UN-Habitat State of Iraqi Cities Report: International collaboration for a new urban future

Current international policy encourages countries to prepare “State of Cities” reports in order to understand how cities work and fit into the economy. They are part of the global trend towards cities promoting themselves and competing on the national, regional and world stage. As part of the Urban Strengthening Programme following the invasion of 2003, the Government of Iraq decided to prepare just such a report as a basis for future planning. This paper reviews the process in which the report was prepared despite the extremely volatile political and economic context, the security issues preventing the international consultants from visiting Iraq, the difficulty of updating current data, and the extreme polarization of information and comment among stakeholders. This paper draws heavily (and without further citation in the text) on the English language version of the report (UN-Habitat, 2007) on which Dr Tipple was lead .author