One Thousand and One Cities: Socio-Spatial Patterns and Challenges over a Half-Century of Urbanization in Iran

Abstract:

Since 1970, Iran has experienced dramatic environmental, political, and socioeconomic changes and events. All these events have impacted and shaped the urbanized landscape in Iran during the past 50 years. This article provides an overview of those factors influencing the socio-spatial patterns during this half-century of urbanization and highlights the current challenges that confront Iran’s cities.

Key Words:

• Iran
• Middle East
• socio-spatial patterns
• Tehran
• urbanization

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Iran, because of its socioeconomic conditions (e.g. oil-based economy, rapid population changes, the size and population of the country, and high diversity in terms of ethnicity), historical background and geopolitical position (e.g. sharing a border with one of the superpowers of the world, the Soviet Union/Russia, influencing global energy market due to its vast oil and gas reserves, and its position at the crossroads of major trade routes and energy corridors), has experienced several dramatic events in the past 50 years, including the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79; the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, which was one the longest classic wars of the last century; an international economic and political crisis for the past decades over its nuclear program that has been accompanied by unprecedented US economic sanctions; a baby boom during the war with Iraq, followed by a successful family plan that has drastically reduced the size of the population under 20 compared to older age groups; and climate change/severe drought that has led to environmental problems, such as water shortage and air and dust pollution in the largest cities. Crises in neighboring countries and the wider Middle East/Persian Gulf region also have impacted Iran, including Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1989-90; the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s; the Soviet-Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s; and the rise, fall, and resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the past 20 years. The three decades of intermittent instability in Afghanistan prompted three waves of mass migration of Afghans into Iran. All these events have shaped the urbanization landscape in Iran and left their footprints on the socio-spatial patterns of urbanization in the country.

In this article, I present an overview of the socio-spatial patterns and challenges that have significantly impacted Iran’s urbanization during the past five decades. Using existing data and literature, I address the following research questions: What spatial patterns of urbanization have emerged in Iran since the late 1970s? And what currently are the main socio-spatial urban challenges in Iran? This article will shed light on urbanization in Iran based on previous research and reports, including available official data, maps, and studies, and present a big picture of the country’s socio-spatial patterns and current urbanization challenges.

Influencing Factors: Geography and Environment

Iran’s geography sets the stage for the country’s uneven geographical distribution of cities. Geographical barriers include two mountain ranges (Alborz and Zagros) and two of the largest deserts in the world (Kavir-e-Lut and Dasht-e-Kavir) have made a large area of the country uninhabitable (See Figure 1). In addition, recent severe drought and climate change, overconsumption of groundwater,¹ environmental mismanagement² (e.g. shrinking Lake Urmia as a prominent example), and high air and dust pollution³ are putting more pressure on populated areas, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. As Figures 2–4 show, not surprisingly, Tehran (the capital city) and its peripheral cities (e.g. Karaj), one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world, have kept their position and dominance in the urban spatial organization.

Figure 1. Geography of Iran [Source: compiled by Author].

Figure 2. Cities with more than 50,000 population in 1966 [Source: compiled by Author based on Statiscal Centre of Iran data].

Figure 3. Cities with more than 100k population in 2016 [Source: compiled by Author Based on Statistical Centre of Iran Data].

Figure 4. Population Growth of Cities, 1966 to 2016 (Source: compiled by Author based on Statistical Centre of Iran data).

Demographic Factors and Population Dynamics

The population of Iran was almost 25.8 million in 1966. In the past 50 years, it has increased to 86.5 million. The country’s overall population increased approximately three times from 1966 to 2016, while the urban population experienced a six-fold increase in the same period. Since the first census in 1956, the urbanization growth rate has always been more than the population growth rate; as of 2016, the number of cities (1242 cities) was about five times more than in 1966 (272 cities).⁴ In the late 1970s, the country witnessed an urban transition, and the urban population exceeded the rural population for the first time.

