the iranian city in an era of change and development

British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

The Iranian City in an Era of Change and DevelopmentAuthor(s): Frank R.C. BagleySource: Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 3, No. 2 (1976), pp. 100-109Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/194584 .

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THE IRANIAN CITY IN AN ERA OF CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT

Frank Bagley

Editor's Note: This paper was read on 7 July 1976 at the Iranian Studies Session of the Society's Third Annual Conference. Mr P.W. Avery was in the Chair.

Mr Peter Avery's request that I open this discussion was an honour which, as a non-expert, I hesitated to accept; but I felt that, having had glimpses of our subject over the years, and having heard Iranians talk about it, maybe I could say something of interest.

Let me start with the background. The geography of Iran is such that communications are long and difficult, and transport costs are high. Even today, when the government keeps transport charges down by taxing petroleum products at low rates and by building roads at vast expense, the real costs are high because the money thus foregone or spent might have been put to good alternative uses.

The difficulty and cost of communication were probably the main reasons why a centralized form of government only took root in Iran in the 1920s, under Reza Khan and Dr Arthur Millspaugh. Before then the state capital had only been primus inter pares among the provincial capitals, just as the ruler had been the Shahanshah, or the King of the Kings; and the location of the state capital had not made very much difference, indeed in the course of history it had often been changed. In the nineteenth century Tabriz did more foreign trade than Tehran, while Mashhad, Esfahan and Bushehr also did foreign trade. Neverthe- less Tehran is a natural focus of communications, lying like its pre- decessor Rey at the convergence of routes from Khorasan, from the Caspian provinces, and from the north-west, the west, and the south- west of the plateau.

Traditionally, the Iranian state or provincial capital was a governmental and military headquarters, a religious and judicial and educational centre, and a seat of commerce and of handicraft industries, producing goods for the local market and specialities of high value and small bulk for export to other provinces and abroad. In the modern context, the big provincial cities have kept and expanded many of these functions but no longer play the same commercial and industrial role. Besides large provinces, Iran has always had small provinces and well- defined districts within the large provinces. Their chief towns per- formed the functions of a provincial capital on a smaller scale. Sometimes they were centres of feudal or tribal influence, but more often their main importance was as market towns or, if on main roads, as staging posts. The smallest towns, called qasabe (sing.), which originally meant fortress, were often no more than large farming villages in which a market had developed. Rasht was a qasabe until Shah Abbas I made it the capital of Gilan, while Babol (formerly Barforush) grew in the nineteenth century to be the biggest market town of Mazandaran without becoming its capital.

Many features of the traditional Iranian city or town still survive, though they are passing out of the picture, and some of them such as citadels, walls, and gates, have almost all vanished. The traditional layout included a royal or governmental quarter, a masjed-e jom'e and other mosques and madrases and shrines, a bazaar, and residential sections called mahalZe or kuy. The handicraft industries were pur- sued either in special parts of the bazaar and in arcades called timche

opening off it, or in workshops in particular mahalZes. Today some-

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times the name survives, though the mahalle has gone, for instance the Nakhrisan at Mashhad, which means the handspinners' quarter, is now occupied by garages. In towns with Zoroastrian or Jewish or Armenian minorities, these people lived in mahalZes of their own. Not in- frequently a mahalle arose around the house of a powerful notable, or aZem, and was inhabited by his retainers and people wishing to live in the shadow of his protection. Through their kadkhodis or elders, members of the bazaar and craft guilds and dwellers in the mahalles had a measure of local self government. Access to a mahalle was by a narrow alley, wide enough only for pedestrians and pack animals, and fronted by high mud-brick walls off which heavy wooden doors opened on to a passage or deZhiz leading to the house or workshop. In general rich and poor lived side by side in a mahalle, and sometimes the high brick walls concealed the presence of a mansion in the old Iranian style with one or two courtyards and a veranda (ayvin) and a pool and shade-giving trees. Except in the north, the houses were normally single-storey and built of k6hgel (mud and straw) with flat roofs which had to be rolled with a stone roller, the ghaltak, to extrude the moist- ure after rain or snow.

Iran today presents a very different picture, having become a politically and economically unified, strong and progressive, partly industrialized, oil-rich country. The third census this year will probably show that half the population of about 35 millions now lives in municipalities, some of them admittedly small qasabes which have acquired municipal status. The contemporary subjects on which I pro- pose to touch are as follows: urban growth and rural migration, the megalopolis, other cities and towns, bazaars and new suburbs and slums, traffic and pollution, architecture and conservation, participation and local government.

