Modernist Unilateralism and the Urban Development Policies of Contemporary Iran

Abstract

Historical cities have generally been the product of a kind of partnership between the general public and the government. In the historical era, due to the alignment of the public sector’s worldview and the powerful class of the community, there has not been a significant difference between their taste and view, and as a result, the decisions and measures of these two groups towards the city resulted in some sort of sustainable coordination. However, with the emergence of modernity in the Iranian community, a gap in approaches is emerged between the authority and the public class, leading to the formation of unilateralist approaches regarding urbanism policies. In the Qajar era, these policies are mainly limited to governmental spaces, but from the Pahlavi era, these policies lead to changes in the urban residential contexts without paying attention to the role of people in this process. This paper seeks to answer the question of what is the relationship between the emergence of modernity and unilateralismin the Iranian community and its impact on urbanism policies in the country's developmental and civil plans. This descriptive-explanatory research by analyzing the obtained data through library method will attempt to investigate the relationship of government as an elite part of the community in connection with the general public, before and after the emergence of modernity, and in this way discusses the reason of the formation of unilateralist approaches towards urban development policies. In the following, this paper will investigate the policies adopted in the field of residential contexts development in historical periods after the emergence of modernity to approve this hypothesis that the policies pursued in the urban development topic in various eras due to the lack of democratic structures and institutions in some way have relied on a unilateralist view and without the people’s participation.