The Iranian city in an era of change and development

Abstract

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. Nevertheless Tehran is a natural focus of communications, lying like its predecessor Rey at the convergence of routes from Khorasan, from the Caspian provinces, and from the north-west, the west, and the southwest 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 welldefined districts within the large provinces. Their chief towns performed 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 pursued either in special parts of the bazaar and in arcades called timche opening off it, or in workshops in particular mahalZes. Today some-