One reason for this rapid urbanization rate is the official transformation of villages into cities, especially in the peripheral areas of major metropolitan cities, such as Tehran and Isfahan. In Iran, if the population of a village surpasses a specific number in a census survey, which usually happens every five years, this village officially becomes a city, and its residents are recorded as an urban population. This population threshold was 5,000 before the Islamic revolution, in1983 was 10,000 individuals, in 1986 was 5,000 individuals, and in 2010 was 3,500 individuals. There has been no specific population limitation recently, and the criteria for becoming a city are unclear. As Figures 2 and 3, and Table 1 show, the size of many cities, Tehran (as the largest city/macrocephaly in the country’s urban system) and several small or medium-sized cities in the peripheral area of Tehran in 1966, now accommodate large numbers of people. Karaj, on the west and the capital of the new province of Alborz, emerged as a megacity with a population of over 1.6 million. One can see, in 1966, that twelve cities by population–Tehran, Isfahan, Mashhad, Tabriz, Abadan, Shiraz, Ahvaz, Kermanshah, Rasht, Qom, Hamedan, and Urmia—each had a population of more than 100 k, but in 2016, there were 98 cities with this population size. After Teheran, Isfahan shows a similar spatial pattern and change but at a different level regarding the number of cities and their population, including Najafabad, Shahin Shahr, and new towns (e.g. Baharestan). As Table 1 and Figure 4 show, several cities in the Tehran city-region, Eslam Shahr (Shad Shahr before the Islamic Revolution), the second most populated city in Tehran Province, Karaj, Ghods, Malard, Nasim Shar, Nazarabad, Pakdasht, Shahriar, and Qarchak have experienced skyrocketing population growth. Other cities that have experienced a very high population growth rate include Bandar Abbas (the capital of Hormozagn Province), Yasuj (the capital of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province and a unique example that was a small village with a population of just 931 in 1966 but by 2016 had grown into a city of 134,532 inhabitants), and Zahedan (capital of Sistan and Baluchestan Province).

Table 1. Megacities and big cities’ population growth rate (percent), 1966 to 2016 (* Megacity).

No	Name	1966	2016	Growth Rate
1	Tehran*	2,719,730	8,693,706	219.6
2	Mashhad*	409,616	2,987,323	629.3
3	Isfahan*	424,045	1,961,260	362.5
4	Karaj*	44,243	1,615,218	3,550.8
5	Shiraz*	269,865	1,565,572	480.1
6	Tabriz*	403,413	1,558,639	286.4
7	Qom*	134,292	1,201,158	794.4
8	Ahvaz*	206,375	1,184,788	474.1
9	Kermanshah*	187,930	946,651	403.7
10	Urmia	110,749	736,224	564.8
11	Rasht	143,557	679,995	373.7
12	Zahedan	18,806	587,730	617.6
13	Hamedan	124,167	554,406	346.5
14	Kerman	85,404	537,718	529.6
15	Yazd	93,241	529,673	468.1
16	Ardabil	83,596	529,374	533.3
17	Bandar Abbas	34,627	526,648	1420.9
18	Arak	71,925	520,944	624.3
19	Eslam Shahr	1,006	448,129	44,445.6
20	Zanjan	58,714	430,871	633.9

Mass rural-to-urban migration is another crucial factor that has increased Iran’s urbanization rate, and it is the outcome of a series of interwoven economic, environmental, and social factors and changes, such as the transformation of the economy from agriculture to urban factory production and service sectors, capital accumulation in large cities, lack of job opportunities in rural areas, development of suburban industrial districts, and heavy industries (e.g. steel and textile) in these areas which absorbed and attracted white and blue-collar workers, climate change (e.g. water shortage and severe drought) and consequently farming collapse, and higher education development.⁵

The sedentarisation of nomads and tribes in the fringe of cities also directly affected the urbanization rate. Most of these tribes are/were living along the Zagros Mountains range, including in Bushehr, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Fars, Ilam, Khuzestan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Kurdistan, and Lorestan provinces, where Arab, Bakhtiari, Kurd, and Lur tribes are/were living and a part of Isfahan province where Bakhtiari are/were living.⁶ Over the past half-century, although the total population has been increasing, the number of nomads per total population constantly has declined in successive decennial censuses.⁷ In contrast, the urban population of Arabs, Bakhtiari, Kurds, and Lurs shows an increasing pattern in this region of the country (See Figures 1–4).

