Lanterna Rally

Author: Leila Javanmardi

Publisher:

Published: 2021*

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

The evolution of urbanism under dictatorship forms the core of the current research. This thesis is part of a research network at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, which studies the 20th century's urbanism under different dictatorships. The network has provided a cross-cultural and cross-border environment and has enabled the author to communicate with other like-minded researchers. The 2015 published book of this group 'Urbanism and Dictatorship: A European Perspective' strengthens the foundation of this research's theoretical and methodological framework. This thesis investigates urban policies and plans leading to the advancement of urbanization and the transformation of urban space in Iran during the second Pahlavi (1941-1979) when the country faced a milestone in its history: Nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. By reflecting the influence of economic and socio-political determinants of the time on urbanism and the urbanization process, this work intends to critically trace the effect of dictatorship on evolved urbanism before and after the oil nationalization in 1951. The research on the second Pahlavi's urbanism has been limitedly addressed and has only recently expanded. Most of the conducted studies date back to less than a decade ago and could not incorporate all the episodes of the second Pahlavi urbanism. These works have often investigated urbanism and architecture by focusing merely on the physical features and urban products in different years regardless of the importance of urbanism as a tool in the service of hegemony. In other words, the majority of the available literature does not intend to address the socio-economic and political roots of urban transformations and by questioning 'what has been built?' investigates the individual urban projects and plans designed by individual designers without interlinking these projects to the state's urban planning program and tracing the beneficiaries of those projects or questioning 'built for whom?' Moreover, some chapters of this modern urbanism have rarely been investigated. For instance, scant research has looked into the works of foreign designers and consultants involved in the projects such as Peter Georg Ahrens or Constantinos A. Doxiadis. Similarly, the urbanism of the first decade of the second Pahlavi, including the government of Mossadegh, has mainly been overlooked. Therefore, by critically analyzing the state's urban planning program and the process of urbanization in Iran during the second Pahlavi, this research aims to bridge the literature gap and to unravel the effect of the power structure on urban planning and products while seeking to find a pattern behind the regime's policies. The main body of this work is concentrated on studying the history of urbanism in Iran, of which collecting data and descriptions played a crucial role. To prevent the limitations associated with singular methods, this research's methodology is based on methodological triangulation (Denzin, 2017). With the triangulation scheme, the data is gathered by combining different qualitative and quantitative methods such as the library, archival and media research, online resources, non-participatory observation, and photography. For the empirical part, the city of Tehran is selected as the case study. Moreover, individual non-structured interviews with the locals were conducted to gain more insights regarding urban projects.