We’re used to the crown of “world’s tallest building” following the world’s economic centre of gravity: the US for most of the 20th century, then the Far East (Malaysia’s Petronas Towers, Taiwan’s Taipei 101), and now Dubai, with the Burj Khalifa due to be superseded by Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower in about 2019.

But now comes a tower to eclipse them all – in Iraq. Yes, you read that right: the world’s tallest building is due to be in Basra, southern Iraq. It is called The Bride of the Gulf, and it will be 230 storeys – 1,152 metres – high. That’s roughly the Burj Khalifa with the Shard on top of it. You’ll probably be able to see it from the Burj Khalifa.

But height is not the goal, according to its designers, British-Iraqi architecture firm AMBS. Instead, they want to create a “vertical city”, with four interlinked towers of varying heights, containing not just offices and hotels and the usual stuff, but also “its own transport systems, schools, clinics and neighbourhoods”. There’s also a vast canopy over a public area at the base of the towers, called “The Veil”. Bride, veil – see what they did there? There’s a security aspect to their plan, too, architect Marcos De Andres explains: 9/11 exposed the weakness of the standalone skyscraper when it came to escape routes, so a cluster of interconnected towers is far safer.

Space efficiency ... The tower will have its own transport systems, schools, clinics and neighbourhoods. Photograph: AMBS Architects

Hopefully that won’t be necessary, though. If your mental image of Basra is still the war zone it was in 2003, when British and American troops first entered Iraq, it’s clearly in need of an update. Basra is a prosperous and relatively peaceful city these days, “more like Kuwait than Baghdad”. The tentacles of the Islamic State are at least 600km away. There’s oil money sloshing around. There are new cars on all the new roads. Five-star hotels and a new sports stadium recently opened (Basra is football-crazy, apparently). The government is working on a new masterplan for the growing city, of which the publicly funded Bride would be the centrepiece.

The Bride of the Gulf is actually a local nickname for the city. Basra was once considered one of the most beautiful and cosmopolitan places in the Gulf – before Saddam Hussein punished its mostly Shia population, then the Iraq war further scarred it. It was also the supposed location of the Garden of Eden.

There’s still plenty of time for this Bride to be jilted at the altar, though. There’s no definite site for the building yet, or a completion date. But it’s a rare piece of positive news from a country invariably associated with violence. “If you go there today, people just want normality,” says De Andres. “They want to get on with their lives and play football. Hopefully the whole of the Middle East will be like this one day.”