Urban growth in Iran seems bound to accelerate, because the natural increase is more than 30 per cent per decade, and agriculture as a whole will probably not need more labour. Industrialization is therefore necessary to provide work for the people. It has by general consensus been a national goal ever since the constitutional revolution. There is also a general consensus that rural living standards ought to be raised and that the country's agricultural output ought to be increased. In recent years, Iranian villagers generally have become better off in absolute terms, especially the 60 per cent of village families who received land under the land reform, and they have also

gained much from the Literacy and Health and Extension and Women's

corps and other forms of help. In naturally favoured areas, especially the Caspian provinces, signs of rural prosperity can clearly be seen. But as Professor Hans Bobek has pointed out, the amount of good agricultural land per head of the population in Iran is less than in most

European countries. In naturally disfavoured areas farming and pastor- alism yield low returns, and, since Iranian farming, especially wheat and date growing, is to a large extent seasonal, rural families often have no work for much of the year unless they also do handicrafts.

Moreover, many villages are too small or inaccessible or remote for modern amenities. It therefore seems unlikely that the great gulf between city and village in Iran can be bridged in the near future.

Massive migration of villagers seeking urban work began after World War II, particularly from Azarbaijan as a result of local events. It

grew rapidly in the late 1950s, when there was a building boom at Tehran and when buses and trucks began to penetrate the countryside. More recently, departure of landless villagers and official steps to

prevent uneconomic subdivision of small holdings have sustained the

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flood of migrants. Iranians sometimes express fear of rural depopula- tion, and it is a fact that certain naturally poor districts such as southern Khorasan and Khalkhal in Azarbaijan have had population de- creases; but, in general, the high rate of natural increase seems likely to compensate such losses.

The influx of unskilled and illiterate villagers has caused grave problems of housing and overcrowding, public health and education, particularly at Tehran and, formerly, also at Abadan. The story-writer and educationist Samad Behrangi vividly sketched their hardships about fifteen years ago in his Bist o chah&r sa'at dar khwzb o bidzri. Many of them, particularly the Azarbaijanis, work in the building trades, which still on the whole prefer old methods requiring abundant cheap labour, though recently modern techniques have begun to spread. In the slump of 1960-63 many of these building workers became unemployed. Some of the rural immigrants to Tehran could only keep themselves through street-vending, as described by Samad. Today even street-vending has prospered. The vendors sell not only most of the cigarettes and matches, but also garments in polyvinyl wrappings and even transis- tors and tape recorders. Shoe-shiners operate large stands and skil- fully put new soles and heels on one's shoes while one waits. It has been remarked that most rural immigrants are both hardworking and thrifty. They save in the hope of returning to their village or a neighbouring small town, and some, though probably not a high proportion, do indeed return. Some, particularly Khorasanis, are seasonal migrants who go back for the ploughing and harvesting. I will pass to the slum problem later. An even more important problem is how to provide literacy in Persian and training in modern technical skills for these villagers in the cities. Iran today suffers from an acute shortage of skilled labour, particularly at the middle and lower levels. It is so acute that foreign skilled labour has had to be imported, Pakistanis for the Kerman mines, Filipinos for the Tehran hotels, also 1000 Indian doctors to serve in the south, where few Iranian doctors will go at any price because they can make all the money they want in private practice in Tehran.

I will now say something about this megalopolis. In most countries today, governments tend to assume more and more functions, and to ap- propriate more and more of the national income and spend overmuch of it in the capital. Consequently, important decision-making, whether public or private, has to be shifted from provincial centres to the capital, and partly for this reason, partly because the capital is always first and best in amenities, the upper and middle classes tend to become con- centrated there. Thus the local market of the capital acquires an ever

higher purchasing power relatively to other local markets, and, if it has a good geographical location, it becomes the distributing centre for the whole country and a leading industrial centre also.

