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Index Kabul / Teheran 19979 ff | Imprint |
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Jochen Becker
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"City of Revolutions" At the end of the 19th century, with the orientation toward Europe (32) and the involvement in world trade, the city underwent a massive change. The fiscal system aligned to foreign capital and foreign trade led to a divide between the capital and the rural regions. The resulting conflicts were carried out in the capital city. Modernization always implied the orientation toward the West, which was faced with the threat of foreign rule. "The story of Tehran is also a case study in the tensions of modernity. (...) While a revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century strongly promoted modernity, the second revolution towards the end of the century cast serious doubts on many aspects of modernization" (ibid.: xi). Tehran has been the capital for 220 years, and in this period the population has grown from 15,000 to around 13 million. One fifth of the Iranian population lives in Tehran, with currently about eight million in the city proper and another five million in the outskirts. 15 to 27 million inhabitants are estimated for 2010, something for which the city administration seems to be only partially prepared. (33) The rapid urban development has rendered the old master plans stemming from the Shah period obsolete. "The small-town architecture is simply transferred to a larger scale", the essayist Mohammad Ghaed complains (2005: 38). Today the average speed of a car on a normal weekday is already only 18 kilometres per hour, despite numerous city motorways. Permanent traffic jams and more than one million badly equipped vehicles produce a dense cover of smog. In many places, public transport is based on privately operated share-a-ride taxis. After the large extension of 1868, the city especially expanded to the north, while the many unskilled workers that the construction boom attracted settled foremost in the south. Tehran spreads from the edge of the Alburz Mountains, with its ski runs located nearby, to the countries central desert. In between there is a difference in altitude of 640 metres, which has a noticeable influence on the vista, the city's climate, temperature and water quality. The fabric of the city is until today divided into a rich north and a poor south, although - as Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi reconstructs in her contribution to this book - the city administration made an effort to balance out these differences by means of numerous interventions, especially in the 1990s. City/Flight While well educated groups of the society settled in the large cities or emigrated to foreign countries, the poor population had a hard time finding adequate housing. According to the "Iran Report" from 1978, more than 1.2 million persons were homeless in Iranian cities in the 1970s. Some lived in caves produced by clay mining for the brick factories. In the 1980s the flight from the war along the border to Iraq drove further people to the cities. Tehran now mainly grew towards the west in the direction of the city of Karaj forty kilometres away. The factories of Iran Khodro, in which utility vehicles are manufactured in cooperation with Renault and Mercedes (34), are located along the motorway leading there. There is a strong connection between Tehran and Los Angeles - the city with the largest Iranian community in exile. For this reason there are several TV and radio stations in the U.S.A. that broadcast programmes in Farsi around the clock. The close link between "homeland" and "diaspora" that Mike Davis examined for Latinos living in the United States, is also applicable to the Iranians at home and abroad. Many Iranians maintain close contact with their relatives in the West via telephone or air travels (35), they listen to foreign programmes, receive satellite television, buy pirate copies of CDs and DVDs in the street, and download contemporary Hollywood films from the Internet. Redistribution Among the mayors of Tehran, who distinguished themselves very little in regard to urban planning, Gholam-Hossein Karbaschi was a notable exception. (36) The architect, who was trained in Germany, among other places, between 1989 and 1998 organized a sort of exchange of indulgences regarding the number of storeys (37), because since he took office, the municipality was obliged to finance itself. The city's budget subsequently rose from 20 to over 300 million euros. Karbaschi used this income to effect a redistribution from north to south and funded public buildings, cultural facilities and the improvement of housing conditions in the poor quarters. He additionally concentrated on major projects such as the motorway-settlement axis of Navab, but neglected many other areas of urban development. The numerous motorways newly built in the 1990s cut lanes into the city, but they were simultaneously developed into a network of green arteries through intensive landscape architecture. Karbaschi decisively enhanced public space. (38)
By expanding green spaces and parks and by keeping them permanently
open, places of sociability and communication were created for people
who otherwise met behind drawn curtains. Up until the 1990s, even
flats were threatened by the controls of "moral guardians"
who persecuted parties, pop music, clothing contrary to the regulations,
and the consumption of alcohol. For this reason, picnics in the
park are a widespread and popular form of sanctioned public gathering
in Tehran. (39)
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