Children of Paradise (33 page)

T
HE WORLD’S FIRST INDOOR SHOPPING MALL
—the sort anchored by two department stores with a soaring atrium in between, lit from skylights, traversed by escalators, graced by indoor gardens and dozens or hundreds of shops—opened its doors in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. The mall was called Southdale. It was an architectural innovation and a marvel in its day. Unlike the strip malls that had begun to line America’s suburban highways, the mall turned blank and windowless exterior walls onto a vast moat of parked cars. All of its vitality faced inward, in what its groundbreaking architect, Victor Gruen, imagined as a vibrant, interior downtown for communities that otherwise threatened to shoot apart into centrifugal space.

Gruen, a Viennese Jew, arrived on American shores after the Anschluss. From the ruin of exile, in the city of New York, Gruen built a legendary career as a retail architect. It was a crass and lowly field at the time. Gruen changed it forever. He believed that the design of stores—their façades, their window displays, even the immediate environment outside them—could compel shoppers or repel them, and that the key to retail success lay in generating an atmosphere that seduced customers and even distracted them, at first, from the business of consumption. This would become
known as the Gruen effect. Its unlikely author was a socialist who hated cars, strip malls, and suburbs with a passion equaled only by his contribution to their advance across the American landscape.

Gruen was a peculiar, yet strangely apt, urban planner for the sprawling, car-bound city of Tehran. More peculiar still was the effect his work would have on the fortunes of the men who made Iranian politics—particularly those who erected an edifice they called reform astride his urban reverie. For the reformists would make city politics the theater for their deepest and most ambitious plans. Like Gruen before them, they would come to learn that half the power in plans lay in their subversion.

Gruen first imagined shopping malls as an antidote to the evils of American ribbon development. They would furnish town centers to the bedroom communities that ringed American cities; around Southdale, Gruen planned for Edina to put up apartment houses, a hospital, a park, a lake, highways, schools. The shopping center itself would draw suburbanites into contact with one another as in a European town square. They would do their retail business, then sit over coffee in the atrium garden, making conversation with neighbors as they paused to admire the giant giraffe sculptures.

None of that ever happened. Instead, land values skyrocketed and speculators moved in, lining the pockets of the retail giants that had been Gruen’s clients. The shopping mall, isolated behind its parking lots, anchored nothing so much as it contributed to unplanned and unchecked “scatteration,” as Gruen and the social critic Jane Jacobs called it in their contentious exchange at the time.

Frank Lloyd Wright foresaw much when he traveled to Southdale upon its opening, hoping to understand what the fuss was about. Of the mall’s celebrated atrium, Wright said, “
Who wants to sit in that desolate looking spot? You’ve got a garden court that has all the evils of the village street and none of its charm.”

Yet the shopping mall was a runaway commercial success. Gruen’s design became so commonplace that no one would think to associate it with any architect at all. Gruen, ambivalent but unrepentant, moved on.
By the end of the 1950s he had turned from designing stores to redesigning entire cities. At the behest of the president of the Texas Electric Company, Gruen reimagined Fort Worth, Texas, as a city of pedestrian malls and sidewalk cafés, where cars entered by a belt road only to be fed off into parking garages, and pedestrians traversed an untrafficked town by electric trams. Even Jane Jacobs thought the plan was a marvel. But it ran aground in the Texas state legislature, which worried that its execution would infringe on private property and make way for “
graft and corruption.”

By the mid-1960s, Gruen had indelibly marked the American landscape, from Fresno, California, to Rochester, New York; but he hated the American built environment so intensely that he returned to his native Vienna, whose cohesion he found threatened by a nearby shopping mall. Around that time, he heard from Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The Iranian monarch offered Gruen everything Texas Electric could not: bottomless funds, unlimited authority, and a world capital that was a vast canvas, with a rapidly growing population and little history of urban planning. Gruen partnered with a highborn Iranian master architect, Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian, to draw up the first Comprehensive Plan for Tehran.

As Gruen’s biographer would later write, “
The world of postwar America [Gruen] so lamented was, in part, his own creation. He better than anyone should have realized that the choices between planned development and unplanned sprawl were never so simple.” Unintended consequences were the story of Gruen’s career. That was true in America, and never truer than in Iran, where Gruen’s Comprehensive Plan for Tehran would determine everything, precisely by determining nothing.

• • •

T
EHRAN BEGAN ITS LIFE
as a suburb to the north of the ancient city of Rey, and it would come of age as the sum of its suburbs well after Gruen and the shah were gone. But these were not suburbs in the First World sense. They were spontaneous communities that had arisen out of necessity and seismic social change, and they posed a nearly insoluble puzzle to both the monarchy and the revolutionary regime that followed it.

Bound by the Alborz Mountains to the north and the Kavir Desert to the south,
Tehran sloped sharply, its northern boundary more than six hundred meters higher than its southeastern one. The unevenness of the land inscribed itself on the city’s soul. The northern heights had clean water, sweeping views, and breathable air. The southern flatland had industrial plants and shantytowns, toxic smog and an occluded view of the northern slopes that looked down upon it. The landscape was also a source of drama and beauty. Within the city limits were winding creeks and villages that climbed hills. The understated grace of Tehran’s low, symmetrical architecture set off the spectacular verticality of the Alborz. Valiasr, as the city’s majestic central artery would be called after the revolution, was the longest thoroughfare in the Middle East, lined end to end with some sixty thousand towering sycamore trees.