All these tendencies have been present in the case of Tehran. For

instance, the monopoly, or licensing system, for imports and exports, which lasted from 1932 to 1956, put an end to direct trading with for-

eign countries by merchants of Tabriz, Esfahan and Mashhad. Nor has the pull of Tehran been purely economic. In many provincial cities, outlooks and ways of life were very narrow. Often the main reason why an educated young couple migrated to Tehran was so that the wife could escape from the chddor and do part-time work, or so that both could es-

cape from the eyes of old-fashioned relatives and neighbours. Most of the Tabrizi and Esfahani Armenians, the Esfahani and Shirazi Jews, and the Yazdi and Kermani Zoroastrians, have migrated to Tehran, partly for economic reasons, but partly because they disliked the narrow life in

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the old segregated mahaZZes. Reputedly Baha'i families have also moved from provincial cities to Tehran. All these people prefer the anony- mous life of the megalopolis, where achievement rather than affiliation is what counts.

Tehran now has four million people, with industrial and working class suburbs which stretch southwards to Shahr-e Rey and westwards in the direction of Karaj, and middle-class suburbs which stretch north- wards to Tajrish and the Alborz. It has become the centre of the automobile, electrical, pharmaceutical, household equipment, and food-pro- cessing industries. The ministries have grown so large that some of them are to be moved to Abbasabad, half way to TaJrish, and a new centre of company head offices has arisen in and around Takht-e Jamshid Avenue. Tehran now has three universities and many colleges, a large proportion of the country's hospitals with still more than half of its doctors, and two thirds of its automobiles. It used to be a pleasant city to live in, but in the last few years it has greatly changed for the worse. Traffic congestion and bad driving make it difficult for people to get to work or from place to place, and almost impossible for the municipality to run efficient bus services. The ministries and head offices and factories have to transport their employees to and from work at great expense in official or company vehicles. Moreover, automobile exhaust is the biggest single cause of the increasingly bad air pollution. The building of an underground railway network, now under discussion with French consultants, will only give partial relief. While wage rates are much higher at Tehran, so too are living costs, particularly rents and house prices. Overcrowding in the schools, with classes of sixty or more, is much worse than elsewhere. Finally, there is the problem of water. The present supplies from the Karaj and Latian dams will soon be augmented by the Lar dam, which is also to

supply irrigation water to Mazandaran and the Vernmin plain. After that the only possible source will be dams on the Shah Rud, which according to the Plan are meant to supply Qazvin. Unless this water is

diverted, it is estimated that the absolute limit set by water shortage to Tehran's growth will be 6 million people. It rose from 800,000 at the end of the war to 1 million in 1956, then at 6 per cent annually in the 1960s and more recently at 4.3 per cent annually. At this rate the absolute limit will be reached in 11-12 years from now.

Recently there have been signs of a change of attitude among younger members of the educated middle class. Many have become eager or willing to work in provincial cities which are without Tehran's drawbacks, but now possess similar amenities such as shops, hospitals, schools, in some cases universities, and above all modern suburbs where

they can keep a car and be among people of similar outlook and way of life. They are even willing to work at Ahvaz now that coolers are in

general use, though there they may hesitate to accept an appointment at Tabriz unless they know some Azari Turkish. The government pays huge bonuses for service in disagreeable places, especially places on the southern coasts, and has had some success in alluring engineers and

officials, but not doctors. As regards industrial location, the petroleum and mnining and paper

industries are of course centred where their resources lie. The steel

industry was located at Aryashahr, 25 kilometres from Esfahan, because of its need for water. In the public sector, machine and engine and tractor factories have been set up at Tabriz, and aluminium and machine factories at Arak. For the private sector the government has designa- ted Qazvin, Tabriz, Arak, Ahvaz, Esfahan, and Mashhad as industrial

poles. Mashhad, though handicapped by distance, now has the advantage

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of natural gas from Sarakhs and Torbat-e Heydariyeh. In spite of financial inducements and tax penalties, private indus-

tries in and near Tehran continue to expand, and for obvious reasons would be reluctant to move; but for new private industrial enterprises, provincial location now has real advantages.

The pattern of change in provincial towns is very varied. The big provincial capitals owe their present possession of amenities--almost equalling those of Tehran--primarily to central government expenditure. Some of them, such as Esfahan and Mashhad, are also beginning to suffer from similar traffic problems. Certain smaller cities which in recent years have become the centre of a new province (ost&n) or of an inde- pendent district (farmendAri-ye koZl) have recently gained much from the increase in central government spending on them consequent on their rise in status.

