This research explores the informal settlement conundrum over the last fifteen years in Iran against the backdrop of the World Bank âs loan for physical upgrading, and the distinctive models, policies/processes, and outcomes associated with it. These themes while theoretically separate, operate in concert. That is why revisiting them has immense benefits for planners and policymakers, who typically practice in formal planning paradigms. The significance of identifying and unraveling these trends, while to some extent unpredictable and complex, sets the tone for not only why, despite obvious challenges, informal settlements are so resilient and hardheaded in Iran, but also how understanding them in a broader theoretical context helps rectify the existing policies in order to develop more effective ones.
With its old history, Iran âs diverse and rich urban landscape has not been systematically documented. In addition to this geographic and historic diversity across a variegated tapestry of cultural, social, and physical landscapes, many Iranian cities have experienced rapid growth in both the formal and informal sectors over the last half a century. What prompted this research, first and foremost, is to glean some important, but nevertheless, less documented lessons the phenomenon of informality , with all its nuances and complexities, can offer and contribute to the urban planning and policymaking literature.
Informality is not a new phenomenon and is fairly well documented. We are familiar with this phenomenon as a long-lasting âproblemâ that has for decades plagued the developing world from Asia to Africa and Latin America. While ubiquitous, two points warrant attention here. First, with all the policies, regulations, and preventive government interventions as well as international organizations including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank among others, this phenomenon is still prevalent and widespread. So much so that informality is not limited to the so-called developing world anymore and is rapidly becoming part of the vitality of everyday urbanism in the developed world as well. The Informal American City edited by Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris (2014), and the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism edited by Arefi and Kickert attest to the fact that âinformalityâ is quickly and robustly catching on in the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia.
Second, the pendulum of the inherent stigma associated with informality seems to be swinging the other way.1 That is, if informality has been commonly considered a nuisance or a threat to the social and cultural order, it is now increasingly epitomizing vitality and robustnessâa socially and politically realistic if not desirable alternative that paves the way toward âenablingâ and eventually âempowermentâ . Many of us remember William Goldsmithâs (1974), at the time, innovative interpretation of âthe Ghetto as a Resource,â and not a âproblem.â The fact that there are usually two (sometimes conflicting and quite ironic) sides to what appears to be a problem underlines seeking new insights into the informality phenomenon in general, and the Iranian case of Hashieh Neshini (squatting in fringe areas of the city in Farsi) in particular.
The Iranian experience is not an exception to this observation. Nevertheless, it remains fairly unexplored compared with the corpus of work published on Latin America or Africa. What makes the Iranian informal settlements experience interesting and perhaps intriguing is the manifestation of its rich physical , cultural, social, and geographic diversity . These lessons while mostly undocumented remain in peopleâs memories and, hence, ought to be recorded through systematic research methods including participant observation and oral history.
What motivated me to pursue this major undertaking is that during my last trip to Iran I witnessed an incredible willingness and passion for documenting and sharing this rich and unique experience with the rest of the world. This is indeed a great task because doing justice to what has either fortuitously or by design taken place in Iran is not easy to document or understand for different reasons. First of all, Iran is a big country with a population of around 80 million. Collecting information from across this large country is daunting. There are hundreds of cities in Iran that deal with informality and its guises in their own ways. Finding these idiosyncrasies and being able to report them accurately needs much more time and effort that I can afford, and hence, requires years of systematic data collection, observation, and analysis. This level of attention is definitely something that goes beyond any one personâs commitment. Of course, this does not mean that no effort in understanding informality in its rich and complex, and at times innovative sense of the word, has been made. Many devoted and respected Iranian scholars including Piran , Irandoust , Seifaldini, Alaedini , Athari , Sarrafi , Rafieian , and Zebardast, among others, have made such contributions. But the problem is that since the bulk of this research is in Farsi, they remain unknown, inaccessible, and unlikely to be shared with the scholarly community outside of Iran.
This study sets out to glean, document, and perhaps rehash some invaluable lessons in a way that can become available to scholars, policymakers, and public officials who want to know more about the Iranian experience. While in recent years much research on informality has been done, unfortunately, to date, a systematic record of oral history and institutional memory of what has been achieved over the last half a century does not systematically exist. However, anecdotal evidence comprising university theses and reports from consulting firms exist.
