德黑兰的城市规划与发展：城市规划专业毕业外文翻译-(原文及译文).doc

Urban planning and development in
Tehran
Ali Madanipour
Department of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, Newcastle, United Kingdom
Available online 25 September 2006

With a population of around 7 million in a metropolitan region of 12 million inhabitants, Tehran is one of the larger cities of the world. This paper charts its planning and development through the ages, particularly since the mid-20th century, a period in which the city has gained most of its phenomenal growth. Three phases are identified in this historical process, with different types of urban planning exercised through infrastructure design and development, land use regulation, and policy development.
_ 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Planning, Urban growth, Iranian cities

Planning through infrastructure design and development: foundations for growth
The first phase of Tehran’s planning refers to the period before the Second World War, whereby at
least three major efforts set the framework for the city’s growth and development: walling the city
(1550s) , expanding the walled city (1870s) and building a new urban infrastructure (1930s). They were all led by the government’s ability and desire to instigate change and shape the city through undertaking large-scale infrastructure projects.
Tehran was a village outside the ancient city of Ray, which lay at the foot of mount Damavand, the highest peak in the country, and at the intersection of two major trade highways: the east–west Silk Road along the southern edge of Alburz mountains and the north–south route that connected the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. Ray had been inhabited for thousands of years and was the capital of the Seljuk dynasty in the 11th century; however, it declined at the end of the medieval period, when Tehran started to grow (Lockhart, 1960).
The first large-scale town planning exercise in Tehran was undertaken in 1553, with the construction of a bazaar and city walls, which were square and had gates on four sides, in accordance with the pattern of ancient Persian cities (Barthold, 1984). This set the framework for other developments that followed, and the city grew in significance, eventually to be selected in 1785 as the capital of the Qajar dynasty (1779–1925).
On becoming the capital, the city swelled by courtiers and soldiers, who were followed by trades and services. From a population of 15,000 at the end of the 18th century, Tehran grew tenfold by the 1860s, with a 10th of its inhabitants now living outside the old walls (Ettehadieh, 1983). The country’s military defeats in its encounters with Britain and Russia had engendered a process of reform, which was now being extended to the capital city. The second large-scale town planning exercise in Tehran, therefore, was conducted for accommodating growth and introducing modernization and reform. Starting in 1868 and lasting for 12 years, new city walls, in the form of a perfect octagon with 12 gates, were constructed, which were more useful for growth management and tax collection than for their defensive value. Selection as the capital city and these transformations, which included a new central square, new streets, a bank, an institute of technology, a hospital, a telegraph house, hotels and European-style shops, were, according to a British observer, a ‘‘twofold renaissance’’ for Tehran (Curzon, 1892, p. 300).
The city continued to grow and pressure for modernization intensified, which was manifested in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. A modern municipality was established in 1910, transforming the old system of urban governance. After the First World War, the Pahlavi dynasty came to power and this lasted from 1925 to 1979. The new regime’s emphasis was on secularism and nationalism, which were reflected in administrative centralization, modernization of the army, expansion of bureaucracy, development of a transport network, integration of regions into a national market, and restructuring towns and cities (Abrahamian, 1982). The 1930s witnessed widespread road-widening schemes that tore apart the historic urban fabric, making them accessible to motor vehicles. The city of Tehran thus went through its third major town planning exercise. The city walls of the 1870s were far too restrictive for a growing city. By 1932, population density had doubled to 105 persons per hectare and a third of the population lived outside the walls. In addition to demographic pressure, the arrival of motor vehicles, the regime’s desire to control urban populations and to modernize the urban infrastructure led to a substantial transformation of the capital, in which it was ‘‘radically re-planned and re-built’’ (Lockhart, 1939, p. 11). New boulevards were built on the ruins of the city walls and moats, as part of a transport network of 218 km of new roads. The walled royal compound was fragmented and replaced by a new government quarter; retailers were encouraged to move to new streets and to abandon the old streets of the bazaar; and new buildings and institutions sprang up all over the city. The new street network was imposed on the winding streets of old neighborhoods, with the aims of unifying the space of the city, overcoming the traditional factional social structure, easing the movement of goods, services and military forces, strengthening the market economy and supporting the centralization of power. The city was turned into an open matrix, which was a major step in laying the foundations for further modernization and future expansion. The immediate result was the growth of the city from 310,000 inhabitants in 1932 to 700,000 in 1941.
