Tehran’s Housing and the Gaze of State: Definition of Tehran’s Housing in Tarh-e Samandehi-ye Tehran

Problem statement:

 The vast body of academic research on State-housing sector relationship has shown various ways by which the State manipulates and controls the housing sector in Tehran. But the image of this phenomenon in the eyes of the state has remained rather vague or even invisible.

This study investigates the definition of “Tehran’s housing” by the state – as the sole owner of the right of law-making for material space in its territory – in texts in which the state has defined this phenomenon.

As the state – the sole owner of the right of law-making for material space in its territory – tries to define and control Tehran’s housing by various degrees of policy and law-making form programs and policies to concrete detailed laws, it produces a rather vast spectrum of texts which both explicitly and implicitly define “Tehran’s housing”. Among these texts, master plans have the significant quality of being both Comprehensive and concrete in defining Tehran’s housing. This article tries to reveal the State-produced image of Tehran’s housing by analyzing discursive articulation of Tarh-e Samandehi-ye Tehran (TST) as Tehran’s first post-revolutionary master plan.

Analyzing discursive articulation of Tarh-e Samandehi-ye Tehran uncovers an image in which a complex assemblage of people, population, housing, Tehran, and the ideal image of the state in urban scale being produced simultaneously under the gaze of the contemporaneous state, irreducible neither to the economic nor the formal aspects of housing.