This paper addresses the interplay of oil production, urban development, and local and national politics in the Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk, beginning with a strike in which Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) workers demanded housing in 1946 and ending with the coup d'etat of 1958. It contends that the presence of the oil industry in Kirkuk created certain factors that shaped development there: the presence of a large number of foreign (especially British) workers and executives, a company camp of which the infrastructure was more advanced than that of the city itself, and the fact that a large number of the city's residents worked for a single, foreign-owned entity and had the potential to organize. Both the foreign-owned IPC, which was headquartered in Kirkuk, and the British Foreign Office, whose political interests predominated in the IPC, considered the pursuit of development projects in Kirkuk to be important for the promotion of good relations between the company and the city's populace. Kirkuk's municipal officials actively engaged in soliciting the IPC's help with infrastructural development; notably, the company provided the city with electricity and water directly from its own installations. The company's projects also included the construction of a new residential neighborhood for its Iraqi workers, conceptualized after the 1946 strike. This strike was spearheaded by Iraqi Communist elements based in Baghdad, a matter of particular concern to the British and the IPC. This paper analyzes how and why the IPC and the Kirkuk municipal government pursued these infrastructural projects. This paper also recognizes that British and IPC interests in Kirkuk paralleled the objectives of Iraq's nationwide economic development initiatives, which aimed to preserve the political status quo in Iraq -- that of elite rule and British influence -- in the face of growing popular discontent. The existing work on this subject tends to rely on the viewpoints of officials from Baghdad and examines Iraqi development projects, which were mostly focused on the agricultural sector, in a broad manner such that local, urban development is often overlooked. This paper therefore provides a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical objectives of Iraqi economic development in the 1940s and 1950s by focusing on projects undertaken in a provincial urban area. This paper relies on correspondences, memoranda, reports and other writings from the United Kingdom's Foreign Office (housed at the UK National Archives, London), the IPC papers at the BP Archives in Coventry, and the Doxiadis Archives in Athens, Greece.