Political Factors

Policies also play a critical role in intensifying urbanization. City-centric policies, especially after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, have reinforced and promoted existing patterns. Along this line, designing and constructing new towns substantially impacted the pattern of urbanization in Iran. New towns were planned based on economic, ideological, and military goals, especially to provide housing for oil and gas employees before 1979. In 1985, the construction of 28 new towns was included in the work plan of the Ministry of Housing & Urban Development. These new towns and other public housing projects mainly Maskan Mehr or Mehr Housing were built to decentralize such major cities as Tehran and Isfahan, absorb the surplus populations of big cities, provide diverse employment opportunities, and overcome the urban housing problems by offering low-cost affordable housing.⁸

Moreover, during the last five decades, Iran’s economy has been at the (semi) periphery of neoliberal economic policies, but after returning the Islamic City Council (Shoray-e-Shahr) to an urban management and decision-making system in 1999 as a replacement for the city council (Anjoman-e-Shahr) in the Pahlavi era, they started following neoliberal policy in urban management. The Islamic City Council elects the mayor of the city and supervises and monitors almost all municipality activities, including the city budget and development plans. The members of the city councils are elected by direct public vote for a 4-year term. Over the past decades, urban managers implemented different versions of neoliberal economic policies under different names and projects, such as Public-Private-Partnership projects and privatization based on Article 44 of the Constitution, to cut city governments’ budgets and support.⁹ Therefore, city managers implemented neoliberal-oriented policies to deal with national economic crises due to US sanctions and budget shortages, which increased urban inequalities in favor of specific groups and businesses, especially in megacities.¹⁰

Among Iranian cities, Mashad and Qom, two religious cities, are unique in terms of ideology-driven development. Mashad is the home of the Imam Reza Shrine and attracts millions of pilgrims from Iran and other countries every year. Qom is often considered the religious capital of the country. It is also home to Imam Reza’s sister shrine and the renowned Qom Seminary, one of the Shia world’s most important scholarship and education centers. As Iran is a predominantly Shia Muslim country, these two cities’ religious authority and influence hold significant weight within the country’s political landscape.¹¹ The government often seeks to maintain a favorable relationship with the religious establishments in Mashad and Qom. Both cities show very high and similar growth rates (Table 1), which may reflect the ideological and political perspective of the government toward urban development. Considering these two cities' environmental and ecological limitations, their population growth and physical expansion have exceeded their ecological capacity.¹² At the urban level, the government tries to produce its own urban public space and symbols,¹³ for example, replacing Azadi Tower with Milad Tower as the symbol of Tehran¹⁴ and developing religious spaces (e.g. the number of mosques).

Geopolitical Factors

During the last 50 years, the Middle East has experienced several dramatic political tensions and wars. After 1978, the fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power in Iran, along with eight years of war following Iraq’s invasion into Iran, had significant effects on the functionality, governing systems, and socio-spatial patterns of cities and their landscapes. This war caused a mass movement of the population from the western part of the country to other parts, especially the central area and megacities such as Tehran and Isfahan, which led to population growth and urban sprawl in megacities.¹⁵ For example, Abadan in Khuzestan province was a prosperous city in 1980, where the world’s largest oil refinery was based. Iraq’s September 1980 invasion into Iran destroyed the refinery and had a negative impact on population growth, with the city losing its population during the eight years of war. The city’s population was 273 thousand (k) in 1966, 294k in 1976, 0 in 1986, only 855 in 1991, but 206k in 1996, 220k in 2006, and 231k in 2016. Even three decades after the war, Abadan still has fewer inhabitants than in 1980 before the war (Figure 4).