Mashhad benefits from the pilgrimage and from agricultural development in the Kashf Rud and Atrek valleys, and has attracted many immigrants of all classes from the poor and earthquake-smitten districts of southern Khorasan and from Sistan and Baluchestan. Tabriz was depressed for many years because most of the upper and middle classes and many of the working classes migrated to Tehran as a result of the Russian occupation and the period of Russian-backed communist rule; but the new factories and the growth of road and rail traffic have brought about a recovery. Esfahan is the main centre of the modern textile industry, which has not fared very well, and was stagnant until it received the impetus of the Shah Abbas dam and the steel works.1 Its population has doubled to nearly 800,000, making it the second city of Iran.

The effects of migration, though not so conspicuous as in Tehran, where 43 per cent of the inhabitants were born elsewhere, are apparent also in the provincial cities. At Shiraz, formerly the home of the purest Persian speech, so many tribal people have come in that one now often hears Turkish spoken. Another recent phenomenon in some cities and towns has been an influx of educated middle-class people who are locally called 'Tehranis', no matter where they individually come from. In 1975 at Bushehr I was told that two-thirds of the present inhabitants are 'Tehranis'. The town had long been depressed and the old families had migrated; then the new port was dredged, the new road was cut and tunnelled through the mountains, piped water was laid on, and the so-called Tehranis poured in.

The fortunes of smaller towns and qasabes have depended on two main factors, the state of agriculture in their district, and whether or not they lie on a busy main road. The Caspian towns and some others such as Reza'iye owe their present relative well-being mainly to advances in local farming, as they have little or no modern industry. Some new towns, wholly based on agriculture, have come into being. Gonbad-e Kavus has arisen at the foot of the Gonbad since the war as the centre of the mechanized cotton growing to which the Turcomans have turned. Marvdasht, near Persepolis, grew up around a sugar-beet factory built by Reza Shah. Shirvan, in Khorasan, owes its rise to a more recent sugar-beet factory and a large mechanized-farming enterprise. Sabzvaran has become the centre of the new farming and orange-growing district of Jiroft in Kerman province. Great dams and agro-industrial or forestry schemes are already spawning new towns, such as Haft Tape2 in Khuzestan, Neka3 in Mazandaran, and Haft Par4 in Talesh, and are also revitalizing old towns such as Dezful, Shushtar, Ardabil and Meshkinshahr. In towns which lie on busy main roads, large proportions of the people now earn their livelihoods in transport undertakings,

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repair garages, and sometimes also tractor repair stations. These ac- tivities take the place of the old caravanserais. Since sugar-beet and other agro-industrial factories and to some extent transport businesses require seasonal labour, their presence is a great help to farmers in surrounding villages. Encouragement of agro-industries, and construction of more main roads, are two ways in which the government can do a lot for rural uplift. On the other hand, it will be difficult to lift towns in isolated and unfavourable areas out of their present stagna- tion or decay.

Two of the big social changes in Iran have been the decline of the handicraft industries and the decline of the bazaars. To a great extent hand-woven textiles and hand-made shoes and pots and pans have been displaced by factory-made articles, and the shops have moved to the boulevards and also in Tehran to new suburbs. Sometimes the shops are built off the boulevard in a two or three storey pedestrian-gallery called a p&s&zh (passage), which seems to show the vitality of the bazaar tradition as the shops in a p6sazh are usually of one trade. Today the old bazaars have lost their former commercial and political importance. The handicrafts which still thrive are those which carry on the high traditions of Iranian art and workmanship. At Yazd, where they still weave by hand the beautiful brocades called terme, modern factories are carrying on the tradition by producing fine quality machine-made fabrics. All these goods, and, of course, also carpets which are mostly woven in villages, are luxury goods, subject to sharp fluctuations of demand, but at present doing well thanks to the growing national prosperity and foreign interest. Esfahan is the great centre of the national crafts; Yazd, Mashhad, Tabriz, Zenjan, and Shiraz are lesser centres. In most cities sections of the bazaar specialize in the sale of carpets and craft goods. At Tehran the upper part of the bazaar has been made hygienic and is a good general shopping centre, cheaper than the boulevard shops, but the lower part has become a slum. At Tabriz the huge bazaar with its beautiful nineteenth-century vaulted timches is still vigorous, both as a general shopping centre and as a

carpet trade centre. At Esfahan the bazaar contains both craft shops and general shops, but a part of it in the north has fallen into decay since it was cut off by a new boulevard. Shiraz has its fine Bazar-e Vakil, but has lost much of its main bazaar in a big slum-clearance scheme. One of the main reasons for the decay of bazaars is their in- accessibility to trucks and vans. Previously, goods were carried to and from shops in bazaars on the backs of donkeys or camels or human porters, but this is gradually ceasing to be feasible.

