In this chapter I investigate the post-Qajar era and demonstrate that, after the establishment of the Pahlavi state in the 1920s, the process of spatial abstraction reached new heights. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the Pahlavi state, particularly in the main cities of the country, undertook a massive project of social reform with widespread spatial ramifications. In Tehran, the municipality became the central state’s executive organ. The spatial strategies of the municipality resulted in the further decline of the communal sphere and the consolidation of the state’s domination over people’s daily lives and spaces. The codification of space was the state’s main method for accomplishing social reforms, modernization, and Westernization. By designing and imposing detailed guidelines for various communal spaces of the old city, the state disturbed the old, established forms of communal life. Similar to Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago, the Pahlavi state succeeded in imposing strict social control and discipline over urban populations through spatial guidelines. The state’s spatial codes, similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, stretched the state’s omnipresent control to every corner of the communal sphere. The Pahlavi state transformed the lived spaces of the old city into representations of space and means of social control.

Regarding this Lefebvrian framework, the political struggles of the 1940s and the early 1950s in Tehran pose significant questions that this chapter seeks to examine. After decades of spatial abstraction and the (re)production and development of the city through abstract spaces, how did the people of Tehran transform state spaces into a political arena to contest the hegemony of the state? What was the relationship between spaces of daily life produced in the Reza Shah era and the new spaces of protest in Tehran? Why did people choose the new streets and squares of the city for protesting against the monarchy? Why did they not take bast in the mosques of the old city as they did in the constitutional era? To analyze this spatial shift, this chapter scrutinizes political groups and forces of this era and their political gatherings, protests, demonstrations, and parades in public spaces of Tehran. This examination suggests a dynamic political scene that cannot be dichotomized into the conventional binary opposition of people against the state, as was examined during the constitutional era.

This book is about an ontological shift in the conceptualization and representation of the spatiality of Tehran, the capital of Iran, as the outcome of the formation and establishment of a novel spatial discourse. Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, this novel discourse sidelined the indigenous knowledge of Iranian urban society and the state and became the legitimate sources of imagining and producing the spatiality of Iranian cities. It transformed the spaces of the social, political, and economic processes in Tehran and elsewhere in the country. This shift was ontological and spatial, meaning that it brought about novel frameworks for urban society and the state to produce the spaces of their daily practices and strategies. This shift was discursive, leading to the abandonment of the traditional and indigenous spatial understanding in a long process of knowledge production; society and the state internalized a novel form of knowledge as the authentic source of producing the spatiality of social, economic, and political relations. This shift targeted both the state and society; it was top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. As the book suggests, since the mid-nineteenth century, this new spatial discourse has reproduced Tehran; the contours of the current city should be read through the analysis of this discursive transformation.

The 1870s expansion of Tehran was a vehicle for the spatial commodification of vast sections of the new city. Through this expansion, the Qajar court managed to produce the new spatiality as a lucrative commodity. The commodification of the city accompanied an unprecedented socio-spatial bureaucratization. A combination of several factors –from preventing outbreaks of diseases to organizing a novel relationship between the state and society – helped the state to stretch its control and dominance over the spatiality of the city. In its initial steps, these early attempts were the manifestations of a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state, society, and the city. To use Lefebvre’s concept of abstract spaces, Tehran went through a process of spatial abstraction particularly after its 1870s expansion. This chapter demonstrates how this expansion followed delicate economic objectives, and how the Qajar court had pursued this commodification process through its spatial policies long before the actual expansion of Tehran. Afterwards, the chapter focuses on the bureaucratization process and argues that, from the first half of the nineteenth century, the state had already generated spatial strategies to prevent cholera outbreaks in the city. The chapter moves to the examination of the spatial strategies of the state for the legitimation of its power and demonstrates how the expansion of Tehran helped the state to stretch its spatial control and domination beyond the confines of the royal compound. It continues with the study of the social life and spaces of the new neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century and finds that the Qajar elites produced semi-private spaces modeled after European social space. Finally, the chapter concludes with the investigation of the spatial strategies of the state and the impact of the two processes of commodification and bureaucratization on Tehran.

