10
Tehran

Naser al-Din Shah’s Beautification as Progress

Smith highlights the role of the ruler as the singular embodiment of the regime, its political apparatus, and its political identity in selected spaces within ancient cities that, through their charismatic dimensions, reinforced the creation and reproduction of structures of authority.¹¹ Centuries after the formation of some of the earliest urban landscapes in southern Mesopotamia, the role of ruler seem to have remained closely intertwined with the formation of distinct, architecturally and aesthetically defined political landscapes of Tehran. However, only after the 1850s, urban revolutions mirrored sociopolitical revolutions. The role of ruler remained important as each phase of Tehran’s modern transformation took place by the order of the ruling monarch—Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848–96), Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925–41), and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79), respectively—and pushed the boundaries of the city to the north; each also positively reinforced Tehran’s vertical axis of social promotion.

Tehran acquired the status of a city in 1553, when on the order of Shah Tahmasp I Safavid (r. 1525–1576) a wall of 114 towers and four gates along with a bazaar were erected. This aimed to protect the city from potential Ottoman attacks and to serve as a refuge in times of need for officials fleeing Qazvin. In 1589 Shah Abbas the Great (r. 1587–1629) erected gardens (chahar-bagh) and plane groves (chenarestan) in the northern edge of the city, but Pietro della Valle in his 1618 descriptions insisted that “Tehran possesses nothing, not even a single building worthy of notice.”¹² This contradictory perception of Tehran resonates with similar questioning of the “reality” of Samarkand, Tamerlane’s capital in central Asia, lofty and monumental yet erected by coercive means, which prompted Smith to caution against subjective generalizations of the relationships between political organization and landscape aesthetics.¹³ The Safavids established a temporary court and Shah Suleiman (r. 1666–1694) erected a palace in the Tehran citadel. By the eighteenth-century Afghan raids, Tehran was large and important enough that the invading army opened up a new gate to the north of the citadel to provide a secure passage by circumventing the inner town. While Karim Khan Zand’s (r. 1750–1779) seat of government was in Fars, he had plans to unite and control the entire empire with a capital at its geographic center. In effect, in his ambition to restore the borders of Safavid Iran with a capital not in Isfahan, but in Tehran, Karim Khan commissioned architect Ostad Gholam Reza Tabrizi in 1759 to fortify the city walls and erect an audience chamber, administrative buildings, and private quarters. In 1760, Karim Khan was ready to move his power base to Tehran.

It was the founder of the Qajar dynasty, Aqa Mohammad Khan (r. 1794–1797) who besieged Tehran. On March 20, 1785, he not only declared it the imperial seat of his dynasty, but also the seat of the caliphate.¹⁴ By then, the city of 15,000 inhabitants consisted of one and a half square-mile area, enclosed within the Safavid wall, circular towers, and a forty-foot-wide moat (figure 10.1). It had six gates, a citadel, and an extensive bazaar that served as the spinal cord of the urban layout. Four living quarters (Sangelaj, Bazaar, Udlajan, and Chalemaydan) flanked the economic center, and the royal compound lodged diverse social classes and professions. People from all walks of life gathered in the two main open spaces at the heart of the city: the Citadel Square (meydan-e arg), flanking the southern wall of the citadel, and the Herbs Market (sabzeh meydan) across that same wall as the entrance to the northern tip of the bazaar. Russian Orientalist Ilia Nikolaevich Berezine was the first, in 1842, to depict Tehran on a map with European conventions. He was followed by Augustus Krziz, an instructor at the newly founded Dar al-Fonun training school, who made a blueprint of the city between 1857 and 1858.¹⁵ Unlike subsequent urban developments, the topography and the physiognomy of late-eighteenth-century Tehran neither mirrored nor bolstered the hierarchical structure of the sociopolitical system.

Figure 10.1. Map of Tehran. Date: 1796; population: 15,000; area: 1.5 square miles. (From Madanipour, Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis)

In the 1850s, Tehran had grown so large that 10 percent of its inhabitants were living outside the walls. Under the order of Naser al-Din Shah, who intended to modernize the country in the first decades of his long reign, the city experienced its first major urban change. The longest-reigning Qajar king at the most crucial moment in the history of Iran’s modernization was pivotal to the urban changes that took place in Tehran. As a man who had traveled throughout Europe, his ideas about modernity and its appearance came to influence the way Tehran modernized itself. Naser al-Din’s reformist prime minister, Amir Kabir, oversaw outward improvements to the citadel, including the extension in 1865 of the Golestan Palace by the design of Haji Abd ol-Hasan Me’mar Navai: it marked the exact location of the Timurid palace in the north of the walled city. Two years later, the Sun Palace (Shams ol-Emareh) was added to the eastern wing of Golestan by Ostad Mohammad Ali Kashi. The mechanical clock, visible from the royal courtyard on one side and the public Naser Khosrow Avenue on the other was a manifestation of the king’s conception of “progress” and of the temporal qualities of the modernity that went hand in hand with the major structural changes in the city.¹⁶ While his reformist prime minister Amir Kabir oversaw outward improvements to the citadel, the main urban transformation occurred in 1868 when the king ordered the widening of the city boundaries. The king’s grand vizier Mostowfi al-Mamalek, his minister of the capital Mirza Isa, and the French teacher at the Dar al-Fonun, General Bohler, were assigned to draw up a master plan. An official map was published by Abd-al Ghaffar Najm al-Molk in 1890.¹⁷ A perfect octagon, the new walls and rampart had twelve gates. Tehran had expanded on all sides and had thus grown four times its Safavid area (figure 10.2).¹⁸

