Developers are sweeping aside everything from orchards to the capital’s 19th-century architecture in favour of rocketing profits
Tehran is not associated with ancient history: popular opinion knows it as the city of the Qajars and Pahlavis. But as recent excavations suggest, Tehran was settled 7,000 years ago. Even so, the Qajar and early Pahlavi eras shaped modern Tehran in giving it a distinct architecture. Divergent art once defined Iran’s cities: from Qeshm, to Kashan, to Astara, each built according to its locality, climate and artisans. Today, Tehran, like those other cities and more, has been disfigured throughout.
In the Tehran of the most recent centuries, elaborate houses had intricate basements underground, and aab anbar – a deeper basement for water storage. No matter how lavish or simple the home, it almost always treasured a blue pool in the yard around which fruit trees were grown. Windows and doors were wooden, and intricate carvings filled the walls with patterns that became more complex the higher the financial standing of the owner.
Few of these homes remain today, unless renovated by a major organisation. The luckier ones were turned into museums and art houses. Few like the home of Anis al-Doleh were the odd in the bunch that were kept intact but overtaken by random associations.
As recently as the 1930s, Deh-e Vanak in northern Tehran was a farming quarter in the midst of the city. Today, nearby Vanak Square is one of city’s most congested areas, but walk towards the village, and you will still find homes built in the 1920s, 1930s and even earlier. Why have they not been turned to apartment buildings in this frenzy? One wonders.
Ali Vanaki comes from a family that has lived in the village for hundreds of years. “We were farming in this area for centuries, then Reza Shah came along and gave the entire village to his prime minister, Mirza Hassan Mowstofiyol Mamalek. We refused to leave, but many of these homes do not have proper documents, even to this day.”
....
Tehran’s Beautification Organisation, an agency that operates under the municipality, but with its own independent budget, walks on shaky ground. On paper, it is responsible for carrying out artistic projects around the city, and in conjunction with the Heritage Organisation, repairing and maintaining the city’s monuments. While it employs sociologists, artists and architects who understand the worth of the city’s old treasures, it is under the wings of a far larger body, the municipality, that is leading the charge for high-rises and shopping malls.
“It often feels like we have to fight our own limbs,” says an artist who works for the organisation. The municipality seems lost between the thirst for more and more real estate, which yields revenue, and the need to save what is left of the very things that give the city character. Some of Tehran’s most notorious developers sit on the city council, only exacerbating this dilemma.
But so have we, the residents. Our very existence has mutated the shape and look of this city, from 15,000 residents in Qajar times to more than 8 million today. That the rats of Tehran are almost as big as cats not only speaks to the greed of developers, but how cities have come to be in the 21st century. Mass migration from villages and small towns to cities is the fuel driving ever more apartment buildings, more garbage, more waste, the very thirst for more.
A city without a memory may be a city lost. But what makes Tehran’s story flit between the tragic and the uplifting is not just what has been lost but what has been salvaged, repaired, somehow maintained. Part of this city’s story is this push and pull, this battle of opposing forces.
Tehran is a city with a past, and there are walls, homes and even people here to still remind you. If you look carefully, beyond the malls, and the butcher shops.