The Urban Bridge: Walking Baghdad

The context in which Baghdadis build, live and move today is not stable, but meta-stable. To address this state of temporality, a study of movement was conducted. For Baghdadis, such movement can help in coming to terms with the ambiguity and temporality of Baghdad as a severed city. This speculative work embodies two contrasting worlds; a collective memory of the city as it was – the soft city, and the reality of the severed, walled city of today – the hard city. The pendulum swings. To bridge these two worlds, this inquiry explores Baghdad as a text, and posits the Baghdadian flâneur as its reader. A study of stairs, pathways and circulation networks is used to understand these transient moments within the volatile city. The inquiry then proceeds to investigate the connection between the existing walls of Baghdad and the proposed architecture. This is architecture of and for circulation.