Figure 10.2. Map of Tehran. Date: 1890; population: 150,000; area: 7 square miles. (From Madanipour, Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis)

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, with a population of 150,000 and an area of seven square miles, Tehran became a model to be admired and mimicked throughout Iran. These urban renewals had altered the power relationship of its inhabitants. The northward expansion of the city had set an urban growth pattern that became chronic and subsequently defined future social relations. As the political and economic elite moved to the north, the merchants and the clerics decided to remain in the Safavid urban pockets in the south. The construction boom attracted unskilled workers from the rural areas who began to settle outside the southern wall and the four gates that flanked it, while the northern properties within the new walls were occupied by the aristocracy, modern institutions such as the newly established Imperial Bank of Persia, as well as European embassies and villas.¹⁹ The fact that the number of gates was multiplied meant that the state increased its revenue from the gate tax and thus helped initiate a socio-urban segregation between the inside and the outside of the city walls. These were further accentuated by the rearrangement of Tehran’s main public spaces: the Citadel (mayden-e arg) and Herbs Market Squares that had until then served as the meeting point of the mixed population were relocated to the north of the Golestan Palace, away from market and mosque, and closer to the northern neighborhood. The commercial and social center of the city became the Tupkhan-e Square (figure 10.3).

Figure 10.3. Citadel Square (Meydan-e Arg), Qajar Tehran, 1890s. (Photo from commercial postcard)

By the end of his reign, Naser al-Din Shah’s urban policies had given birth to a new relationship between Tehran’s morphology and a pattern of social segregation and promotion on the north-south axis that has been characterized as “bipolar urban structure,” on which the “bipolarity of the city . . . came to be an ever enduring north-south divide”: the king and the state at the top, the poor and the destitute at the bottom; in this unique case, physically, as the king was in the north (the highest point in the city topographically), and the poor were in the south (the lowest point in the city topographically).²⁰

Reza Shah’s Renewal as Infrastructural Construction

The second and the third phases of Tehran’s urban renewal occurred not under the Qajars who had made it their royal seat, but under the Pahlavis who transformed it into the modern capital of a nation-state. After a failed attempt to make Iran a republic in 1924, Reza Shah—an officer in the Persian Cossack army—declared himself king in 1925. Between 1926 and 1941, the king and his secular ministers aimed to modernize the urban fabric as rapidly and forcefully as they foresaw the advent of a new, secular, and thoroughly modern Iran.²¹ Reza Shah deployed Tehran as the site of power from which he could centralize the state and homogenize the nation. In a characteristic modernist tactic, he aimed in Tehran to erase the Qajar past that he had overpowered. Eradicating the urban reforms of Naser al-Din Shah and providing Tehran an updated appearance of modernity motivated much of the urban reform that took place during the two decades of Reza Shah’s rule. That these measures were taken with a rapidity that eventually undermined the very foundations of the system was telling of the top-down nature of the nation-building project under Reza Shah. As a military man who often personally supervised, or at least inspected, infrastructural projects that aimed to bring Iran up to par with other industrialized states, the king’s role was pivotal in reinforcing a lasting trend of northward urban expansion. The elimination of physical limitations to the city opened up an expansion that exploded toward the northern mountains.

As Smith examines in the case studies of ancient complex polities and as Pilat (chapter 9 in this volume) further details in her study of Mussolini’s Rome of the 1930s, urban reconstructions and physical demolition within and through the existing landscape are vehicles by which authority was translated into official history and created notions of progress.²² Indeed, the first symbol of modernism in Tehran was the destruction of the city’s nineteenth-century fortifications.²³ Under Tehran’s mayor, Karim Agha Khan Buzarjomehri, the ramparts and eleven gates of Naser al-Din Shah were gradually dismantled between 1932 and 1937. In a process of elimination/preservation, all but one gate were destroyed without a trace. Seen neither as historical nor monumental, but rather as standing tributes to Qajar political power, the twelve gateways symbolized the locations where the old regime had controlled the traffic of people and objects in and out of the city. These explicitly visible elements of Tehran’s public architecture, furthermore, often caused embarrassment in Iran’s secular elite, especially during visits by European diplomats and tourists, because they were seen by both parties as signs of “shameful symbols of backwardness.”²⁴ Their demolition enabled both the physical expansion of the urban fabric and the eradication of the last evidence of the old regime. While these acts epitomized the king’s determination to modernize Iran, the expansion of the city enabled the state to disperse the traditional bureaucratic network of social power.

