I begin the concluding chapter by bringing different threads of this study together and I will continue by discussing my overarching arguments and brief final theoretical and methodological remarks for possible future investigations.
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.
Second, as I will discuss further in my overarching arguments, this structural transformation accompanied people’s abandonment of the traditional instances of social life and spaces, repertoires of contention, and political public spaces to produce novel forms based on the socio-spatial knowledge that had no historical precedence in Iran. Instead of nineteenth-century coffeehouses, bathhouses, takīyyihs, and zūrkhānihs, people produced cafés, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, and sport clubs as their primary venues of social life, mostly in the northern neighborhoods of Tehran. Similarly, the long-lived tradition of taking bast in mosques and sacred places transformed into political meetings and parades in the squares and streets of the northern city.
Third, a process of spatial secularization occurred with the first two shifts. As the first chapter discussed, religiosity was the main incentive behind the majority of social activities in nineteenth-century Tehran. Various religious rituals in neighborhood mosques, Muharram and Safar mourning ceremonies, and the social life around Ramadan fasting month were based on people’s religious fervor. Moreover, the Shiʿi doctrine and religious leaders were the main social forces that enabled the collaboration of various communal segments during the Constitutional Revolution; they formed the public opinion on political matters and helped to produce the public sphere. In addition, during the 1906 revolution, sacred spaces of Tehran transformed into the platforms of political activities and supported the main episodes of contention. In contrast, by the mid-twentieth century, the religious discourse lost its unrivaled role as the main producer of social life, particularly among the modern middle class. Furthermore, the religious leaders and sacred spaces were not at the forefront of the political movements of the 1940s and the early 1950s. Only a fraction of political gatherings of this era occurred in the sacred spaces of the city.
Fourth, both social and political spaces of Tehran witnessed the process of gender diversification. While the majority of traditional social spaces of nineteenth-century Tehran were dominantly masculine, women’s presence in cafés, restaurants, cinemas, and theaters of the mid-twentieth-century city gradually became an accepted norm. By then, Iranian women were not obliged to socialize solely within the confines of the private realm, as their grandparents did. In the same vein, while women were absent during the main episodes of the Constitutional Revolution, by the mid-twentieth century they were an active part of the public sphere and political public spaces who founded all-women political organizations and participated in political gatherings and parades of the era.
The four characteristics mentioned above demonstrate the interconnectedness of Tehran’s sociality and spatiality. The production and transformation of spaces of daily life and political public spaces closely followed social processes. Tehran as a social product formed and transformed alongside people’s active production of social and political spaces and, in return, it reproduced, enhanced, and sometimes deflected these social changes; the city and its spaces actively played a significant role in the (re)production of social processes and relations. This deep reciprocity between the city and society provided the necessary framework for studying urban change in Tehran between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.
Overarching Arguments
Four main overarching arguments help to tie the six chapters of this book together. For the first central argument, I highlight the agency of ordinary people, Tehran’s inhabitants, in the production and transformation of the city. Most scholars examining the process of urban change and development in Iran and the Middle East emphasize the role of the state and consider cities as the material products that can be formed and transformed through large-scale urban projects and top-down policies. Hidden in this line of reasoning is the assumption that urban society follows the changes in the material world; it establishes a cause-and-effect relationship. Through the transformation of the physicality of cities, states are able to (re)shape societies based on their desired policies. This view considers Reza Shah’s modernization of Tehran as a vehicle for the modernization of society.
State-sponsored projects and policies are loud and flamboyant; it is hard to miss them and history plays a better role in recording them; newspapers announce these projects and history books discuss them. It is easy to find numerous documents about Nasser al-Din Shah’s decrees on various urban affairs and his large-scale projects, such as the 1870s expansion of Tehran. It is easy to follow Reza Shah’s socio-spatial interventions and recognize the impacts of his policies. The streets and squares constructed during his reign still form a large section of the central city. His appointed mayor went as far as publishing an independent magazine, Baladiyyih, to publicize the municipality’s projects and policies. Even Tehran’s maps were the state’s products; the state decided what to show on the maps and what to omit; these maps record representations of space rather than spaces representation.
