The Wrong City in the Making; the Case of Tehran’s District 22

On August 30th, 2000, Tehran gave birth to her last offspring, District 22, occupying nearly 10 percent of the capital’s land area. Spreading over northwest Tehran, it was largely a carte blanche defined to be developed as an exemplary model for sustainable development; a beacon of urban planning for the capital. Two decades in the making, today, the urban scene of District 22 is, in a word, a catastrophe; arguably, a failure of city design; a mishmash of fruitless, desolated, dispersed satellite towns with no respect for sustainability, symbolised by an ill-conceived artificial lake veneer. It is literally a reproduction of Pruitt–Igoe in a massive scale, half a century after its demolition.

(Re)reading Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow, and Henri Lefebvre’s the Right to the City, this work will be critically analysing the urban and architectural vocabulary of the District, revealing how and why a complex conglomeration of stakeholders – including urban managerial, socio-political and military forces – is wasting a great opportunity to deliver a liveable urban environment. It will also discuss the potential strategies that may help reducing the damage.