The historiography of Tehran landscape in the early 20th century suggests that an organized neighborhood system had functioned in the city, as the main layer of city governance, offer public services, and providing the residents with the sense of community. The formation of the modern state and centralized bureaucracy in 1920-40 vanished the power and authority of the neighborhoods as governance units, but neighborhood-as-community continued to contribute to the social formation of the city dweller’s identities and spatial distribution of its main characteristics. The historiography of Tehran landscape since the 1960s onward includes the researches which approach the territory as organizing factor of social relations and neighborhoods as container of normative solidarity.
My paper suggests that the attempt to build/revive the role of the local scale in the urban governance during the reform movement of 1990s, succeeded to increase the independence of the municipalities in the structure of the state and turn them to a new scene of political competition for the intra-governmental forces in Iran. The self-sufficiency of municipality law (1988) and the election of the first city councils (1997), both served this end. While proponent of city and neighborhood councils argue that urban and community self-governance benefits the polity by democratizing the state, I will argue that the prevailing urban modernist approach to the city in the Reform era and onwards, has symbolized the local as the more efficient level of government and not its more participatory one. However, the people’s participation in the local projects, including the neighborhood councilors’ collaboration with the district municipalities and rehabilitation houses in the old neighborhoods are examples of instrumentalist approach to the self-governance of the urban in the Iranian context.
This paper is based on my long term research project on the rehabilitation projects in central parts of Tehran.