Urban Governance & Municipal Politics in Tehran

We examine the dynamics of urban politics in Iran by focusing on Tehran and the manners in which its built environment has been transformed through frictions and interactions between institutions of urban governance (Municipality, relevant ministries, elected City Council), and a range of key social actors (land speculators, ruling authorities, citizen activists). While the urban and provincial dimensions of the 1970 Revolution have been overshadowed by its Khomeinist and ideological aspects, the centrality of urban dynamics to how political and social issues have been framed,, experienced, and addressed became cleared after the Iran-Iraq War. Critical issues such as housing, migration, the pressing expectations of rising new middle classes as well as hard-pressed subalterns, the accumulation of capital through land speculation, culture wars over defining the boundaries of public and common space, the resentment of the pauperized urban periphery, and the formation of new citizen coalitions reclaiming the right to the city have reshaped relations between the state, ruling elites, and ordinary people. Tehran has been the epicenter of these processes. In the 1990s 'technocrat revolutionaries' advanced urban renewal projects redefining the postwar transition to a new socioeconomic order. In the process, municipalities became autonomous instruments of social engineering. Their neoliberal urban renewal projects aimed at solving municipal dire finances through privatizing and marketizing urban space, and relegitimizing the regime via the support of propertied classes vested in the built environment. These projects were financed through alliances between developers, land speculators, municipalities, and rival ruling political factions. This paper analyzes the struggles over defining the boundaries of these practices and the counter claims of residents for the right to the city.