BAGHDAD—It is early morning. A cool breeze blows off the Tigris. I stand in a Baghdad street and look at the map in my hand and then again at the door and wonder if I’m in the right place. A cat eyes me from the crumbling wall. I’m looking for the house of Isaac Amit, who lived here until 1971. His family fled Iraq after the Ba’ath party came to power; they were among the last members of Baghdad’s Jewish community to leave the city. In my hand is a drawing of the house sent to me by Amit. “I remember every corner,” he tells me. “I remember it very well, because all my life I’ve been only at that place.” I wish I knew the city as well as Isaac. In front of me are dozens of crumbling houses, each with its own story. Despite Amit’s drawing, I can’t figure out which one was once his. I walk on.

Baghdad’s architecture is extraordinary: crumbling art deco neighborhoods, a Le Corbusier gymnasium, and the great railway station built by the British using all the hot weather architectural tricks they’d learned on the subcontinent. Mid-century modernism flourished here too, in a post-1958 revolutionary climate of cultural optimism with new money from oil. Walter Gropius and a firm called The Architects Collaborative planned Baghdad University. Iraqi architects like Mohamed Makiya and Rifat Chadirji wove echoes of Abbasid and Mesopotamian forms into a modern but distinctly local style. A walk in this city can take you along the tree-lined banks of the Tigris, past Ottoman brickwork, 1930s villas, and 1970s concrete futurism. It is layered, fragile, and unlike anywhere else.

Mohammed Alsoufi doesn’t stop moving or pointing things out or saying hello to almost everyone. He is an architect and he is taking me on a walk through the historic central district whose reconstruction—a collaboration between government, the banking sector and the mayor’s office—he now oversees. Decay, accelerated by the poverty and shortages of the sanctions era, have been as big a threat as war to the survival of Baghdad’s historic neighborhoods. Many people “hated a particular era—even if it produced nice buildings—because it was linked to political periods,” he tells me. Neglecting or dismantling the infrastructure of that period was also a way of forgetting, of erasing elements of a past that some people wanted to forget.

His words remind me of an earlier conversation I had on the terrace of a tea house, where a suicide bomb killed the brother of the man who had just refilled my cup. Ammar Karim, an Iraqi journalist who was also there that day, told me about the concrete blast walls that, until recently, divided this and so many neighborhoods across the city. They were the United States’ contribution to the architecture of Baghdad, he says. We were glad to see them gone.

Baghdad is layered with history, yet certain layers are already gone, peeled away, faster than they could be saved. Some are missed and some, like the walls, are mourned by no one.

As I walk with Alsoufi down Rasheed Street, the cultural life of the historic city hums around us: Newly restored facades in the winter sunlight, booksellers and hardware stores, cafes full of men playing dominoes and backgammon. Through it all, he is telling the stories of ownership and connections that are behind every restoration. But it hums a little more softly than it once did. Many of those who made up Iraq’s urban intellectual and cultural elite have left the city and haven’t yet come back.

Here, in Baghdad’s historical center, the ancient capital of the Abbasid Empire is beneath our feet, buried over centuries. It was buried most recently by the Ottomans in the early 20th century, when they carved out Rasheed Street to move vehicles more quickly than they could through the older winding lanes. This was the “Green Zone” of the Ottoman administration and then the British Mandate. Later, after independence, it became the cultural and intellectual heart of the city.

“So there’s several Baghdads we’re talking about,” says Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi American academic known for his work on Iraqi monuments and tyranny. “There’s the original Baghdad, as it was, from the Ottoman era, until the British came. There’s a British contribution from the 1920s, ’30s. … A new story opens up again after 1968, when the Ba’ath came to power,” and again post-2003. “All those are different cities which happen to share the same name.”

“Many parts of our identity and cultural memory were damaged or lost over the past decades … the details that form the emotional texture of Iraqi society,” explains Haider Ibrahim, a film producer who lives and works here. It’s a sentiment echoed by Geraldine Chatelard, a historian of modern Iraq, when she tells me, “It’s entire neighborhoods of houses from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s … that gave Baghdad its very particular character,” adding, “The disappearance of this urban built environment … has a profound impact on the way people orient themselves and define themselves as Baghdadians—as Iraqis.”

Down the street, I visit the site office for the restoration of the Al-Khulafa Mosque, a building which itself straddles two eras of Baghdad’s history. There is a 13th-century minaret—once the highest point in the city—that now leans like an Islamic Pisa. Then, wrapped around it, is a modernist mosque built by Mohamed Makiya in the 1960s, today regarded as a masterpiece of Iraqi modernist architecture.

At the office, I meet Radwan Hamoshi, an engineer, and his daughter, Maryam. Originally from Mosul, they fled as refugees to Australia but then came back, first to help reconstruct their city after it was devastated by the Islamic State, and now to stop this Baghdad minaret from toppling over into the street.

Outside, a very noisy bird market fills the pavement, enormous vultures perched on the cages of surprisingly calm chickens. To the sound of geese and pigeons, Radwan and Maryam Hamoshi offer me tea and talk me through the complexities of the work: the temporary sleeve they’ve wrapped around the tower; the cables that hold it steady. There’s a picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on the desk. Ours is older, they say proudly.

