Examining the social and material space in one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s first gated communities, Dream City, this paper explores how upper middle class residents’ desire for development and modernization conflict with certain economic relations that support and nurture these desires. Drawing on the Polyanian idea of the ‘double movement’, the paper shows how the architecture, reputation, and design of Dream City seeks to place the gated community firmly within a global, universalized space of capital, while at the same time drawing upon highly situated, contextualized means of capital extraction to do so. This contradiction leaves many of Dream City’s residents with a conflicting and uneasy sense of place and belonging, which simultaneously permits them to distance themselves from lower classes. The paper shows that the very experience of dislocation distinguishes the communities' upper middle class residents from lower class citizens, who, cannot help but feel that they belong in the local context. This dynamic, the paper concludes, may have wider implications for how to anthropologically analyze class reproduction in a time of receding welfare programs and increased global centralization of wealth.
