This presentation illustrates how a series of Iraqi governments-- from the Hashemites to the Ba'th Party--used urban planning and housing policies to manage politically sensitive populations in Baghdad during the ‘oil boom’ years of 1950-1979. Two housing policies in particular—one targeting rural migrants, the other targeting a growing cadre of public sector workers—are key for understanding the political motivations that transformed Baghdad’s urban landscape during these three pivotal decades. In the first instance, housing settlements were geographically situated and designed by the state to manage, control, and monitor a poor population viewed as politically troublesome and socially destabilizing. The legacy of this policy is today's Sadr City, home to one quarter of Baghdad's population, though the district is geographically marginalized and designed to be cut off from the city center. In the second case, the state turned housing into a new standard benefit to reward the growing ranks of public sector employees who made up the staffs of new government ministries, professional associations, and the officer corps. Strikingly, new neighborhoods were built for each major professional union, creating vocational silos of middle-class Baghdadis in the middle of the capital. The result of these two different housing strategies for managing potential political allies and troublemakers was a new urban landscape in which largely homogenous communities were structurally separated into ‘good’ districts and ‘dangerous’ districts differentiated by vocation, income, and background. Baghdad’s newly-built neighborhoods for rural migrants and public sector employees contained markers of political belonging or exclusion, politicizing housing and making it a new point of negotiation between state and society. This paper draws on the archives of urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis; French, British, and American diplomatic archives; Iraqi maps; and unpublished demographic studies of Baghdad from the 1960s and 1970s.