For more than a century, Iranian and Western scholars and theorist have sought to conceptualise terms such as modernity and modernisation and applying them in the humanities, social sciences, architecture, and city planning. This paper is part of a doctorate thesis that offers to nuance the understanding of modernization processes and urban development in Tehran by adapting Timothy Mitchell notion of modernity as an analytical framework. Mitchell carefully disrupts the powerful Eurocentric understanding of modernity by questioning the origins of the geography and temporality of modernity. He argues that “modernity had its origins in reticulations of exchange and production encircling the world, then it was a creation not of the West but of an interaction between West and non-West. The sites of this interaction were as likely to lie in the East Indies, the Ottoman Empire, or the Caribbean as in England, the Netherlands, or France.” (Mitchell, 2000). Therefore, this research uses the term modernity to frame the successive process of urban development in Tehran within different stages of interaction and connection with different places and practices in different parts of the globe.
This paper, instead of imposing a western definition of modernization, development, and planning on the Iranian context, has tried to investigate and bring to the fore the ways in which the Iranian planners, technocrats, municipal decision makers understood and interpret these terms and defined the trajectories of development in the process of rebuilding Tehran. This paper present an interactive narrative based on a series of interviews conducted in 2014 in Tehran with politicians, administrators, urban planners, and urban sociologists who were involved in various urban development projects in Tehran during the last three to four decades. The paper focuses on punctuated master plans; one is a continuation of the 1968 Victor Gruen master plan, and the other the Abbas Abad Hill redevelopment plan. Both these plans were among the most long lasting plans in the history of Tehran’s urban development, since their implementation process have continued until today. Furthermore, this study looks at two recent urban mega-projects that were both inaugurated in the last two yeas: first, the Sadr two-level highway, and the Tabiat pedestrian bridge.
Ultimately this study aims to offer grounded insight into contemporary urbanism and urban development processes in Tehran to revisit the “challenge of theorizing cityness in the face of a great diversity of different kinds of urban experiences” (Robinson, 2013).