At the heart of the city, predominantly consisting of the residential quarters and service areas of the Qajar royal complex, approximately two-thirds of royal Tehran was leveled to the ground. Some of the demolitions were replaced by new structures; others were left vacant. most probably because of the lack of construction time and the need for wider streets and open spaces. As part of a controlling urbanism to decentralize dense urban pockets and to bring Tehran to look like European major cities, one-tenth of the fabric was transformed into open public squares, including wide avenues, urban squares, and municipal parks. In new constructions, the new Ministry of Finance was erected on the site of the royal harem with great symbolism, and the Nayeb al-Saltaneh palace gave way to the Justice Ministry; in a similar vein, the main barracks and royal stables were transformed into the Ministry of Trade. Only the major structures of the Golestan Palace, such as the Shams al-Emareh, were preserved, cleaned up by the destruction of the surrounding secondary structure. Perhaps the most impressive single demolition, both in terms of scale and symbolism, was that of the “magnificent” Takkieh Dowlat. Erected in 1868, it is described by historians as “the brainchild of Nasir al-Din himself” and as “one of the greatest edifices built under Qajar rule.”²⁵ The complete demolition of this state theater was, on the one hand, notable because the structure was a massive work of architecture. Seating some one thousand spectators around a circular stage and three-story balconies under a semipermanent dome, it was a hybrid of A local decorative program and European building typologies, for Naser al-Din had decreed its design after Charles Garnier’s Paris opera house began in 1857. On the other hand, it was highly symbolic because it was the most imposing structure raised in the capital city by the most influential Qajar monarch for the specific purpose of Shi’a passion plays (ta’zieh)—the very performance of which the Pahlavi state had perceived as regressive and, hence, had outlawed.²⁶ Ironically, Naser al-Din had erected Takkieh Dowlat as his marked contribution to Iran’s nineteenth-century modernization.

Whereas much of these demolitions took place from the mid- to late 1920s, the legal basis of this harsh urban renewal policy was the “Street Widening Act,” unanimously passed by the parliament on November 13, 1933.²⁷ Reza Shah’s opening speech of the ninth parliament had demanded a “rapid industrialization,” which even the British knew that “the country could hardly stand,” but the local deputies were pressed to approve “the Law concerning the creation and widening of avenues and streets.”²⁸ The case presented to them under the rubric of preservation and modernization, instead would sanction an array of demolitions. When the Pahlavi state applied similar tactics to Tehran’s residential quarters, Charles Calmer Hart, the American attaché to Iran, reported in 1931:

Nine years later, the American embassy estimated that the number of residential structures demolished by the state ranged from 15,000 to 30,000. In a memo, it remarked, “Tehran looks as if it has been destroyed by an earthquake,” further underscoring that “the ruthlessness of its methods is bewildering to anyone not used to the ways of modern Iran.”³⁰ Rosita Forbes, an American traveler to Iran in the early 1930s, similarly described Tehran as “slightly Hollywoodesque, for the new streets looked as if they had not quite settled where they were going, and the rows of new houses, one room deep, were all frontage.”³¹

Iranians were not quiet about what was happening to the capital city. The most vocal anti-Pahlavi clergy in the parliament and a charismatic preacher from Isfahan, Seyyed Hasan Modarres, objecting to the urban renewal, stressed during his 1925 parliament speech, “modernization had to be distinguished from such lawless acts against the people and their possessions.”³² In 1932, German archaeologist Ernest Herzfeld, who had supported the reformists in their drive for modernization and had personally collaborated with the state in all its undertakings, confessed to Hart: “It is a system of ruining established authorities of old, without replacing them with anything at all. Everything we see [is] a methodic destruction...The result is a vacuum. One day the consequences will appear.”³³ Political historians would later describe these urban changes as “a good example of bureaucratic reformism and mindless vandalism,” where “the vandals played havoc with community life and historic architecture at will.”³⁴ Others characterized the 1930s Tehran as “a massive unfinished tableau worked on by several artists,” and a mere “external Westernization” aimed at “impress[ing] foreign observers, who usually visited only Tehran.”³⁵ The state “ripped down sections of cities,” a historian of Iranian nationalism would note, “ruthlessly destroyed mosques and other edifices mellow with the charm of age, and replaced them with broad, tree-line but incongruous boulevards.”³⁶

