Refusing Inner-Coloniality: Informal Urban Commoning in Iranian Cities

Sustaining power, both at the scale of urban governance and within the national government in Iran, as in most regions, is only achievable by dismantling the grassroots infrastructure of commoning.

For the case of Iran, the source of power is not solely capital; but also, it is ideology, which constitutes the inner coloniality of the Islamic Republic. As discussed in our previous work*, understanding the urban development paradigm known as Anfal* is essential for unpacking the enduring trajectory of urban uncommoning in Iranian cities and the emergence of Gitch (de)urbanism.

The paper begins by elaborating on the mechanisms resulting from the Anfal-based urban development paradigm, which have led to the captured urbanism and the erosion of the civil society sector in urban governance. The second part of the paper presents vignettes of informal commoning practices as urban hacks/glitches. The first vignette focuses on a phenomenon we call mountain urbanism, highlighting activities that have been prohibited from urban spaces by Islamic republic law and inhibited on mountains, including women's singing groups, dating, and socio-political activism. The second vignette discusses how Gershad app utilises crowdsourcing and digital mapping to identify the locations of cities’s morality petrol. The third vignette examines the extensive crowdsourcing efforts by individuals during natural disasters, such as earthquakes, which rally around trusted anti-government profiles rather than donating to government or official charities.

Reflecting on these vignettes of refusal strategies (hacks) against the ideological and neoliberal violence of the current urban development regime, informed by feminist theorization of the 'minor theory of revolution,' we conclude that, due to the high level of securitization, grassroots practices of urban commoning remain precarious, fragmented, and temporary, while being far from building infrastructure of commoning.