Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemEffects of state power on daily practice in Vali Asr (Pahlavi) Street( 2007)The relationship between power and urban spaces, more specially streets, is investigated in this project. Although the issue of power has been studied from different viewpoints, this project is dealing with the issue of power and its effects on people's everyday life through investigation of changes in everyday practices in the spaces of the city. The investigation has mainly concentrated on the users' appearances and behaviours, and documented the changes that have happened since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. The geographical focus of the research is Vali Asr (Pahlavi) street, the historical north-south axis of Tehran, approximately 20 km long, which was built in the Reza Shah Pahlavi reign connecting the railway station at the hot, dusty plateau of the south to his Palace at the north, in the cool foothills of the Alborz mountains. The selected study area of Vali Asr street is its central part, including one of the main squares of Tehran, Vali Asr (Vali ahd) square. The temporal focus of the study is the period since the 1979 Islamic revolution, in which the state's policies concerning the daily practices of people in public spaces has changed radically. The specific concentration is on the current situation. The change in state policies has been underpinned by change in state ideology toward Islamization. The target group in this research is the educated middle-class of Tehranians who are the most frequent users of the study area. The methods of data collection include various secondary sources such as books, together with surveys through distributed questionnaires, informal in-depth interviews, historic photos and the internet. One of the major difficulties of this research has been to balance the pessimistic view of Iranian society particularly held by people who are trawling their memories about the past in relation to the current situation. Therefore it has been necessary to seek different sources from both inside and outside of Iran, to compare different voices and ideas. Moreover, my personal twenty-five years of experience in this society helped me in the process of data collection. Previous generations' experiences remembered from conversations can be added to these, albeit with due caution. The project has tried to map the changes in the spaces of the city through investigation of this group's appearances and behaviour before and after the Islamic revolution. The incomplete observation of Islamic rules in public space by this group, and against that control exercised by the moral police to oblige them to follow Islamic rules, has resulted in spatial contestation between this group and state power. While the moral police control on people's daily practices appropriates the spaces of the city, this group is trying to 'expropriate' them through acts of disobedience. Although some people may not care about the Islamic control, this struggle is seen in the spaces of the city, particularly in central and northern parts of Tehran. In addition, it is highly intertwined with the political climate of the country. The mapping of appearances and behaviour in the study area is mainly based on collecting and analysing photos and statements from various sources of data, collected about the study area and the places that people most remember from it. In order to escape from Islamic controls in the spaces of the city, some public places in the study area have become public refuge-spaces for this group, with a relative freedom from Islamic regulations compared to other places. Those places have been mapped through andarouni and birouni concepts, which relate to private and public realms of Iranian traditional houses in the nineteenth century, and based on Islamic values. Andarouni and birouni concepts have shifted in scale from that of the individual house to the wider spaces of public and private realms for this middle-class group, whereby private homes have become a 'free' place for socializing versus the controlled public places. This shift also could be seen in a dramatic expansion of the internet as a new public realm, particularly among this class, as a new free avenue which connects opposite genders, people inside and outside of Iran, and as a way to discover the world outside from the shrouded world inside Iran. Again, there is the same struggle of appropriation and expropriation of this new public realm by state power through continuous censorship of websites on news, human rights, religion, women as well as weblogs. Internet users are trying to overtake the government by finding new techniques to pass those filtrations. Finally, the autocratic political approach of state power toward public realms has affected Iranian society throughout modern history where one group has been suppressed and others supported. This has always resulted in a contest for the spaces of the city. This dilemma stems from a society which is wandering between tradition and modernity.