In Iran’s eastern neighbor, Afghanistan, the 1978 Saur Revolution and the rise, fall, and resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan led to Iran becoming one of the largest refugee-hosting countries in the world. Also, the two Persian Gulf Wars (1990-91 and 2003-2011) and the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) increased the immigration from Iraq to Iran’s megacities. Approximately 95% of these refugees are living in five cities: Esfahan, Mashad, Qom, Tehran, and Yazd. Simply put, urbanization patterns have been influenced by population pressure and dynamics, migration from rural to urban areas,¹⁶ the gas and petroleum industry, political perspective of the government toward development, new urban lifestyles of formerly migrating tribes, international immigration, mainly from Afghanistan and Iraq,¹⁷ and the Iraq-Iran war.¹⁸ From 1986 to 1996, Iran witnessed a significant change in the number of cities with up to 1 million population, but the pressure was on megacities, especially Bandar Abbas, Isfahan, Karaj, Mashad, Qom, Tehran, and Zahedan.

Challenges

The aim of this article is not to refute the positive impacts and outcomes of urbanization on the economy, people and quality of life but rather to highlight the current urban challenges facing cities.¹⁹ An overview of these challenges reveals that many of them are also global challenges, which are the consequences of the tragedy of the commons in the world, but they can provide insights into the future for planners and researchers.²⁰

One of the main drivers of urbanization is the economy. Iran’s economy highly depends on the gas and petroleum industries. Therefore, the oil production rate has been one of the most crucial factors in all socio-spatial processes and patterns, especially urbanization, including the development of the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries in Bushehr, Fars, Hormozgan, Ilam, Kermanshah, and especially Khuzestan provinces.²¹ Although the largest cities in these provinces act as economic engines, they also impede even-development by absorbing a large share of capital and business activities from peripheral cities.²² The list of urban cultural, economic, and socio-spatial challenges probably is endless, but they include crime, informal settlements and slums, macrocephaly in the urban system, mass immigration, new urban lifestyles, social change, housing shortages, ever-increasing house prices, spatial inequality and segregation, and suburbanization of poverty.²³ Among these challenges, housing and the real estate market combined with the new individualistic lifestyle and demographic changes may trigger other socioeconomic challenges, e.g. the relationships between urban sprawl,²⁴ housing, and divorce.²⁵ The recent official report shows that the percentage of urban households without access to affordable housing amounted to 45% in the country and 79% in Tehran. The average housing price in Tehran has increased by 950% from 2019 to 2023.²⁶ The government and urban management, municipalities, and city councils need to pay special attention to these areas.

Population growth and quantity and quality dualism have been at the center of debates in Iran since the Islamic Revolution. Different presidential administrations have supported various family planning policies. The government promoted population growth during the Iraq-Iran war. After this period, Iran ran one of the world’s most successful population control programs.²⁷ Recently, the government announced that population growth is the main focus of all social and development plans. Now, some politicians in the country see population growth and quantity as a political challenge and a way to destabilize the government by Western countries. These questions are open because some researchers and experts have different ideas, but any implemented policy will impact socio-spatial patterns and future challenges of urbanization.

Moreover, environmental challenges grow as cities expand in size and number, especially in megacities. Transportation, industrial activities, and energy demand have increased in megacities due to population growth and unsustainable urban development, leading to increasing levels of air pollution, earthquake damage, floods, urban sprawl, and worn-out urban infrastructure.²⁸ All these challenges subject city residents to health risks associated with harmful pollutants and impose high economic, health, and social costs on the citizens. Urbanization and climate change are deeply interwoven. While cities are affected by the global climate crisis, they contribute to climate change through various activities and processes that release greenhouse gases and affect the environment.²⁹ Climate change can significantly affect various aspects of city life and patterns and processes of urbanization and exacerbate existing challenges, including water scarcity and drought, extreme heat waves, urban heat island effect, natural hazards, extreme weather events, and other environmental threats (i.e. flood and drought).³⁰ Climate change, directly and indirectly, will lead to mass migration and more population pressure in megacities with better environmental and ecological conditions. Climate-induced environmental changes have inevitable cultural, health, political, and socioeconomic consequences for citizens. For example, water scarcity can push rural populations to migrate to cities in search of better opportunities in the job market, but many of these cities are prone to natural hazards, including earthquakes, landslides, and floods, especially along the Alborz and Zagros Mountain Ranges. This influx of people puts additional pressure on urban infrastructure,³¹ housing, employment opportunities, and services, potentially leading to an increase in informal settlements and urban poverty.³² The studies on internal migration in Iran show that the flow is toward areas currently suffering from water shortage, especially in the central areas (e.g. Isfahan and Yazd)³³ and south (Kerman and Zahedan).³⁴ This means more water demand and consumption, leading to a severe water shortage and tension inside the central areas. Some environmental and ecological changes and problems, such as drought, flood, and dust, should be seen at the Middle East scale. For example, Iran has water conflicts with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey; the sources of dust storms in Iran are not only deserts in the country (e.g. Dasht-e-Kavir and Dasht-e-Lut), but also deserts in Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkmenistan.³⁵ Some Middle Eastern countries have similar environmental issues, especially the degradation of environmental conditions.³⁶ Geographical and environmental challenges often stem from factors and processes that disregard political borders; therefore, environmental plans to mitigate climate change impacts need to be designed for the wider context in this region, but the current geopolitical conditions in the Middle East make it very challenging if there is no political and collective will.