However, it was certainly true that, as historians Banani and Lockhart put it, “the Tehran of 1941 bore no resemblance to the Tehran of 1921.”³⁷ The northward urban growth accelerated by the elite’s urge for rapid development resulted in an entirely new city: “well-planned” with “wide streets intersecting each other at right angles, some paved with cut granite, others with asphalt and concrete.”³⁸ “In the construction of new streets, or the extension and widening of the old, the policy was to demolish any and all buildings—residential, monumental, historical or whatever—merely in order to keep them straight.”³⁹ By design, the master plan, if there was one, was intended to project “a glaring contrast to the labyrinthal lanes of the old quarters” in southern Tehran, where the merchants and the ulama continue to occupy their historical spaces.⁴⁰ While in the early 1930s the American diplomats could hardly see the benefits of a hurried urban renewal, a decade later they praised the city’s “remarkable changes since His Majesty came to the throne.”⁴¹

Despite being accused of vandalism, Reza Shah persisted with his drive to transform Tehran into a modern capital until the end. As late as 1940, that is one year before his exile, while taking a stroll in Tehran, he took issue with the height of the buildings on designated streets. “Why do these ugly, one-story shops still remain?” he asked. “I have told the military to force the owners to add another story or have their shops destroyed. I wonder if you, a civilian, could succeed where the army has failed?”⁴³ He then gave the owners the two options of either adding a story to their original structure or face destruction. Reportedly, after the incident, Tehran’s mayor who was held responsible for such disappointment “plunged into the task” of mending the problem, “and within a few weeks sections of the avenues looked as if they had been bombed from the air.”⁴⁴ Notwithstanding his harsh methods, on the eve of the king’s abdication, those Iranians who could remember the pre–Reza Shah Tehran, the changes, including the speed by which they had happened, “were nothing short of miraculous,” while for those who had had the opportunity to either study or work in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin, “the chasm between the material progress of the West and their own country was a source of frustration and defeatism.”⁴⁵ This gulf between Iran and the West, often explicitly manifested in architecture and urbanisms, would continue to be a cause of shame and disappointment for the following generations of Iranian architects and politicians. Throughout the Pahlavi era, Iran’s progress was made manifest in the urban development of Tehran.

Reza Shah’s urban reforms of the 1930s had several modernist, physical, and symbolic purposes: easy military access to the dense areas of the city; easy movement of goods and capital; the creation of modern infrastructural and communication networks; unification of space that would encourage homogenization; and, above all, the manifest display of modern architecture as a marker of progress. By 1937, Tehran had increased its population to 0.7 million and its area to eighteen square miles. Shahreza (present-day Enghelab) and Pahlavi (present-day Vali Asr) formed the major east-west and north-south axis. Shahreza marks the northern moat of Naser al-Din’s 1868 Tehran, while the twelve-mile Pahlavi Avenue first connected to the new train station—one of the hallmarks of Reza Shah’s era—to his 1925 Marble Palace in the heart of the city, then to his Sadaabad royal complex in the northernmost neighborhood, where he commissioned the eclectic Green Palace.⁴⁶ The seat of Qajar kings at Golestan Palace in the south of the city was opened to the public as the first museum of art, while north of it the new archaeological museum, museye iranbastan, was designed and erected in 1939 by French architect Andre Godard. Numerous squares were also transformed into traffic roundabouts.

When compared to Naser al-Din Shah’s urban development, the 1930s reform was “more vigorous in its implementation and more far-reaching in its scope.”⁴⁷ Reza Shah transformed the physical structure of the city, and above all, enabled a complete reshuffling of the existing social system in order to homogenize it—precisely what the reformists had intended. As Abd al-Hosayn Teymurtash, the king’s court minister and the mastermind of his radical plans, remarked in 1927, “we wanted to erase everything, and start all over again.”⁴⁸ Tehran was the ultimate expression of this sweeping modern ideology. While the demolitions and reconstructions epitomized the resolve to modernize Iran, the expansion of the city enabled the secular state to disperse the traditional bureaucratic network of the merchants in their bazaar, the clerics in their mosques, and the old nobility in their residential quarters. These three groups had clung to sections of Tehran’s Safavid neighborhoods as important components of their political power; now they were forced either to relocate their power base or suffer significant loss of political influence brought about by the king’s urban policies. Since the 1920s, the government had actively encouraged the merchants to give up their shops in the south and move to the new street fronts. While the aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie began to resettle in the north for better water, air, view, and social status, the ulama (clerical establishment) and the bazzaris (mercantile class) chose to remain in their place, and over the years they figured less and less in the country’s political apparatus—that is, until 1979.