I pass to slums, of which there are two sorts in Iran, the decaying mahatZe and the shanty town called moftabid. I mentioned earlier that the educated middle class people shun the restrictive social atmosphere of the traditional nahalle. They also have an aversion to k6hgeZ which

they consider to be unhygienic and dangerous, as indeed it is if use of the ghattak is neglected. They usually employ only one kolfat, or

maid, if at all,and they have no desire to live in a big old house re-

quiring heavy expenditure on servants and upkeep and modernization. Above all they own or intend to own a car, and the houses in an old mahaZte are either inaccessible or not easily accessible to automobiles.

Consequently the younger middle-class people move to new baked brick houses or apartments in middle-class suburbs, and the mahaZZe comes to be inhabited solely by poor people, the fine old notables' houses being subdivided and let off room by room. This has happened in Tehran, for instance around the Khiaban-e Pa-menar, in parts of Esfahan, and at Yazd and KAshan which have the finest examples of kahgeZ architecture,

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the b&dgirs5 and sardibs6 of the old mansions as well as the ib-anbars7 and huge mud domes being justly famous. At Bushehr the old town, with its winding alleys and tall merchants' houses in an Arab-looking archi- tectural style which the novelist Sadeq Chubak has so vividly described, is now in a particularly sorry state and has been partly demolished. Not all mahaltes in every town have become slums, but this often hap- pens through neglect and overcrowding.

Shanty towns have not presented as big a problem in Iran as in Turkey or Iraq. At Abadan, adjacent to the Anglo-Indian-looking company town, there used to be a large shanty town, but this was cleared a good many years ago and replaced by streets of shops and houses looking like a transplanted part of Tehran. In the 1950s large numbers of rural immigrants made cave-dwellings called aZunak for themselves in exhausted brickfields between Tehran and Shahr-e Rey, but these were cleared in the early 1960s and low-cost housing to accommodate the people was built nearby at central government expense.8 Today shanty towns are mainly confined to the southern outskirts of Tehran, though in 1972 I saw a small colony of the palm-frond huts called kapar outside Ahvaz. In the south-west of Tehran there is a huge moft6bad on both sides of the Tabriz railway. The houses are rickety but mostly of baked brick and of two storeys; the streets are narrow and unpaved and, in spring, seas of mud; water is from standpipes; drainage and garbage- removal are evidently almost non-existent; and overcrowding is said to be very bad. I was assured that the authorities will soon bulldoze this moftaibad and rehouse the people, and I have no doubt that they will. I asked whether the people were illegal squatters, like the dwellers in the gecekondu or 'build-by-night' settlements of Turkey, or the camps outside Baghdad and Basra where tens of thousands lived in palm-frond huts called sarifas. I was told that the houses of the moft&bad had been built on legally acquired land which lay at the time beyond the city limits and had not therefore been subject to municipal building regulations.

Town-planning in Iran is a subject in which Iranians now show keen interest. Mr Nirumand Rahimi is doing research on it in the Durham Geography Department, but unfortunately cannot be here today. Effec- tive planning began in Reza Shhl's reign, when future street alignments were set and boulevards such as the Falake at Mashhad were cut through old quarters. For a long time little was done about zoning. All municipalities suffered from financial stringency and could barely meet current expenditure. Funds for capital expenditure on improvements had to come from the central government, which until the last decade was often short of money too. Consequently, all important decisions had to be taken or approved by the Ministry of the Interior, and many oppor- tunities were missed. For instance, almost nothing was done to acquire land for public parks during the great expansion of Tehran in the late 1950s. Since land is generally abundant in Iran and since real estate was the favourite savings medium of all classes, nothing was done to

prevent land speculation. Moreover, as I mentioned, there was no control of building outside municipal limits. The new suburb and school in Jalal Al Ahmad's novel Modir-e Madrase were so located, and certain textile mills were built two or three miles outside the limits of Esfahan and Yazd because artesian water could be obtained at these

spots and because municipal taxes would be avoided. A recent and

alarming development, whether done with or without planning permission I do not know, is the building of an almost uninterrupted chain of villas and hotels and seaside camps along the Caspian shore from Babolsar to near Lahijan.