In the last 50 years, political and social unrest and upheavals have increased. The 1979 Islamic Revolution, which led to a major regime change in the country,³⁷ was motivated, at least partially, by discontent over urban conditions in the second Pahlavi era. The US hostages’ crisis from November 1979 to January 1981 set off a break in Iran-US diplomatic relations that has continued for 44 years. Although there was a brief relaxation of tensions when the US and Iran mutually agreed in 2015 to a procedure for inspecting Iran’s nuclear facilities (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), the US withdrew from this agreement in 2018 and re-imposed economic sanctions on Iran. Since 1980, Western countries, especially the US, have imposed numerous economic sanctions on Iran, which have impacted the performance of the country’s economic sectors adversely. In addition, the Iranian government’s attitude toward centralizing power and capital has played an important role in concentrating economic activities and population in large cities. All these challenges, including the concentration of development, industrial site selection, social unrest and protest, and neoliberal economic policies,³⁸ reveal the underlying tension in the society and governing system of the country.³⁹ For example, five decades after the initiation of urban development plans in Iran, these plans still face various challenges to their full and successful implementation. Furthermore, top-down urban planning often has contributed to exacerbating diverse urban issues and problems, including people displacement and gentrification, ecological pressures, economic and/or ethnic segregation, poverty and health conditions, social tensions, and urban sprawl.⁴⁰ The country has witnessed overemphasizing engineering and technocratic solutions, such as water transfer (e.g. Khuzestan to Isfahan and Isfahan to Yazd) and big dam projects, to overcome some of these challenges, and their destructive consequences on the ecosystem, forced people displacement, commodification and commercialization of water, and criminalization of environmental and social protests, have complicated the situation and increased social and political tensions between cities and citizens.⁴¹ This engineering and technological approach in (urban) planning and management systems needs to be revised; otherwise, it might exacerbate existing challenges and problems.⁴²

Another challenge is using and dealing with technologies, especially emerging ones, such as urban artificial intelligence (AI) and smart city projects and initiatives. While technology can provide partial solutions to some economic, environmental, and socio-spatial problems, it can cause new challenges because technology usually reinforces existing socio-spatial structures and patterns and produces new forms of inequalities (e.g. digital divide).⁴³ The digital and data revolution has had cultural, economic, political , and social changes in cities. In this digitalized world, where people are surrounded by the Internet of Things (IoT) and increasing smartphone usage, access to (stable and reliable) Internet is a basic need and right. The Internet connection is necessary for the education system, different urban management sectors, online jobs, communication through platforms, daily activities (e.g. online banking), etc.⁴⁴ Also, digital technologies can play a critical role in the country’s social-spatial patterns and challenges of urbanization in different ways due to their impacts on influencing factors such as internal and international immigration. Over the digitalization process, some aspects of socio-spatial inequality, such as the digital divide, can boost people’s immigration from rural to urban areas and increase existing socio-spatial inequalities within urban areas. For the country, which has been suffering from brain drain over the recent decades, these emerging technological challenges can cause more difficulties at both national and international levels with footprints on the urbanization landscape and patterns.