Mohammad Reza Shah’s Urbanism as Social Engineering

The postwar development of Tehran occurred rapidly and without much state control. Mohammad Reza Shah, who took the throne after his father’s 1941 exile by the Allies, exercised little actual power until the royalist coup d’état orchestrated by the CIA in 1953. Like his father, the young king believed in his mission to bring Iran into the twentieth century; unlike his father, he seldom managed to negotiate the intricate politics of power and identity in contemporary Iran. While the former had destroyed the old system and set up a secular nation-state in the place of the Qajar empire, the latter aimed to improve the existing socioeconomic infrastructure and to polish the image of the Persian monarchy. While Mohammad Reza Shah’s power had been volatile in the 1940s and the early 1950s, by the early 1960s he managed to reestablish and control the “three Pahlavi pillars” that had supported the unrivaled power of his father: “the armed forces, the court patronage network, and the vast state bureaucracy.”⁴⁹ He, who had committed himself to land and economic reforms despite all kinds of objections, announced on January 9, 1963, the first six points of his White Revolution.⁵⁰ Described by historians as “a revolutionary strategy aimed at sustaining a traditional system of authority,” the White Revolution subsequently enabled the king to appropriate the various political, socioeconomic, and cultural forces into his own domain of power and thus gain unprecedented executive sway over major agencies such as the Plan Organization, the National Iranian Oil Company, the Women’s Organization of Iran, and the Society for National Heritage.⁵¹

By the 1960s when Mohammad Reza Shah carried out his own urban renewals—Tehran’s third phase—the spatial segregation brought about by the north-south socioeconomic polarity had been firmly established. This pattern was reasserted by the king’s move from the Marble Palace in central Tehran to the Niavaran royal complex in Shemiran in 1959. The land upon which the palace was built was the highest possible construction, right against the mountain where the soil becomes stone; it is impossible to build higher up in Tehran without great expense. These lands, belonging to the royal family, were probably confiscated by Reza Shah in the 1930s. The king reserved a portion of this land for a large public park, equipped with a zoo. Considering the political temperament of the period in Iran, this was a highly symbolic act. The fact that the long-anticipated heir to the Pahlavi throne was born at about the same time had probably little to do with the move, since the complex was being designed and constructed five years in advance. The new palace became the center of political and monarchical power. The religious power of Tehran was left in the old bazaar, now in the poor south of the capital city. By these urban interventions, Mohammad Reza Shah reinforced the vertical axis of social promotion. By then, the king was being criticized for abuse of wealth and power, as well as for “Westoxication (gharbzadegi).”⁵² The rapid growth of Tehran’s population to three million within an area of seventy square miles forced the government in 1965 to think of ways to decentralize the power of urban interest groups, to find a solution for rural immigrants, and to break Tehran’s vertical axis of social promotion. A new master-plan was proposed in 1969 by the firm of Victor Gruen Associates and Abdol-Aziz Farmanfarmaian. Its most important purpose was to reorient the city’s expansion toward east and west. Despite the good intentions of the master-plan, the push for Westernization in the 1970s and the policies of the White Revolution provided for and enhanced the spatial segregation of social pockets in Tehran. “It was now possible to see ‘a social gradient on the grand scale . . . on the ground.’ ”⁵³

In addition, the sheer size of the city prompted its spatial and social fragmentation. The city limits were set at fifteen miles from Tajrish in the north, Ray in the south, Mehrabad Airport in the west, and Tehran-Pars in the east. Systematic and state-funded industrial and residential areas started to develop along the road leading to Karaj.⁵⁴ In the south, two kinds of city planning were scheduled: selected historical areas were to be transformed into tourist hotspots, representing the traditional Tehran in contrast to the north. Other dense residential quarters were to be demolished and made into public parks and recreational zones. As a part of the larger urban renewal, a metro system was designed that was realized two decades after the revolution. In 1960, Reza Shah’s Karaj canal was replaced by two dams, which were channeled from the east and the west to provide clean water to Tehran’s peripheries. “In 1960, the construction of the Karaj dam considerably increased the water supply of Tehran for it could produce more than 180 million cubic meters per year. In 1968, the need for further water supplies resulted in a new dam constructed on the Jarjud River to the north-east of the city.”⁵⁵ West Tehran up to the International Airport of Mehrabad and East Tehran up to Tehran-Pars were supplied with clean water, thus satisfying the first precondition for urban construction and east-west expansion. Aside from these permanent solutions to the city’s water distribution, several older systems continue to be used. The first one is the jub—or open canals—that run in the north-south direction, following the slope of the city.⁵⁶