These large-scale urban planning and development phases of Tehran were all efforts at modernization, instigating and managing radical change. However, while the first phase had used distinctively ancient Persian imagery and local expertise, the second and third phases employed European images and experts, primarily from France and Germany. What these early town planning efforts shared was that they were all envisaging a particular new form and implementing it through the (re)development of the urban environment; they were all plans for a major series of physical changes executed in a relatively short period of time.
The reforms in the second half of the 19th century opened up the city’s society and space to new economic and cultural patterns, and unleashed centrifugal and dialectic forces that exploded in two major revolutions. Economically, the city started to be integrated into the world market as a peripheral node. Embracing the market economy divided the city along the lines of income and wealth, while new cultural fault lines emerged along lifestyle and attitude towards tradition and modernity. Rich and poor, who used to live side by side in the old city, were now separated from one another in a polarizing city. Moreover, modernizers welcomed living in new neighborhoods and frequented new streets and squares, while traditionalists continued to live and work in the older parts of the city. Ever since, these economic and cultural polarizations—and their associated tensions—have characterized Iran’s urban conditions.
Planning through land-use regulation: harnessing speculative development
The second type of planning to emerge in Tehran was in the 1960s, which saw the preparation of plans
to regulate and manage future change. The city had grown in size and complexity to such an extent that
its spatial management needed additional tools, which resulted in the growing complexity of municipal
organization, and in the preparation of a comprehensive plan for the city.
After the Second World War, during which the Allied forces occupied the country, there was a period of democratization, followed by political tensions of the start of the cold war, and struggles
over the control of oil. This period was ended in 1953 by a coup detat that returned the Shah to
power, who then acted as an executive monarch for the next 25 years. With high birth rates and an intensification of rural–urban migration, Tehran— and other large cities—grew even faster than before. By 1956, Tehran’s population rose to 1.5 million, by 1966 to 3 million, and by 1976 to 4.5 million; its size grew from 46 km² in 1934 to 250 km² in 1976 (Kariman, 1976; Vezarat-e Barnameh va Budgeh, 1987).
Revenues from the oil industry rose, creating surplus resources that needed to be circulated and absorbed in the economy. An industrialization drive from the mid-1950s created many new jobs in big cities, particularly in Tehran. The land reforms of the 1960s released large numbers of rural population
from agriculture, which was not able to absorb the exponential demographic growth. This new labour
force was attracted to cities: to the new industries, to the construction sector which seemed to be always booming, to services and the constantly growing public sector bureaucracy. Tehran’s role as the
administrative, economic, and cultural centre of the country, and its gateway to the outside world, was firmly consolidated.
Urban expansion in postwar Tehran was based on under-regulated, private-sector driven, speculative development. Demand for housing always exceeded supply, and a surplus of labor and capital was always available; hence the flourishing construction industry and the rising prices of land and property in Tehran. The city grew in a disjointed manner in all directions along the outgoing roads, integrating the surrounding towns and villages, and growing new suburban settlements. This intensified social segregation, destroyed suburban gardens and green spaces, and left the city managers feeling powerless. A deputy mayor of the city in 1962 commented that in Tehran, ‘‘the buildings and settlements have been developed by whomever has wanted in whatever way and wherever they have wanted’’, creating a city that was ‘‘in fact a number of towns connected to each other in an inappropriate way’’ (Nafisi, 1964, p. 426). There was a feeling that something urgently needed to be done, but the municipality was not legally or financially capable of dealing with this process.