By utilizing the notions of the communal sphere and segmented urban society developed in Chapter 1, this chapter investigates the relationship between society and the state as mediated through the spatiality of the city. It studies Iranians’ political practices in public spaces that contested the state during the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution. It seeks to better understand the troubled relationship between society and the state and its geographical manifestations. As a result of this troubled relationship, Iranian society managed to delimitate the absolutist monarchy and bind it to certain political and social norms. Two theoretical concepts stand out in this context: the public sphere and the political public space. This chapter deals with the relationship between these two concepts in a different geography, beyond the dominance of Western European and North American narratives. Drawing in part on Jürgen Habermas’s discussion in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, here I understand the public sphere as a medium between society and the state that enables the former to exert influence on the latter. Political public spaces provide unique platforms for people’s collective political activities, and do so in ways that intersect with other aspects of urban life.

Aiming to highlight the agency of ordinary people in Tehran’s transformation, I mostly scrutinized the shifts in two seemingly independent but inherently interconnected socio-spatial relationships: the spatiality of social life and social movements. Throughout the main storyline of this book, I illustrated that the transformations of these two relationships shared four common characteristics. First, there is an apparent departure from communal to class-based identities. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the social spaces of nineteenth-century Tehran were the outcome of the shared communal identity of their users; people’s communal ties colored coffeehouses, bathhouses, takīyyihs, and zūrkhānihs. In the same vein, communal ties played the main role in the formation of political public spaces and the public sphere during the Constitutional Revolution. However, the structural transformation of Iranian urban society resulted in the demise of the communal sphere and the rise of class consciousness based on shared economic and political interests. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, the modern middle class produced the main social spaces of mid-twentieth-century northern Tehran. Chapter 6 illustrated the role of this class alongside the urban working class in the production of political public spaces of the city in the 1940s and the early 1950s.

From the late eighteenth century, various sections of Iranian society, particularly the court and the elites, developed an acquaintance with European and American cities, their social lives, and spaces through direct visits, postcards, geographical texts, pictures, and other means of knowledge transfer. The analysis of Iranians’ wonder-like appreciations of Western cities helps to illustrate how this novel spatial knowledge determined the future of Iranian cities. This chapter suggests that the post-1870s spatial transformations of Tehran had been incubated in Iranian society – at least among the elites and the Qajar court – for decades. I argue that these transformations were the outcome of the gradual formation and development of a spatial discourse, rather than an abrupt change and a sudden disjuncture from the past. By adopting the Foucauldian conception of discourse, this chapter focuses on Iranians’ acquaintance with European cities, their social lives, and social spaces. The exposure to new ideas was not limited to the political landscape and had an impact on various aspects of Iranian society. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the growing relationship between Iran and European countries generated new forms of knowledge and transferred them to Iranian society. From culinary culture to the establishment of a new educational system, and from painting and theater to industrial and monetary organizations, various aspects of this impact have been investigated before.

My objective in this chapter is to investigate these questions through the examination of the relationship between society and the city in nineteenth-century Tehran. This relationship focuses on the spatiality of ordinary people’s daily lives. Social theories of space have become a common domain for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers as a means to investigate socio-spatial processes. In this chapter, I unfold this theoretical framework and explain the impact of the spatial approach on social and historical examinations of cities before presenting the main empirical analysis of daily life and social spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran. My objective is to socialize the spatial analysis and, more importantly, to spatialize the social analysis. This chapter focuses on the relationship between urban society and Tehran in the nineteenth century. It examines people’s everyday lives in the city and their religious and non-religious spatial practices. It investigates various social spaces of day-to-day interactions in the city. I start by presenting a social analysis of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century. Afterwards, I examine social spaces in two main categories: spaces based on religious gatherings and spaces based on nonreligious practices. This chapter ends with the examination of women’s social life and spaces in the city.