Other outcomes, such as social change, are not within the scope of this article. Nevertheless, previous studies indicated that recent patterns and trends in urbanization have various effects on gender roles and families as they change the roles of women and men.⁴⁵ Urbanization has facilitated social change by increasing women’s access to higher education, labor market, and participation in political arenas. Also, higher education acted as one of the drivers of immigration and urbanization over the past decades. Universities, especially in megacities, have absorbed a huge number of youths into cities. Urbanization has impacted all aspects of life in Iran; this topic needs more attention and research to deal with mounting challenges, such as bridging social capital, increasing brain drain rate, housing shortages, identity crises, inadequate urban services, growing informal economic activities, marginalization of people and communities, rising urban poverty and unsustainable urban development, especially in metropolises.

One reason for the existing gap in the literature on various aspects of urbanization in Iran is inadequate data availability and accessibility compared with developed countries. The government can resolve this issue by providing updated and open-access data and following the objectives of open science and open data. Open science in general, and open data in particular, make researchers more responsive to social challenges.⁴⁶ Another reason is the lack of academic freedom, especially in social research areas, which has made researchers more conservative in disclosing their academic results and communicating their findings to policy designers and the public. Consequently, the social challenges can be exacerbated in the long term.⁴⁷ Obviously, all macro and micro factors and drivers are interwoven, and more research on different scales will offer new insight into the literature and enable both officials and scholars to learn from the past patterns and trends for future environmental and socioeconomic planning and urban studies in Iran. Moreover, urbanization in Iran needs to be studied in the Middle East context. For this purpose, new emerging (big) data (e.g. night and day mode satellite images) and advanced spatial methods (e.g. data integration, spatial econometrics, and computational techniques) can provide more contextual, environmental, and geographical information to gain a better understanding of the underlying political and socioeconomic processes and environmental spillover effects of urbanization in the country. Qualitative data and methods (e.g. interviews and historical documents) can provide more information in this area and contextualize the quantitative outputs, such as maps.

Conclusion

This high-level overview of the spatial patterns of urbanization and their influencing factors in Iran over the last 50 years highlighted the current challenges of living in cities, especially megacities. These challenges cannot be addressed without considering all the cultural, environmental, geographical, political, and socioeconomic limitations and without attention to global and macro factors and drivers of changes in governmentality and spatial planning systems. One can predict that the country’s population will be more urban due to current trends of population dynamics and city-centric and top-down planning approaches. Moreover, on the one hand, Iran, as a country that has not been standing on the core of neoliberal economic policies, started implementing them by providing private urban facilities and services, such as schooling, after the Iraq-Iran war and under the banner of a privatization policy. On the other hand, external drivers such as two rounds of severe US economic sanctions, an unstable oil market, and mass migration from neighboring countries, mainly Afghanistan, make urban life much more costly and stressful for citizens. The integration of these immigrants into the host society needs more attention. In addition, Iran experienced a mass displacement of people from rural areas toward big cities and megacities where there was no plan for accommodating these newcomers, who usually experience cultural and social tensions with the long-settled urban residents. Climate change and environmental problems sharpen pre-existing vulnerabilities and aggravate above mentioned challenges. Therefore, it is likely that cities, especially megacities, and the suburbanization of poverty in the country will lead to more challenges and pressures that can burden citizens, government, and public organizations with huge costs, such as public health system, and we may witness the expansion of informal settlements and more social unrest and tensions in megacities and medium-sized cities. Tehran acts as an engine of capital relocation in the urban system, will likely retain its current position and remain the dominant megacity in the coming decades despite its ever-increasing environmental, political, and socioeconomic challenges. Also, other megacities likely will continue to draw more population. Considering similar environmental and population challenges at the Middle East scale, it is time to call for action and political and collective will to implement an integrated regional environmental policy. Universities, research bodies, researchers, and regional environmental and urban observatories and monitoring systems can play a critical role through academic collaborations, such as sharing data and communicating the findings to the public and policy designers.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Mahmoud Ghazi-Tabataei for encouraging me to write this article and Dr. Shahin Mohammadi for his help with maps.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

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