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The White Revolution's eleventh point, promulgated in 1967, is now- s&zi-ye keshvar or internal reconstruction. To implement it laws were passed in 1968 for zoning and control of building in both municipal and rural areas, for a new form of municipal taxation like the British rates called m&ti&t-e now-sazi,9 and for elected municipal councils and also district (shahrestan) councils which send delegates to provincial councils. For every municipality a comprehensive plan has been or is to be drawn up. The municipalities still depend on the central government for an average of 60 per cent of their funds, and competent technical staff is still in short supply. Therefore the planning is still done by the central government, i.e. by the Plan Organization and the Ministry of Housing, rather than by the municipalities. From 1971 to 1974 a new wave of speculation (borsb&zi) greatly aggravated in- flationary pressures which were pushing up house-prices and rents. The speculators showed special eagerness to buy sites beyond municipal limits in the hope that the limits would be extended or that a new municipality would be created. The government responded with a law of January 1975 which is intended to curb speculation without acting as a deterrent against building. The owner of an urban site may sell it to one purchaser who must then either build on it or sell it to the authorities. If a hitherto non-municipal area becomes municipal, the owner of a site in the area who wishes to build on it or to sell it to a prospective builder must pay a tax on its increased value which will go to the municipality (not to the central government) for capital expenditure on municipal services. The same law has nationalized all the not already built-up land on the Caspian and southern coasts and the shores of Lake Reza'iye.

Certain benefits from town planning are already apparent. For instance, at Mashhad and Esfahan it is forbidden to build skyscrapers which would spoil the beautiful panoramas of tiled domes. To check the spread of Esfahan itself, growth has been encouraged in the neighbouring small towns of Najafabad and Homayunshahr (formerly Se Deh), and two satellite towns, Malekshahr and Shahinshahr, are under construction. Near Qazvin a satellite town called Alborz is being built to house people working in the new industrial pole. The oil-fired brickworks south of Tehran which contribute to the air pollution are to be replaced by smoke-free gas-fired works further away using a new process devised by the London Brick Company. Last year a British expert, Mr Earp, studied street junction improvement and traffic light timing, and, as I mentioned, Tehran is to have an underground. An even greater help towards solving the traffic problem would be to improve the standard of driving of the Iranians, who are ordinarily so polite, but behind the wheel seem to lose all restraint. Nearly all important towns now have piped water, but only Esfahan has modern sewerage, which was particularly necessary there as a protection against the ascaris tape-worm; but attachment to the water and sewerage systems has not been made compul- sory, partly because poor people cannot afford the charges, partly because leading the water- and drain-pipes up narrow, winding alleys (kuches) in the old mahalZes is not practicable. The upper part of Tehran does not suffer from the lack of sewers because it is built on a thick deposit of gravel, but the lower part suffers considerably and

increasingly. The installation of a sewerage network in the megalopolis will be a colossal task, but is now under consideration, and many Iranian and foreign firms (including the British engineering consultants Sir Alexander Gibb and Company) hope to share in the work. The streets will have to be pulled up again not only for drain pipes but also for gas pipes, because use of natural gas which Iran possesses in

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abundance will release oil consumed in heating for better uses and, furthermore, will reduce air pollution. The provincial cities also will certainly have to be provided with sewerage and gas systems. Another source of anxiety is marine pollution in both the Caspian and the Gulf. In the Caspian, where it may soon threaten the caviare fish- eries, it has been caused by the Russians, though the new building on the Iranian coastal strip cannot have helped and the new paper-mills may be dangerous.

Iranians are now greatly concerned about architecture and conservation. They rightly deplore the gharbzadegi, or to use a Swiss term Uberfremdung, which is so conspicuous in their cities, particularly Tehran. Often it reflects the worst of Western bad taste, as, for instance, in the craze for garish neon signs. Yet Iran can hardly escape the compulsions which make contemporary architecture so uniform all over the world. The old Iranian style of house architecture has great charm and suits the climate, but cannot readily be adapted to modern needs. Attempts to impart national character--for instance by sticking tiles on to part of the wall of a concrete office block and lattice work (orosi) into some of its windows--have not been impressive. Only in special buildings has success been achieved. At Tehran, the Shahyad monument blends Achaemenid and Safavid themes in a boldly original design, and the unfinished Hoseynie-ye Ershad mosque and a shopping centre called the Bazar-e Safavi make good use of the Safavid style. The Esfahan Medical Faculty building harmoniously incorporates Safavid elements in a modern-style structure. At Ahvaz and Dezful the use of shade-giving arcades called sayeban improves both the comfort and the appearance of the shopping avenues. Iran's basic need, like our own, is for better modern-style architecture. In this respect the Daneshgah-e MellilO at Tehran is an example of the good work Iranian architects can do.