In contrast, throughout this book, I aimed to give priority to the role of ordinary people in the production of Tehran. I argue that the real city is hidden in the ebbs and flows of daily life, in numerous social interactions, and in common people’s fears, hopes, and desires. The routine daily life, rather than the state’s urban policies and projects, (re)produces and gives meaning to Tehran and its spaces. People’s daily lives bring about continuous and incremental changes, which constantly transform the city. Unlike the vociferous state which publicizes its urban interventions, social life is silent and easy to neglect. It is always present in the background; without capturing much attention, it never stops forming and transforming the spatiality of the city. To borrow from Asef Bayat, the production of cities through people’s daily lives can be best described as the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary.”Footnote 1 However, this quiet and clandestine nature has a bold and dynamic face, too. As I demonstrated in the case of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, sometimes social forces generate a massive tidal wave that sweeps through cities and nations and brings about broad changes in a matter of a short period of time. Social movements and revolutions leave long-lasting traces on cities. Although they might have been incubated for a long time, they can abruptly yield large-scale shifts.
The examples are abundant in this book. Although in the 1870s Nasser al-Din Shah initiated a massive urban project to expand the city based on a new vocabulary of urban design, it was mostly after the 1920s that the streets and squares of northern Tehran were assimilated into daily life and began to produce social meanings. The café-restaurant, museum, gallery, theater, and parks opened during the Nasseri era and under the direct supervision of the royal family resembled rudimentary caricatures of their authentic European counterparts. It took fifty years for urban society to produce these spaces and form a genuine social life in the novel spatiality of northern Tehran. Similarly, it was the northern parts of the city that transformed into lively stages of social movements and political meetings in the 1940s and the early 1950s. Despite all the efforts of the Pahlavi state to annihilate traditional repertoires of contention in the sacred spaces of the city, right after Reza Shah’s abdication from power, urban society redefined the spatial meanings of streets and squares as the spaces of representation and as the platforms of protest to undermine the state’s hegemony.
The emphasis on the impact of common people does not mean that I ignore the role of the state; I mainly point to the silent side of this narrative. The state is an essential character of this analysis that cannot be omitted. As a result, in Chapters 4 and 5 I examined the spatial strategies of the state to demonstrate its impact on the transformation of the city and its reciprocal relationship with urban society, which takes me to my second overarching argument. In a broad perspective, the spatiality of cities can be read as the product of a continuous struggle between top-down and bottom-up forces. To use a Lefebvrian terminology, in the labyrinthine network of streets and squares, an ongoing battle exists between spaces of representation and representations of space; between the clandestine and silent practices of ordinary people and the loud and bold strategies of the states; and between the diversity and meaningfulness of lived spaces and the abstract transparency and homogeneity of conceived spaces.
Although sometimes it is manifested in revolutions and large-scale protests, this struggle is mostly quiet and latent. As Michel de CerteauFootnote 2 suggests, it is hidden in people’s day-to-day life routines and manifested in their walking, shopping, and their most mundane practices. People gradually but constantly push back the borders that seek to produce a fabricated homogeneity and transparency for their daily lives. Similarly, the state has its own covert strategies to impose its desired conformity over social life. As Chapter 5 discussed in detail, these are manifested in the seemingly innocent laws and regulations that, despite their ostensible purposes, invade and disturb the dynamics of social life and set rigid restrictions to delimit the lived reality.
By depicting this binary view, I do not intend to simplify the politics of urban change into a mere opposition, rather, as I suggested in Chapters 5 and 6, both notions of the state and society as well as their relationship are highly multifaceted. It is not possible to provide simple and unchanging definitions of the state and society. Similarly, their relationship fluctuates and changes from time to time. This constantly transforming ground of social and political forces plays a significant role in spatial production. In fact, throughout the book I aimed to demonstrate the reciprocity between three main elements: society, the state, and the city. These three are mutually interconnected; their relationships enhance and accelerate each other’s transformations. Without doubt, Tehran was the product of people’s and the state’s spatial undertakings. However, at the same time, it was the (re)producer of the state’s spatial strategies and people’s social practices.
As my third overarching argument, I suggest that beyond these reciprocal relationships between society, the city, and the state, which tend to highlight the role of one factor as the agent and the other as the outcome, there exists a socio-spatial discourse that dissolves all the causal relationships. From the late eighteenth century, the expansion of the intercontinental relationships between Iran and Western European countries as well as Russia led to the formation and development of a spatial discourse. Novel socio-spatial knowledge based on the particularities of European cities entered Iran via various means of knowledge production, such as Iranians’ travelogues to Europe. As a new form of spatial and social understanding, it took decades before the wonderment-filled descriptions of Iranian travelers manifested as new forms of sociality and spatiality in Iranian cities. This knowledge transformed into a fully fledged discourse, developed throughout the country, and left its mark on various aspects of social practices and the state’s strategies.