I vividly remember that as a young architect, fresh out of college, many years ago, informality had (and still does) a pejorative connotation to many architects, policymakers, and those who cared about cities. The only solution for this problem, at the time, according to these experts, thinkers, decision-makers , and intellectuals, was physical obliteration and removal. Informal settlements are known to be associated with all urban ills from crime and poverty to drug dealing, lack of safety and counterculture. At the risk of sounding naively hopeful and without attempting to give the false impression that there is national consensus on informality, evidence suggests a change of heart among the policymakers. While still many public officials and politicians consider informality part of the problem, there are those who believe otherwise. Not that they consider informality a cause for celebration or ecstasy, but they do not automatically consider it something to be ashamed of or want to get rid of. They argue, instead, that due to a plethora of evidence and driven by macroeconomic and even global forces, cities and their inhabitants experience economic or social instability.
Depending on the severity of the situation, the economic future and welfare of these people could deteriorate. We all remember the USA and the global economic meltdown of 2008 in which millions of homeowners faced foreclosures and lost their homes. This vicious chronic cycle of global economic debacle that has changed the fate of hundreds of millions of people has become a rather familiar phenomenon every decade or so. Situations like this can now be one reason among many for the mushrooming informal settlements in many Iranian cities. This observation is very different from the common and intuitive conviction that considered ruralâurban migration the only progenitor of informality in Iran as well as in many other developing countries over the last half a century.
The history of informal settlements in Iran is associated more with the post-WWII period of rapid urban development rather than the Shahâs land reform. That era witnessed rapid urban development thanks to the economic book from petrodollars of the 1950s and 1960s. But like many other countries, the response and reaction to that remained coercive removal and bulldozing. This physical response to an otherwise socioeconomic, cultural, and even global phenomenon was fairly prevalent and accepted solution at the time. With the passage of time, new experiences and dynamics brought significant shifts to thinking about informality .
Writing about informality in general, and informal settlements in particular, is deceptively easy. It sounds easy because, as mentioned at the outset, there is a significant corpus of research done on this, by now, fairly and increasingly pervasive global phenomenon. Approximately five decades of scholarly research on this broad theme make it a familiar topic among urban planners , economists, public and city officials, and governments. But informality remains an elusive concept because it evades preconceived notions or arguments that are often used to characterize them. Not all informal settlement residents are criminals while not all of them are the outcomes of abject poverty alone. In fact, in some countries, these settlements exist because they represent big housing markets of choice. The informality phenomenon is not even limited to the developing countries anymore. In many developing countries including the USA, informality is now a common trait of everyday urbanism and represents a vibrant and vital part of the economy. So, by all accounts, even though they are still by and large deeply stigmatized, they cannot be solely captured by once well-known social, cultural, economic or even physical and spatial stereotypes. These misconceptions about the current state of informal settlements worldwide make their study somewhat challenging. That is, if without systematic research, we still resort to the same stereotypes and we would definitely do a major disservice to âhow the other half livesâ (Riis 1996).
I have noticed a robust and powerful change of heart both in the ways in which people envisaged informality and how the urban and public officials saw it in Iran . I found this change of heart particularly promising and refreshing for at least two reasons. First, that it takes a deep learning curve particularly for government officials to change their political attitude toward a problem as pervasive and culturally divisive as informal settlements. Naturally, admission of guilt or wrongdoing is much harder for a government official compared to the constituencies they work for. What makes matters even more complicated is, as stated before, that to consider informality part of the solution rather than the problem is not that easy when the more all-encompassing universal lens it is looked at is pretty much negative across the board anyway. What I found particularly intriguing was that I noticed a serious change of heart among many urban officials that unashamedly and proudly admitted it to me when I had conversations with them. This brings me to the second point I would like to make. To these officials, mostly working at the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development , informal settlements were not parasites whose physical manifestations akin to cancerous tumors ought to have been wiped out and removed as public bads anymore. Given that the negative attitude and malice that had for decades defined and characterized the informality discourse in Iran had given rise to other narratives was indeed promising and reassuring.
At the risk of simplifying an inherently complex and multifaceted problem, I am not suggesting that the dominant narrative of informality in Iran is one of hope and being part of the solution rather than the problem. By no means, is this what I am proposing. What I argue though is that consi...