Work development of Housing Co-operative Societies in Iraq before 1991

Abstract EN

This research is an attempt to translate the role of Housing Co-operative Societies (HCSs) as it considered to be the almost single institution permitted to convert the agricultural land to urban one in providing access to housing for various social groups, and in shaping a particular urban physical form before 1991 incidents.

The researcher encountered a number of obstacles : lack of formal data because, the (HCSs) were almost dormant as well as the wide expanse of the work being studied.

However, it was clear from the study, that these institutions were a product of a mode replaced the private accumulation of wealth by a form of state-induced accumulation.

This change occurred without a radical shift taken place in the social relationship of production, and so the poor generally continued to be excluded from state benefits and services ; and indeed that was contrary to the policymakers' assumption.

Also, the work of these institutions resulted in the expansion of the suburbs and modern type housing with all their attendant consequences in diseconomies of scale, urban sprawl and social fragmentation, and so housing in this sequence meant a comprehensive term for social, economic, political and spatial change.

Yet, this pattern was continued for a while until the early 1990s when the work of (HCSs) had been diminished as most of urban lands were given as presidential gifts to specific social groups such as army officers and university tutors, without taking into consideration the side effects of this action such as urban segregation and horizontal expansion of cities as well as the shrinkage of forests, meanwhile the work of the (HCSs) were essential as an active solution for the housing crises in Iraq after amending the mistakes of its work.