District 1 of Kuy-e Kan, more than nine miles west of Tehran and areas surrounding the international airport, became a major development site, where two large-scale residential complexes were financed by the state for the use of government employees. The first development was the Fakouri military residential quarter, and the second housing complex was the Shahrak-e Ekbatan, composed of much larger and better buildings. Finished after the revolution, it consisted of 1,000 apartments designed for government employees and the middle class. Westward expansion, residential and industrial development, and the location of the airport in district one were fundamental in the choice of a site for the erection of a monument that would symbolize Mohammad Reza Shah’s capital city. Here, he ordered the creation of the largest public square in the country and placed at its center a museum of progress, the Shahyad Aryamehr (“reminder of the shah”) Monument (figure 10.4), renamed after the 1979 Revolution as the Azadi (“Freedom”) Monument.⁵⁷

Figure 10.4. Shahyad (Azadi) Monument and Square, Tehran, 1971. (Photo by Talinn Grigor)

Designed as a museum of national history and progress by the young Iranian architect, Hosayn Amanat, it was meant as the symbolic gate not only into the capital city, but also into the king’s utopic view of Iran as a Great Civilization (a concept invented by the shah to represent the utopian society his modernity and policies aimed towards). As the centerpiece of the celebration of the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire in 1971, the monument represented the tradition of monarchy in Iran and the Pahlavi ruling dynasty, millennia old yet fashionably modern. Between October 1971 and November 1978, Shahyad acted as the architectural manifesto of the Persian monarchy, the king’s vision, ideology, and ultimate aim. It became the symbol of the modern nation that progressed ahead and connected to the past. As in the nation, in the monument the new and the old were omnipresent. It was the gate, par excellence, to the Great Civilization. It became the symbolic master door with which the king—like Tehran’s other kings—imprinted the era of his rule on the capital city. Mohammad Reza Shah’s marking of Tehran with a symbolic modern gate was to evoke both continuity with the past and progress into the future.

Historically gates had been significant for Tehran as for many other capital cities. Matured in the age of fortifications and ramparts, it identified itself and impressed rulers with its gates. They disclosed the importance of Tehran in the rivalry of potential capital cities including Tabriz, Qazvin, Isfahan, Mashhad, and Shiraz. As noted, under Nasir al-Din Shah, the original four gates of Agha Mohammad Khan (i.e., Shah Abdol-Azim Gate, Doolab Gate, Shemiran Gate, and Qazvin Gate) were replaced by twelve new gates, eleven of which were eventually removed by Reza Shah. The figure and number of city’s gates, in each era of Tehran’s history, marked each ruler’s contribution to the betterment of the city. From Shah Tahmasp the Safavid, to Karim Khan Zand, to Agha Mohammad Khan the Qajar, and finally to Reza Shah Pahlavi, the different gates emblematized sociopolitical and physical reforms of Tehran. Through the urban location and visual quality of Shahyad Monument, Iran was relocated into Western civilization. It was meant to be seen from the air as travelers were about to land at the airport—an entrance to Iran before even arriving. In addition to the airport, all roads leading to northwestern Iran were through the Karaj road and freeway, towered over by the monument. For travelers by plane, car, and bus it animated a sense of openness and centrality, whereas the old gates mainly functioned to close off and limit the edge of the city. This modern gate had a conceptual, symbolic meaning of getting in and being in. It did not open or close. It was just there, as an allegory of the king’s Iran.

Aside from the actual inauguration in October 1971, the program of the monument was also meant to create historic links and political legitimacy. It housed the storyline of Persian achievements in a series of museums and a large show-stage. The visitor was constantly on the move toward the top of the structure and thus progressed along a narrated, selected history: a procession from the Hall of the Ancient under the ground to the Hall of the Future at the top:

The ultimate link between the distant then and the immediate now was the main focus of all the exhibitions: the Cylinder of Cyrus with the first human rights declaration juxtaposed with the twelve points of the White Revolution.

Shahyad allegorically called forth the image of the monarch and his role in the fate of the nation. The king often talked about passageways, crossroads, and thresholds as mediators between realities and ideals. In form, the monument evoked a simultaneous sense of centrality and directionality, and it created an open urban space for mobility and visibility. These spatial qualities connoted the centrality of the Pahlavi government, revolving around the monarch yet espousing a firm and secure national path. As with the reign that it represented, the monument was dynamic but solidly based—powerful, simple, and central. “The four legs anchored to the ground dart skyward in an artful ellipse bearing a massive, simple and powerful central body. The lines are pure and audacious.”⁵⁹ The very existence of the monument as an urban sculpture and an identifiable object in the city testified to this belief. The Pahlavis revived the ancient tradition of monarchy; however, they were advocates of modernity. The monument, by its attempt at modernism, its color, and its material, implied a sense of openness and honesty. By its form and prototype it inspired ancientness and timelessness.