In general, it seems that most attention is a present being paid to the speeding up of building processes by methods such as standardiza- tion and prefabrication. The problem of earthquake-resistant construction, which is under continual study in Japan and California, has, as far as I know, received little attention in Iran.

As regards conservation, an immense amount of repair and retiling of mosques and shrines has been done, not only of those which are national monuments but also of lesser edifices. If the local people pay one-fifth of the cost, the government pays the rest. Of course much still remains to be done. At Mashhad the buildings on both sides of the Falake have been demolishedll so that the shrine and the mosque of Gowhar Shad may stand forth in their glory in a great open space having ample room for the crowds of pilgrims. I have to say that I felt sorry about the demolition of the bazaars leading to the shrine, as they gave it a pleasing oriental authenticity; but my Iranian friends did not share this feeling. A scheme for which there can be no regrets is the creation of a large park on the east side of the Chaharbagh Avenue at Esfahan having at its centre the Safavid Hasht Behesht pavilion, which is being restored. Unfortunately, the central canals which once added to the charm of the tree-lined Chaharbagh at Esfahan and Bala Khiaban and Payin Khiaban at Mashhad had to be covered over for hygienic reasons, and the same fate may soon befall the dis- tributory rivers called madi, which are such a unique feature at Esfahan.

Little interest was taken in Qajar buildings until the Empress Farah, who qualified in art and architecture at Paris, observed the worsening decay and thoughtless destruction which was going on--for

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instance, the demolition of the fine late Qajar mansion of Hajji Amin ol-Zarb at Esfahan when the Reza Shah Pahlavi Boulevard was cut. Now the Ministry of Culture and Art has a representative in every province with authority to put preservation orders on worthy buildings and to spend money on acquiring them or on helping owners to repair and main- tain them. A certain amount has been done, though the available funds and staff are scarce. Her Majesty has shown special concern for preservation of the unique k&hgeZ monuments of Yazd, Kashan and Kerman. I have to say that some Yazdis with whom I spoke expressed greater ad- miration for their new boulevards, which, as everywhere else, resemble those of Tehran, even to the point of having ditches (jubs) though it seldom rains at Yazd.

I have only hinted at some of Iran's urban problems in this period of change and development. I mentioned that the central government supplies most of the funds and the skilled personnel, and, as payer of the piper, it calls the tune. Today the problems have become so com- plex that there seems to be a general consensus on the need for more mosh&rakat or public participation in finding ways to solve them. This raises the question of the efficacy of the municipal councils and of the shahrestan, ostn n, and bakhsh12 councils. It must be borne in mind that certain functions, particularly education, which fall under local government in Britain are the responsibility of the central government in Iran. Since these elective councils only came into being in 1968 and 1970, research on their working may still be premature. My own im- pression, based on a few conversations, is that in the big cities the municipal councils have made little impact and are viewed with indif- ference, whereas in the small towns the municipal councils are valued and viewed with genuine interest. Perhaps the explanation may be that, while the big cities always received governmental attention, the smaller towns often did not, and that the councils are valued as a means of drawing the central government's attention to local needs.

Notes 1. This dam was finished in 1970. The steel works started production

in 1973. 2. Cane-sugar refinery and paper- and tissue-mills. 3. Iranian-Canadian lumber- and paper-mills project. 4. Iranian-Canadian paper-mill, under construction when the writer

went past in April 1975. 5. Wind-towers. 6. Cellars for summer living. 7. Domed cisterns. 8. The writer was taken to see one of these low-cost housing develop-

ments in 1966. 9. The rate is based on estimated capital (not rental) value and is

0.5 per cent per annum everywhere. 10. National (i.e. private) University, founded in 1960; now state-

financed, with free tuition for those who undertake to work in government service or industry for two years.

11. The writer happened to be there when the first pick was wielded on 7 April 1975.

12. District, province, sub-district.

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the iranian city in an era of change and development

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