Outside the office door, light streams through Mohamed Makiya’s delicate archways. Don’t photograph all the tools, says Radwan, pointing to the piles of equipment under the dome of the mosque. “People shouldn’t see that. They should focus on the beauty of this place. Restoring this is our legacy. A legacy for Iraq.”

Across town, Namir El Akabi, the chairman of one of Iraq’s biggest real estate developers, sits in his sleek boardroom. The population has been booming, he says, but for 40 years, they didn’t build anything. Now high-rises are being built all over the city. “There is no more land for you to go horizontal,” he says, but when they first started building upwards, people didn’t want to live on the higher floors. “Everybody wanted the ground or the first floor. They worried about the elevator, about electricity.” It has improved but, until recently, planning was haphazard. “It was more or less random. The old mayor would say, ‘This is a good spot for a high-rise, this is not a good spot’” with no plan behind it.

Caecilia Pieri, a historian of 20th century Baghdad at the Institut français du Proche Orient and the author of Baghdad Arts Deco, told me that, “in Iraq, what destroys heritage is not war, it’s reconstruction. The model of development in Iraq is Dubai: Towers, amusement parks, and malls. The rest seems less important.” Kanan Makiya told me something similar: What’s lost is a “meaningful, non-kitsch relationship to one’s own past.” What changes, eventually, is “the landscape of the city. It’s a different city with the same name.”

I ask El Akabi about the tension between development and preservation. He sighs. He tells me he loves the heritage of the city, and that he’d like to own and restore one of the old houses himself (like the one Amit left). But he adds that most people are not interested in the past. They want “health, teaching, education” and a “roof over their head.” Developers too: “They are always looking for whatever is new internationally. … They want Baghdad to look like any other capital in the world.”

He sounds wistful. “I mean, you can understand why people want something that’s new and that’s fresh and that’s not something they’ve seen before. I can understand this.” It reminds me of something Alsoufi told me as well: “For so many years we were locked in. … People were tired of what they had. They just wanted new things here.”

I ask about the intersection of corruption and development. El Akabi pauses. “Sometimes I get in trouble for speaking too honestly,” he says. “Is there corruption? Absolutely. Nobody can say otherwise. It is widespread, in every department, every ministry, every sector.” It has gotten better, he says, but it takes time.

I ask him about the future, about the new Baghdad that is rising all around us, the city that looms out the window in the shape of the new Zaha Hadid-designed Central Bank of Iraq tower, which is nearing completion. “What we are missing,” says El Akabi, “is more attention to our historical heritage … while we are trying to build Baghdad to be a modern city.”

Everyone can’t agree on everything. I ask Alsoufi about the historic Palestine Hotel. It was built during Saddam Hussein’s early 1980s building spree when, in Kanan Makiya’s words, Iraqi architects were “doing commissions they had never [imagined] in their wildest dreams on a scale they hadn’t dreamt of either.” It was also etched forever into journalistic memory when a U.S. tank shell killed two reporters there in 2003. Now, it is being stripped of its unforgettable modernist honeycomb exterior and redeveloped into a generic glass rectangle. I wouldn’t have done that, Mohammed tells me. But he didn’t actively oppose it either: “If you say no to everything, you lose the power of your ‘no.’ … I have to choose the battles I want to fight.”

Later I return to the historic center and Mutanabbi Street. I visit the bookshop of an old friend, drinking tea as the sound of pedestrians and shoppers filters up from below. In the hospitable tradition of Iraqis, he keeps trying to give me books.

This whole street was destroyed in a car bomb in 2007. There were dozens of deaths. But here, Pieri tells me, “For once they all agreed—university, companies, state, municipality—to rebuild at all costs, and in less than two years the street was rebuilt more or less identically.”

“For an expert in heritage like me … it wasn’t always done according to the rules.” The reconstruction wasn’t perfect, she says, but “who are we to judge that? Isn’t it more important to have a society that reconstitutes itself rather than a building repaired identically?”

Alsoufi explains to me that his biggest fear now is gentrification and the loss of the individual character of the place that goes with it. We see that in Europe, he says: “Places start to look like each other and not like where they’re from.” But in the meantime, “You try to do what you can to make it a better place—but it’s not guaranteed.”

Dusk is falling and the booksellers that fill the street by day are packing up. Down by the river, people are taking photos in the soft light: birds circling under the bridge; the Ottoman clock tower reflecting in the water. “People used to hate this past,” says Alsoufi. “Now they are starting to fall in love with it again.”

After we say goodbye, I walk south along the Tigris in the dark.

I think about Amit telling me how they used to put their beds on the roof and sleep up there all summer, avoiding the heat. “You wake up at 3:30, 4 o’clock. There was no light. You look at the sky, there were billions of stars.”

The sky now is hazy—the city brighter, louder, leaning toward its own future. But out among the new towers and cranes and dust, another Baghdad is still there: the one Amit remembers, the one Alsoufi fights for, the one Radwan and Maryam Hamoshi carefully rebuild.

Baghdad has always been a city remade by power. It is happening again now—as its inhabitants decide what to forget, what to carry forward, and what to surrender to money or modernity. In a place that has learned too well how to bury the past, remembering becomes its own kind of architecture—shaped by the quiet insistence of those who remain, and those who return, that the city is still theirs to rebuild.

The stars might be harder to see these days. But people still look up.