Journal of persianate studies 13 (2020) 222–251 brill.com/jps Narratives of Home on the Fringe of Tehran: The Case of Shahriar County Saeed Dalil Independent scholar
[email protected] Barend Wind Assitant Professor, Department of Planning, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands
[email protected] Abolfazl Meshkini Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Urban Planning, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
[email protected] Jafar Javan Professor, Department of Geography, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
[email protected] Abstract This paper focuses on the notion of home as a narrative of one’s lived experience that clashes with planners’ understanding of housing and housing policies, using as a case study Shahriar County, located on the western fringe of the metropolitan area of Tehran. Following Heidegger, the feeling of home is a fundamental aspect of human existence. From this perspective, housing policies and spatial planning impact the sense of home in a geographical context. The empirical analysis is based on an over- view of institutional changes since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and interviews with inhabitants of Shahriar. The results indicate that Iran has developed a particular form of neoliberal, speculative model of urban development, in which urban segregation and seclusion and uneven regional development are noteworthy. Consequently, the © Dalil et al., 2021 | doi:10.1163/18747167-bja10010 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0Downloaded license. from Brill.com10/10/2021 01:25:06PM via free access Narratives of Home on the Fringe of Tehran 223 sense of home is structurally undermined on the metropolitan fringe, generating a feeling of living on the edge of the world.