This process was an ontological shift. Little by little, both ordinary people and the state adopted the new spatial knowledge as the unquestionable and taken-for-granted producer of urban spatiality. This shift transformed the ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and representing socio-spatial relationships and processes. From this point of view, society, the state, and the city were the products of this shift. There is no disparity between the wonders of Nasser al-Din Shah and the dervish Haj Sayyah, as they observed European cities. There is no difference between the attempts of the modern middle class to produce theaters, cafés, and restaurants to serve as their upscale social spaces and the 1870s state-sponsored expansion of Tehran based on European schemes of urban design.
Similar to other discourses, the one mentioned above has developed its own particular power relations. On a larger scale, it has a colonial aspect that defines Western sociality and spatiality as the dominant form of being and as the authentic ones to be emulated. It reduces other socio-spatial contexts to temporal realities and presents them as undeveloped matters that merely preceded the former one. In other words, it situates other socio-spatial contexts in a line behind the desired, authentic, and Western image. It creates a single possible way of being and that is the Western European or North American way.Footnote 3
At the urban level and by returning to contemporary Tehran, the impact of this power relationship is omnipresent and fairly easy to observe. Despite forty years of the state’s rhetoric against the West and Western lifestyle and its attempts to establish a discourse based on “Iranian-Islamic” values, more than the past, the sociality and spatiality of the city resemble its European and North American counterparts. Modern and classic architectural styles have left their marks on every single building of the city; glass and steel skyscrapers dominate the business districts of Tehran; European classic architecture with stone columns and heavy cornices is the sign of wealth and prosperity for the upper classes, whose mansions in the northern city provide new architectural models for the middle and lower classes in the central and southern city. The city’s restaurants and cafés compete with each other in designing menus and spaces that emanate an aura of the Western taste. Businesses are expected to adopt European titles to present their identity, products, and services – otherwise there would be a chance of failure. Even the formal and governmental planning and design agencies compete with each other to reproduce the desired Western spatiality by proposing large-scale urban projects. The municipality of Tehran has spent millions of dollars to create a large artificial lake and a waterfront urban landscape just a few miles away from the desert. For many Iranians and, ironically, for the state, the West is the new Mecca.
Once again, northern Tehran is the dominant model producing the new taste of spatiality and sociality for the rest of the country. The European- and American-style shopping malls, skyscrapers, apartment buildings, cafés, and restaurants in this part of the city set the new social and spatial standards. The lower and middle classes and people in the other cities of the country follow the desired image of wealth, beauty, power, and otherness in northern Tehran to reconstruct their lifestyles and, consequently, reproduce their personal and collective spatiality.
Finally, for my last overarching argument, I suggest that these power relationships have reproduced the social and geographical contours of Tehran and transformed it into a bipolar city. The transformation of Tehran occurred alongside the shift of power and wealth to the northern city. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, it is possible to recognize two northward and southward movements. Upper classes and wealthy people have constantly moved north, toward the mountains. By reaching the northern limits of Tehran and leaving no more open lands to develop, this class is pushing further north by building mansions and resorts in the mountainous villages away from the city. In contrast, the southward movement is pushing lower classes and impoverished people to the periphery. It has even exiled them beyond the city limits to the slums of southern Tehran. Impoverished people cannot afford to live in the official districts of the city and have to build their so-called informal settlements beyond the southern boundaries of the city.
Over time, the gap between the north and south has gradually grown deeper and larger. Tehran transformed from a city without meaningful geographical manifestations of wealth into a city with two contrasting poles in the north and the south. The distinction between these geographical poles matches the distinction between the wealthy vanguards of Westernization and the lower classes that continuously strive to push their lives northward. The huge mansions of the north stand in contrast to the slums of the south. The luxurious and upscale shopping malls of the north are in dire contrast to people’s poverty in the south. For more than 150 years this bipolar city and its inhabitants have been in the constant process of becoming.
Final Remarks
Although the works of mostly European urban theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and so forth provided the theoretical framework of this book, a significant disparity is discernible between the context of these studies and nineteenth-century Tehran. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, class relations were the dominant social force in the production of the spatiality and sociality of European cities. European societies of the time had a distinct class structure consisting of the working classes, middle classes, bourgeois groups, and the like. This particular social configuration had a great role in the production of social spaces and the formation of the cultural and geographical contours of European cities. Moreover, the European social movements of this era are deeply entangled in the class identity of these societies. It is not possible to detach the European revolutions from the dynamics and politics of class relations.
Accepting the existing theoretical frameworks at face value can result in misleading interpretations in a different geographical context. In the case of this book, it is not possible to adopt the theoretical frameworks that examine Paris and French urban society in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and incorporate them into the context of Tehran or any other Iranian cities of the same period. It would be inaccurate to search for meaningful class relationships in nineteenth-century Tehran and examine social spaces based on theoretical frameworks similar to those of Western Europe.