Within the larger politics of urban development, Shahyad Monument and the square surrounding it became the commanding urban marker in the middle-class-populated western Tehran district. The state-planned east-west urban expansion would, it was hoped, solve social problems and ultimately obscure the ever-growing cultural and material gap between the mostly religious urban population and the secular rising bourgeoisie of Tehran. Intended to superficially consolidate the different social fragments of the city, Shahreza Avenue—cutting the city in half and flanked by the monument—instead served to segregate the old Tehran districts from the new Shemiran area. The imposing shape of the landmark became the epitome of the Shahreza axis, rupturing the space of the rich and the poor, the aristocrat/elite and the blue-collar worker/merchant.

The urban plan of 1968, which was designed to represent the king’s rule and simultaneously undermine the power of the bazaar and the ulama, had a different effect. As in 1868, the 1968 construction boom—in addition to the heavy centralization of political, economic, and administrative institutions in the capital—drew large numbers of rural immigrants with intimate ties to the clerical and the traditional mercantile classes. Despite the growth of impoverished masses in southern Tehran as well as the land reforms of the White Revolution, the state continued to promote the urban culture, largely ignoring rural problems. The gulf between the haves and the have-nots, the rich of the north and the poor of the south, kept growing wider. By 1976, the four and a half million inhabitants of Tehran consisted 12 percent of the total population of the country and 32 percent of the total urban population. Tehran was ready for a revolution and radical overturning of the regime once again.

Smith questions Marxist scholars who drew the links between urban and socio-political revolutions,⁶⁰ yet in case of Tehran, the intimate and nuanced link between social order and urban space was revealed when a revolution began in 1977. Galvanized by the clerics, the masses mobilized in objection to a building project by the Russians on a Muslim cemetery in southern Tehran. The history of the Iranian Revolution can be read as contestation between the state and the mass over urban space. “Whoever could be in charge of the public sphere was in charge of the country. The contest over, and the domination of, the public spaces of the city was the embodiment of the revolution: in a sense, this was the revolution.”⁶¹ On November 10, 1978, Tehran witnessed Iran’s largest popular uprising. In a city of five million, two million individuals marched on Shahreza Avenue, which had become the main street of demonstrations. From southern, northern, and eastern Tehran, the masses proceeded westward, toward Shahyad Square. The Iranian Revolution that had started in the bazaar and the university came to its apex in this largest open public space in Iran. A royal space of modernity, the square was taken over by antiroyalist demonstrators.

For those who protested side by side in the name of often opposing sociopolitical causes, the public open square was no more the incarnation of the 2,500-year monarchy but instead an urban marker at which their anti-Pahlavi activities intensified. The royal ceremonial space had become a public political space called the free political environment (fazaye baze siasi), within which diverse views were expressed in the street. All of Tehran simultaneously occupied the western urban pocket of Tehran and experienced the revolution in the exact urban space that reform after reform had produced. At the center of this ideological open space stood the symbol of Tehran that was, like the megalopolis itself, appropriated by the king, the revolutionaries, the authorities of the Islamic Republic, the Western media, the local media, environmentalists, and the Iranian diasporas in various ways and times. In other words—as Smith posits and as Pilat details in her study of 1930s Rome (chapter 9 in this volume)—through media, authority became increasingly detached from its place, “profoundly unlocatable, simultaneously nowhere and everywhere.”⁶² The success of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was in effect a political manifestation of the city’s socio-urban development. The veridical axis of social promotion imprinted on the topography of Tehran finally yielded to a historical moment in Iran’s long history and to one of the major revolutions in human history.

Figure 10.5. Map of Tehran. Date: 2006; area: city 579 square miles, urban 265 square miles, metro 7,264 square miles; population: city 7,797,520, density 25,899/square miles, metro 14,000,000. (Photo from commercial/official publication)

By 1986, Tehran’s population grew nine times and enlarged its area twelve times (figure 10.5).⁶³ After the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, great effort and money were spent to turn Tehran into a more agreeable urban place. When President Rafsanjani (1989–1993 and 1993–1997, dubbed saradar-e sazandegi, the Leader of Reconstruction) launched his reform program in 1989, he appointed Gholamhossein Karbaschi as the innovative mayor of Tehran. After a decade of war and revolution, Tehran had ten million inhabitants who were suffocating in a city designed for three million people. Karbaschi managed to bring many positive changes to the urban complex including transforming the transportation system and landscaping; the improvements were remarkable (figure 10.6).⁶⁴ The 1979 popular upheaval had imprinted Tehran with an enormous amount of graffiti. The graffiti remained intact well into the late 1980s. The effort of the mayor to bring aesthetic and urban betterment to the capital included whitewashing public surfaces and adorning them with public murals (figure 10.7). The disorderly, spontaneous, and popular graffiti of the revolutionary days yielded to the orderly, predesigned, and preapproved paintings of the post-revolutionary government. The city looked cleaner, less charged with signs of war and political ideology. Beautification murals and commercial signage began to take as much visual space of the city as the political murals and posters of the revolution and the war (figure 10.8). Needless to say, this kind of iconographic cleaning can also be read as a historic cleansing of parts of Iran’s revolution. New murals and commercial poster-boards certainly make the present urban experience of Tehran tidier; but they also tell a selective story of the revolution and its ensuing years. Architecturally, the earlier graffiti were at eye-level and accessible. Fluid both in form and meaning, they could mutate overnight. In contrast, these contemporary murals are placed at the uppermost vertical space of the city; they are remote, fixed, and static both in forms and signification. The graffiti walls thus became a place that blurred the distinction between space and image and signified the place of resistance and contestation of authority.⁶⁵

