During the 1970s and the 1980s the Ba'athist regime in Iraq proceeded to a massive displacement of people from the villages mountainous areas down to the valleys in the northern region of Kurdistan. The Iraqi government designed Mujamma'a or Collective Towns where these people would be relocated. The planning of Collective Towns initially responded to a logic of rationalisation and cost-effectiveness, but was successively turned into one of the political tools that the regime of Saddam Hussein used to manage the tensions with the Kurdish population of Iraq.