In contrast, the examination of nineteenth-century Tehran, particularly prior to its 1870s expansion, illustrates a city without meaningful spatial demarcations based on people’s economic conditions. Communal ties largely had priority over people’s economic status. Common religion, ethnicity, profession, city of origin, and various combinations of these factors formed the primary ties between people and reproduced the city as a segmented geography consisting of numerous smaller patches. As a result, the first chapter developed the concept of the communal sphere for the examination of the spatiality and sociality of Tehran in this period.
The same incompatibility between available theoretical frameworks and the specific context of nineteenth-century Tehran is discernible in defining the public sphere and political public spaces. My examination of the Constitutional Revolution in Chapter 2 suggests that there is no universal model of the public sphere and public space. I questioned the validity of certain dominant models for Iranian socio-historical contexts. As I suggested in Chapter 2, the concept of the communal sphere can provide the necessary framework for the analysis of the public sphere and political public spaces in early twentieth-century Tehran. Segmented urban society had its particular mechanism in structuring political undertakings. This mechanism was in dire contrast to the models of political activities in European societies of the time. As a result, instead of beginning with the established models of the public sphere and political public space, in this book I reassessed these models based on the particularities of Iranian society and reformulated my theoretical frameworks. This approach can result in the empirical diversification of studies of the public sphere and public space.
Although I deliberately tied my historical investigations to theoretical deliberations, this book falls short of generating an independent theoretical framework for the examination of urban change for Iranian and Middle Eastern cities. Such a task demands a more comparative analysis between the transformations of the cities of the region and other case studies in Europe, North America, and the rest of the world. I consider this book as an opening for future similar analyses and as a way to initiate further investigations into the spatiality of Iranian and Middle Eastern cities. The accumulation of these types of studies will provide the fertile ground to generate novel urban theories.
In order to reach this goal there are certain unventured terrains of which further examination will help to provide a more holistic image of Iranian urban society and, hopefully, will help to generate independent urban theories. First, through the investigation of social and spatial dualities in the 1920s and 1930s, I illustrated Tehran’s transformation during the Reza Shah era. However, my analysis did not include the possible hybrid forms of social life and spaces that could have formed in the tension between the traditional and European types of social spaces. The possible social and spatial hybridity of this era was neither completely based on European models nor followed their traditional Iranian counterparts; they were somewhere in between. Moreover, the study of this hybridity should include the possible interactions between various social groups. Did the traditional strata of society take an active part in the social life of northern Tehran? Or did they limit their social life to the traditional social spaces of southern Tehran? The same question can be asked about the modern middle class and its interactions with the traditional social groups. What were the dynamics and politics of these interactions?
Similarly, this book did not examine the social life and spaces of the urban working class. This is a relatively arduous journey; unlike the modern middle class whose traces of social life and spaces are easily recognizable in periodicals, photos, and memoirs, there is scant evidence of the urban working class’s social life and spaces. Where did they live and socialize? Did they have deep social ties with the traditional strata of society or did they form their separate social enclaves? What were the dynamics of their interactions with the modern middle class? Such an examination demands a different framework and alternative sources of data and methods; it can be conducted through oral history, particularly for the 1940s and the 1950s.
Finally, in this book I covered the transformation of Tehran and the rise and demise of its social spaces, social lives, and political terrain. Although the narrative of Tehran helps to reconstruct the same image for major urban areas of the country, each city has its own particularities and demands an independent urban analysis. The massive legacy of the Safavid Empire in Isfahan and the Zand dynasty in Shiraz, the role of Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad, and the dynamics of the international ties with the Ottoman Empire and Russia in Tabriz are just a few of these particularities. Iranian cities are highly under-studied in regard to the reciprocal relationship between their sociality and spatiality.
I believe that the current book can provide a methodological framework for the same types of studies in Iran and, possibly, other Middle Eastern countries. The lack of quantitative data and the need for excessive dependence on qualitative sources can be expected in the studies of the other cities of the region. The traces of ordinary people’s social lives and spaces need to be extracted from memoirs, travelogues, newspapers, magazines, maps, photos, paintings, and administrative files. This process produces a massive amount of data and demands rigorous organization with an eye on a well-defined theoretical framework.
The field of urban studies as an interdisciplinary terrain that can connect various realms of history, geography, sociology, urban planning, and the like has not been excavated much in Iranian studies. To create such an interdisciplinary dialog in this book, I incorporated a wide range of primary and secondary sources and situated my work in the tension between historical investigations and theoretical deliberations. This book hopefully joins its few predecessors and helps future studies on Iranian and Middle Eastern cities.