Figure 10.6. View of highway retaining wall and landscaping as new strategies of urban beautification, northern Tehran, 2009. (Photo by Talinn Grigor)

Figure 10.7. General view of Haft-e Tir Square, central Tehran, 2009. (Photo by Talinn Grigor)

Figure 10.8. Example of urban beautification mural project, southern Tehran, 2009. (Photo by Talinn Grigor)

During the 2009 presidential elections and the ensuing social upheaval, however, Tehran again disclosed the direct relationship between sociopolitical tensions and urban topography. The political struggle between the Ahmadinejad administration and the pro-Musavi electorate was in effect a struggle over various pockets of the city (figure 10.9). Typical of strategies of power in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iran, the battle over the capital city was the battle over central power. Streets turned into the tabula rasa in order to express political alliances and ideological stances. The walls transformed into dynamic surfaces that altered their messages overnight.⁶⁶ As in the days of the revolution, the walls turned into a malleable, dynamic, constantly shifting space of public expressions. There was something personal and lucid about the way the walls of the city were deployed for the contestation of power. A sense of urgency, adventure, and danger seemed to define their workings. Strangely enough, the walls of the city were also the space upon which those who encouraged political apathy and resignation used to promote their message. In northern Tehran, one wall graffiti proclaimed “don’t vote (raay na),” which encouraged the electorate to refrain from casting their ballots (figure 10.10). Believed by many to be undemocratic in either case, this course of action would show contempt toward the system. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of the public domain—that is, the nightly debates of the presidential candidates, the energized visual environment of the cities, the public activities and enthusiasm, the discussions on the streets—all hinted at an opposite impression. Political apathy seemed to have been the one element missing from that election.

Figure 10.9. Vali Asr Avenue with the stencil of presidential candidate Musavi’s figure, Tehran, June 9, 2009. (Photo by Talinn Grigor)

Figure 10.10. Graffiti that states “don’t vote” during the June 2009 presidential election campaign, central Tehran, June 7, 2009. (Photo by Talinn Grigor)

The walls of the city served multiple functions during the upheaval. The social imprints on the city with definite political message were often censored. This sometimes occurred during the act of production. Cut in the middle of writing, the intended “death to dictator [marg bar diktator]” remained incomplete, changing its meaning into “death to dik.” At times, too, texts with absolutely no political meaning, for instance, “happy birthday to you [tavalodet mobarak]” were inscribed, as if to mock the act of resistance through graffiti and to reveal that the very act of writing, regardless of its specific message, is an act of rebellion. Ultimately, perhaps, the birth of a new government was being congratulated; we will never know. Clearly, there is not enough evidence to tell a holistic story. In Amin’s words, this trace on the wall is a “witness to another history,” which imposes “narratological complications” on how one can narrate the history of a city and of a nation.⁶⁷ The government each night whitewashed the slogans and graffiti produced by protestors. The next morning their trace was only apparent to those who looked closely. The erasure of the visual trace was to annul the reality of the unrests, as if nothing had happened. While the official murals themselves are losing their power to convey the revolutionary message, they are subject to neglect both by the authorities and the people. Their visual and ideological power is fading away—sometimes literally—while other murals await a new coat of paint as more pressing socioeconomic dilemmas surface.⁶⁸

Dominating the Iranian plateau by its hegemonic position in the northern heart of the land, Tehran has played a major political role in the history of modern Iran. Since its establishment as the capital city of the Qajar dynasty in 1785, it has been subject to major urban experimentations and expansions, often designed and financed under the auspices of the reigning monarch. Kings whose rules were characterized by top-down modernization, rapid reform, and the maintenance of an imperial image of civility and progress implemented urban changes in Tehran that constantly reinforced the north-south axis of social promotion, generated by its topographical incline from the southern desert to the northern mountains. Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi each carried out his own version of modern reforms that inadvertently coupled socioeconomic hierarchy with the naturally inclining landscape of the city: in effect, the higher you were placed, the richer you were, the better you lived. All along, Tehran was a revolution in making. Today with a population of fifteen million inhabitants and an area of 7,000 square miles, Tehran is one of the largest, most dynamic, and paradoxical urban agglomeration in the world. Its urban growth remains an enigma of both architecture and power politics to be revealed as its social history unfolds.⁶⁹