Housing Policy Making and Informality Generation after Islamic Revolution

This paper aims to investigate and analyze the role of housing policy making in generating the informal policies in the field of housing, which is being referred to as informality. For this purpose, the effort was made to show that how the housing welfare policies, while themselves being a product of forces and more major structures in global, national and metropolitan scales, generate the other self, i.e. the informal processes. Since the emergence of neoliberal policies in 1970s, the housing policies themselves have become a mechanism for regeneration of informality in the form of informal settlements. Accordingly, the findings show that formal and informal policies are not currently two separate processes, rather they are united ones; formalizing and informalizing which is named by some as informality. Therefore, unlike some western countries where urbanization has occurred by reliance on an industrialization process, in Iran we are faced with an urbanization without industrialization so that the urbanization in Iran with an oil-based economy even could be referred to as oil-based urbanization. This leads to some variations in experiences of Iranian and industrial western urbanization, as, in absence of a powerful production-based economy, spill-over of investment towards real states causes the city economy and subsequently the economy of the country to essentially find a speculative nature, which could have disastrous consequences in case of crisis outbreak.