Tehran, the history of decentralization, 1800-2000

Abstract

Despite its fame in the news, the city of Tehran has not often been discussed in the international literature of urban studies. Today, Tehran is one of the largest metropolitan areas of the world, ranking the second place in the Middle East after Cairo. Tehran city’s population, excluding its satellite towns, is estimated to be 8 million. With its current rate of population growth and urban development, in about 20 years it will become the fifth most populated city in the world. During the last three decades, Iranian architects and urban planners have published a significant level of researches in Iran and abroad about the urban history of Tehran, but unfortunately most of these publications and papers have been written in Farsi. Non-Farsi speaking urban planners who were interested in Tehran’s urban history were limited to a small number of Anglo-American, French and German publications. The concern of this thesis is look at the little-known outer-city of Tehran to understand the transformation of Tehran’s outskirt’s into different kind of suburbs. During the last century, many transformations and reforms have occurred in Tehran, one of the most important of which has been the change in suburbs of the city. During the last century, the population which lived in the outskirts has increased rapidly and there was also an increase in the number of new peripheral towns. This paper presents the historical evaluation and development of Tehran’s suburbs during four historical eras. The periods are: • The period of Qajars (until 1920), • the period of Reza Shah (1920-1940) • Mohammad Reza Shah (1946-1979) • Post-revolution era (the period after the 1979's revolution). Therefore we will have a look at some of the famous urban projects during these periods to understand the scale and structure of sub-urbanity.