Kuy-E Narmak (1952–1958): the Growth and Change of an Urban Community in Tehran
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Delft University of Technology Kuy-e Narmak (1952–1958) The growth and change of an urban community in Tehran Sedighi, Mo; Mota, Nelson DOI 10.1080/02665433.2019.1598280 Publication date 2019 Document Version Final published version Published in Planning Perspectives: an international journal of history, planning and the environment (online) Citation (APA) Sedighi, M., & Mota, N. (2019). Kuy-e Narmak (1952–1958): The growth and change of an urban community in Tehran. Planning Perspectives: an international journal of history, planning and the environment (online), 35 (2020)(3), 477-504. https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2019.1598280 Important note To cite this publication, please use the final published version (if applicable). Please check the document version above. 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Planning Perspectives ISSN: 0266-5433 (Print) 1466-4518 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rppe20 Kuy-e Narmak (1952–1958): the growth and change of an urban community in Tehran Mohamad Sedighi & Nelson Mota To cite this article: Mohamad Sedighi & Nelson Mota (2020) Kuy-e Narmak (1952–1958): the growth and change of an urban community in Tehran, Planning Perspectives, 35:3, 477-504, DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2019.1598280 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2019.1598280 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 29 Mar 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1307 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rppe20 PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 2020, VOL. 35, NO. 3, 477–504 https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2019.1598280 Kuy-e Narmak (1952–1958): the growth and change of an urban community in Tehran Mohamad Sedighi and Nelson Mota Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article examines the growth and change through time of Kuy-e Narmak, a Iran; Tehran; public housing; housing neighbourhood developed in the 1950s under the auspices of incremental housing; Mosaddeq’s Modernization Program. The project was designed by a group of vernacular modernism; urban young-leading European-educated Iranian architects that collaborated with the density government to develop affordable housing solutions in Iran. To design this project, these architects advanced solutions that explored a cross-pollination between the principles of the functional city, and references from vernacular architecture. Over the last 6 decades, the number of households living in Narmak increased dramatically, from the initial goal of accommodating 7500 families, to the 90,000 families that currently live there. This article discusses the extent to which the initial design decisions were instrumental to cope with this extraordinary increase in the district’s density. We have used typological and morphological analysis, combined with site surveys and interviews to investigate the district’sgrowthand change through time. This article argues that the designer’s critical combination of modernist planning concepts with elements borrowed from Iran’svernacular tradition resulted in a socially inclusive urban community. The plan’srigidurban form has become instrumental in defining a neutral background to accommodate the ever-changing social and spatial practices of its inhabitants. Introduction While Iran’s process of modernization started in the mid-1850s, it gained a new momentum in the aftermath of the Second World War. Sharing similar characteristics with the transformation of other non-western countries, in Iran this modernization project accelerated under the Cold War oil-led geopolitics. The period of ‘post-war corporatist compact’, as Kevan Harris called it, saw the US hege- mony infiltrating the region, sponsoring state-led development.1 In the context of the early Cold War period, the US geopolitics in Iran was driven by a strategy of negotiating favourable alliances to secure access to oil resources.2 This strategy sponsored a form of ‘Socialism’ paradoxically supported by a corporatist model of industrialization, which in the late 1960s some scholars described as a form of ‘creative modernization’.3 The social, political and economic transformation of Iran from the early 1950s until the 1979 revolution is a case in point to illustrate this process. CONTACT Mohamad Sedighi [email protected] 1Harris, “Making and Unmaking,” 13. 2See: Little, American Orientalism. 3See: Hanna and Gardner, Arab Socialism. © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 478 M. SEDIGHI AND N. MOTA Mohamad Mosaddeq (1882–1967), Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister in 1951, played a key role in pushing forward the land reforms and the promotion of public housing that started earlier in the 1940s. Both aspects were, however, further developed after Mosaddeq’s over- throwing in 1953, under the second Pahlavi ruler, Mohamad Reza Shah (1919–1980), who ruled Iran until the 1979 revolution.4 In what follows, we aim at contributing for the discussion on the evolution of housing paradigms in Iran since 1941. We will look into a particular case of public housing, Kuy-e Narmak, to study the resonances between the modernization of Iran and the transformation of patterns of inhabitation. We will analyse the typological and morphological aspects of the project and combine the results of this study with the outcome of a site survey in the housing district and interviews conducted with some of its current dwellers. This methodological approach aims at expanding current scholar- ship on Iran’s process of urban transformation, which recently has been addressed by a significant number of scholars. Themes such as the politics of mass housing production, the state’s housing pol- icies, and domesticity and home culture have been addressed from different angles, triggering a criti- cal understanding of some of the most important events in Iran’s process of modernization. Pamela Karimi has been studying the transformations in Iran’s consumer culture and its influence in what she calls Iran’s Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era.5 Karimi has dedicated studies to the urban environment of Abadan, an oil company town in south-west Iran, constructed by the British Petroleum (BP) and based on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept. Karimi developed a com- parative study of Abadan with some other Iranian cities, such as Tehran and Mash’had, highlighting similarities and differences in the urban structure of these cities. She claimed that Iranian cities experienced a hybrid process of urban modernization. In following studies on the architecture and processes of transformation of individual houses and private apartments in Tehran, Karimi has examined how the government used the domestic space as a locus to introduce and promote Western lifestyles among Iranians. She has shown that the layout of the kitchen and its internal arrangement became the main subject of change in the state’s modernization agenda. This shift was connected to the goals of Truman’s ‘Point IV programme’, and developed as a strategy to reori- ent Iran’s home economy towards Western mass-market consumption. In a study developed by Hamed Khosravi, the architecture of dwelling in Tehran was examined through the lens of the state’s policies.6 Through extensive historical analyses, this study showed how the interior spaces of Iranian houses ceased to be the exclusive domain for individual life and family matters. Housing and land policies became a tool to expand the state’s control over the society. Khos- ravi contends that the government used housing as a tool to colonize the land made available after the demolition of the old city walls, in Tehran, with the aim to neutralize the socio-political structure of old neighbourhoods, constructing mass housing for middle-class families and imposing new urban forms. Moreover, his study illustrates how the development of multi-story apartments became an ideal spatial apparatus to promote certain lifestyles and exert control on the society through mechanisms of government planning. Rana Habibi has also examined the impact of mass housing development on the urban structure of Tehran.7 This study showed how mass housing projects in emerging middle-class neighbourhoods of Tehran facilitated the state’s project of nation building. Moreover, Habibi argues that the con- struction of new neighbourhoods was not only a strategy for responding to the