Tehran's Megaprojects

Megaprojects

TEHRAN'S

Pahlavi-Era Conceptualizations and Present-Day Realizations

After the Iran-Iraq War, the Islamic

Republic’s post-war policy emphasized rebuilding Iran’s western provinces, which precluded human development in Iran’s interior. Economic stagnancy halted urban expansion in Tehran, a city that grew at an exponential rate prior to the Islamic Revolution.

When Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected as the fourth President of the Islamic Republic in 1989, he vowed to rehabilitate Iran’s physical and urban landscape—both in Iran’s war-torn peripheral provinces and larger metropolitan areas. Initially, Rafsanjani pursued large-scale development projects in Tehran in order to both revitalize the economically depressed capital city and reintroduce Iran to the global economy. Rafsanjani’s Doran Sazandegi, or period of reconstruction, spanned his eight-year presidency from 1989 to 1997, and is often considered his milestone contribution to the Islamic Republic. He contracted private firms to spearhead a variety of urban megaprojects in Tehran, from public parks to high-rise buildings—all of which he oversaw from planning phases to initial construction.

Today, residents of Tehran attribute the construction of these projects to Rafsanjani’s Doran Sazandegi, but in fact, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi laid the foundations of three of these landmark projects: Imam Khomeini International Airport in 1968, the Tehran Metro in 1975, and the Milad Tower in 1976. Nonetheless, Islamic Republic sources, like the Iranian Students’ News Agency, defend Rafsanjani’s single-handed conception of these endeavors during the late 1980s, and while hardliners critique Rafsanjani’s ostensibly garish megaprojects, the Shah is indeed responsible for their resplendent designs. Moreover, Rafsanjani’s administration reworked the Shah’s plans for a central tower, metro system, and new international airport in order to achieve

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three overarching objectives that both regimes possess in common: nationalism, urban cosmopolitanism, and international interconnectivity, respectively.

The Shah implemented social reform through the White Revolution during the tail-end of his reign. For one, a 1975 New York Times article cites the Shah’s plans for the Milad Tower’s precedent, the Shahestan Pahlavi project, “to be adorned with boulevards, parks, ministries, banks, auditoriums, hotels, embassies and other buildings . . . to give Teheran a splendor it conspicuously lacks.” After the Revolution, the Islamic Republic shrouded this elite-serving nationalism in a newfound Islamic fervor, and the Shah’s megaprojects thusly molded to fit these new regulations. For one, the Shahestan Pahlavi project, whose ostentatious architecture was associated with the “virtually all-powerful Shah,” transformed into the Milad Tower, which today modestly exhibits minimalistic Islamic designs. A pattern of inverted triangles adorn the tower’s head structure, which, while seemingly basic, highlights post-Revolution architects’ preference for Islamic design as opposed to the Shah’s initially empire-centric themes.

The Shahestan Pahlavi project and the Milad Tower both promote Iranian chauvinism, but their leanings—from ancient Iranian to Islamic fundamentalist—materialize differently in the particularities of building designs. The architectural forms of the Shah’s plans and Rafsanjani-era products obscure evident links between both regimes’ underlying ideologies. Nonetheless, both regimes’ planned for the construction of a telecommunication tower to showcase Iran’s burgeoning regional relevance and modernity, even though their analogous intentions have been concealed under the veneer of distinct architectural perspectives.

Moreover, urban cosmopolitanism,

or the aspiration of a connected Tehran metropolis, motivated the Shah to contract European urban planning firms to draft initial proposals for a Tehran-wide streetcar system. French development firm SOFRETU provided rolling stock and broke ground on the project in 1978, but the ensuing revolution prevented the project’s completion. Over a decade later, firms contracted by the Islamic Republic commenced construction on the metro system under Rafsanjani’s Doran Sazandegi. As of February 2019, the Tehran Metro consists of 8 network lines and carries 2 million passengers a day, a volume that rivals those of its European and North American counterparts.

While the Islamic Republic’s urban policy is frequently entwined with conservative, often monotonous, designs, the Tehran Metro boasts sleek, ultramodern trains built by Austrian and Chinese manufacturing companies; this investment in train parts reflects the Islamic Republic’s underlying desire to renovate Tehran’s infrastructure and westernize a sprawling city that previously lacked a centralized urban core. The use of foreign rolling stock by both the Shah and the Islamic Republic underscores both regime’s common purpose in introducing—or reintroducing, in the case of the Islamic Republic—Tehran to global trade, while simultaneously broadening the city’s regional potential with a stateof-the-art transportation network. It was thus the Shah’s initial conceptualization of the Tehran Metro that sowed the seeds of cosmopolitanism in the Islamic Republic, despite the latter’s perceived opposition to change.

Lastly, the Shah’s idealization of the Aryamehr Airport materialized as Imam Khomeini International Airport in 2004, which ultimately served to replace the deteriorating Mehrabad Airport. In 1968, the International Civil Aviation

Organization (ICAO) suggested the construction of this additional airport in order to sustain Iran’s burgeoning population, and the Shah interpreted this as an opportunity to expand Iran’s international connections. However, the inception of the Iran-Iraq War closed Tehran off from the West, and it was only during Rafsanjani’s post-war administration that demand for air travel among a burgeoning Iranian elite necessitated rapid construction of a new airport.

In response to the Obama-era nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic has encouraged the expansion of Imam Khomeini International Airport as a stopover point between Central Asia and Western Europe. Despite President Trump’s discontinuation of the nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic has prioritized global connections and has further broadened the airport’s capabilities since its 2004 inception. Rafsanjani-era growth policy surrounding Imam Khomeini Airport, along with present-day desires for regional prowess, corroborate the Shah’s initial conception of Aryamehr Airport and accentuate both regimes’ fascination with international recognition and infrastructure modernization.

The Shah strove to achieve self-aggrandizement and a pre-Islamic predilection through his urban projects, but Rafsanjani heightened patriotism by providing post-Revolution Iranians with an avenue with which to interact with public space—regardless of the Islamic Republic’s social restrictions. While the Islamic Revolution is often considered a rupture in Iran’s economic growth and development, it has in fact served as a mere shift in the physical attributes of the built landscape. Moreover, Tehran’s megaprojects act as one of few threads of continuity between the Shah and the Islamic Republic. Not only did the Islamic Republic rehash the Shah’s initial conceptualizations, but also both regimes have utilized urban development as a means of progressing their regional policy objectives; these are encapsulated as nationalism, urban cosmopolitanism, and international connectivity.

The urban landscape is an unexpected setting in which Tehrani residents, upon overlooking the physical designs of commercial centers, may observe similarities

between the regimes’ underlying goals. The Shah’s initial conceptions of Tehran’s megaprojects have been largely erased from twentieth-century historiography, yet his ideals successfully transcended the bounds of the Revolution by coming to fruition twenty years after they were initially conceived. While the Islamic Republic and the Pahlavi Dynasty by no means exude common political interests, their desire to promote Iran as a sophisticated, urbane state is strikingly concordant. v

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