Rethinking Urban Resilience in Iraq: The Impact of Sustainable Urban Design on Mitigating Climate Change-Induced Displacement

So far, Iraqi research on urban planning has offered little empirical treatment of the relationship between the quality of sustainable urban design and residents’ decisions to migrate under climatic stress. Local studies on internal migration have focused on economic and security drivers. While reports on displacement illustrate the size of mass migrations, they do not examine urban design determinants. This gap is the research problem of the present study. The study hypothesizes that deficiencies in sustainable urban design features–principally the absence of green cover, shading, and natural ventilation–are a decisive, quantifiable driver of climate-induced displacement in Iraqi cities, independent of the primacy conventionally given to economic migration determinants. To test this hypothesis, the study adopts a descriptive-analytical, mixed-methods design integrating GIS-based spatial analysis of multi-temporal satellite imagery (2003–2024), a household survey (n = 450; 150 households in each of Baghdad, Samarra, and Najaf), and interviews with local planning officials and experts. The analysis demonstrates that, statistically significantly, deficient design features are associated with migration intentions of residents. The urban-design variables account for the greatest share of variance in decision-making regarding displacement across the three cities, excluding income and housing-tenure status. The study calls for a Green Building Code to be a prerequisite for construction, to ensure at least a minimal greening with each new building and a National Sustainable Urban Planning Authority to strengthen the climate resilience of cities and curb climate-related displacement.