The 1966 Municipality Act provided, for the first time, a legal framework for the formation of the Urban Planning High Council and for the establishment of land-use planning in the form of comprehensive plans. A series of other laws followed, underpinning new legal and institutional arrangements for the Tehran municipality, allowing the Ministry of Housing and others to work together in managing the growth of the city. The most important step taken in planning was the approval of the Tehran Comprehensive Plan in 1968. It was produced by a consortium of Aziz Farmanfarmaian Associates of Iran and Victor Gruen Associates of the United States, under the direction of Fereydun Ghaffari, an Iranian city planner (Ardalan, 1986). The plan identified the city’s problems as high density, especially in the city centre; expansion of commercial activities along the main roads; pollution; inefficient infrastructure; widespread unemployment in the poorer areas, and the continuous migration of low-income groups to Tehran. The solution was to be found in the transformation of the city’s physical, social and economic fabric (Farmanfarmaian and Gruen, 1968).
The proposals were, nevertheless, mostly advocating physical change, attempting, in a modernist
spirit, to impose a new order onto this complex metropolis. The future of the city was envisaged to
be growing westward in a linear polycentric form, reducing the density and congestion of the city centre. The city would be formed of 10 large urban districts, separated from each other by green belts,
each with about 500,000 inhabitants, a commercial and an industrial centre with high-rise buildings.
Each district (mantagheh) would be subdivided into a number of areas (nahyeh) and neighborhoods
(mahalleh). An area, with a population of about 15–30,000, would have a high school and a commercial centre and other necessary facilities. A neighborhood, with its 5000 inhabitants, would have a primary school and a local commercial centre. These districts and areas would be linked by a transportation network, which included motorways, a rapid transit route and a bus route. The stops on the rapid transit route would be developed as the nodes for concentration of activities with a high residential density. A number of redevelopment and improvement schemes in the existing urban areas would relocate 600,000 people out of the central areas (Farmanfarmaian and Gruen, 1968).
Almost all these measures can be traced to the fashionable planning ideas of the time, which were largely influenced by the British New Towns. In his book, The Heart of Our Cities, Victor Gruen
(1965) had envisaged the metropolis of tomorrow as a central city surrounded by 10 additional cities,
each with its own centre. This resembled Ebenezer Howard’s (1960, p. 142) ‘‘social cities’’, in which a
central city was surrounded by a cluster of garden cities. In Tehran’s plan, a linear version of this concept was used. Another linear concept, which was used in the British New Towns of the time such as Redditch and Runcorn, was the importance of public transport routes as the town’s spine, with its stopping points serving as its foci. The use of neighborhood units of limited population, focused on a neighborhood centre and a primary school, was widely used in these New Towns, an idea that had been developed in the 1920s in the United States (Mumford, 1954). These ideas remained, however, largely on paper. Some of the plan’s ideas that were implemented, which were rooted in American city planning, included a network of freeways to connect the disjointed parts of the sprawling metropolis; zoning as the basis for managing the social and physical character of different areas; and the introduction of Floor Area Ratios for controlling development densities.
Other major planning exercises, undertaken in the 1970s, included the partial development of a New Town, Shahrak Gharb, and the planning of a new administrative centre for the city—Shahestan—by the British consultants Llewelyn–Davies, although there was never time to implement the latter, as the tides of revolution were rising.

Planning through policy development: reconstruction after the revolution and war
The revolutionary and post-revolutionary period can be divided into three phases: revolution (1979–1988), reconstruction (1989–1996), and reform (1997–2004), each demonstrating different approaches to urban planning in Tehran.
After two years of mass demonstrations in Tehran and other cities, the year 1979 was marked by the advent of a revolution that toppled the monarchy in Iran, to be replaced by a state which uneasily combined the rule of the clergy with parliamentary republicanism. Its causes can be traced in the shortcomings of the