Since the demolition of the city walls in the 1930s, Tehran’s population had grown first, at mid-century, through planned middle-class neighborhoods in the city’s east, and then—as the Pahlavis’ modernization policies sent landless rural Iranians flocking to the capital—through illegal settlements in the city’s south. Between 1905 and 1979,
Tehran’s population grew from 160,000 to 5 million. (It would
top 12 million in 2004.) Many of the new migrants crowded with their extended families into small apartments in the city’s slums, where open sewer ducts bisected muddy alleys and whole households occupied single rooms. Others erected makeshift dwellings on the city’s outskirts. There were shantytowns built of mud brick and even tin cans. At the time of the revolution,
fully 35 percent of Tehran’s population lived in slums or shanties. The squatter communities were not, technically, part of Tehran, and so they did not qualify for city services, like sewers and garbage collection, which the city claimed it could in any case ill afford; but the need was vast, and to fulfill it would become a matter of humanity, public health, and social peace.

Gruen and Farmanfarmaian imagined Tehran as a giant flower stretched on an east-west axis along the Alborz foothills. Like a rose, the city would comprise circles within circles. Ten subcities would each have a center, around which there would be ten towns; the towns would each
have centers, around which would bloom four communities; each community would have a center, from which blossomed five neighborhoods. Green valleys would cut across the map, highways and public transport routes sluicing through the valleys. For all its grace and greenery, the plan reproduced the city’s north-south divide in explicit terms: the north was designed for higher-income residences and lower density, the south, for lower incomes and higher density as well as for industry.

Density—the number of people presumed to inhabit the city’s square acreage—was destiny for Tehran. Gruen and Farmanfarmaian assumed that overall it would remain very low. They envisioned a sprawling, low-rise city like Los Angeles, one that would extend across relatively unspoiled space, preserving traditional Iranian courtyard dwellings, with ample room for parks and gardens. Gruen and Farmanfarmaian set city boundaries that could be extended every five years in predetermined increments until they reached the edge of a twenty-five-year expansion area. The city was obliged to provide services, such as water, garbage collection, and electricity, only to the area within its boundaries.

The Comprehensive Plan for Tehran was approved in 1968. According to one architectural historian, “
There are few examples of a megacity being tamed by a single idealistic planning vision like Tehran; and there are few American cities where the planning ideas being developed in the universities and offices were carried out to such an extent as in Tehran.” But big swaths of the city lay outside the city, beyond the scope of its services or the grace of its Comprehensive Plan.

Around the same time that Gruen’s plan was adopted, a new municipal law allowed the monarchy to respond to the proliferation of squatter settlements with a brutal and unpopular campaign of demolition. From 1974 until the eve of the revolution, the imperial regime razed squatter communities at will, often arriving with paramilitary soldiers and bulldozers in the dead of night. When it was too late—in September of 1978, just five months before Khomeini’s flight home from France—the monarchy shifted course, enlarging the city limits beyond the Gruen plan’s stated boundary for that
year and promising to provide the squatters in the enlarged area with piped water and electric power. Then the shah was gone.

The Comprehensive Plan for Tehran, with all its insufficiencies and its received elitism, was but one piece of imperial baggage the Islamic Republic inherited. Everything about its provenance sat ill with the new regime. Its authors were not even Tehran natives. But it was the only plan the city had. Like a Roman garrison town overwritten by medieval chaos or a colonial outpost overtaken by the megacity, writes the Dutch architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout, Tehran’s story became the story of its master plan’s subversion. But in Paris and Jakarta, Vanstiphout writes, “
centuries went by and generations followed each other before the original source code of the city was forgotten and all traces seemed to have disappeared beneath the new layers of the urban palimpsest. . . . In Tehran, however, this process happened in the space of ten to fifteen years, and the forgetting of the source code was an ideological decision.”

• • •

T
EHRAN AND OTHER BIG
I
RANIAN CITIES
had been the seats of the monarchy’s power, showcases for its cosmopolitan pretensions and its dubious modernism. The Islamic Republic made an about-face, deliberately shunning the cities, particularly Tehran, and anchoring its identity and its nationalism to the Iranian countryside. The Tehran subway system, the construction of which had begun under the Pahlavis, lost its funding. City planning was a thing of the past. Resources were scarce, especially when oil prices plummeted in the mid-1980s, and what the Iranian state had, it channeled into making staggering improvements to village life, extending the benefits of modernization to the country’s long-marginalized rural population.

The Islamic Republic brought electricity, clean water, modern appliances, and an impressive network of medical clinics, complete with family planning, to the villages.
Under the shah, rural women bore an average of eight children each; under the Islamic Republic, only two. Rural women
stayed in school twice as long under the Islamic Republic as they did under the monarchy. The Rafsanjani administration would extend a network of new universities into the hinterland. By 2015 rural and urban Iranians would reach a rough parity in education and standard of living. These would rank among the signature achievements of the Islamic regime.

And yet, for all its emphasis on rural culture, the Islamic Republic governed a more urban country than the shah had ruled. Between 1976 and 1986, Iran’s urban population grew by 72 percent. By 1983, more Iranians lived in cities than in the country. And the new migrants needed decent places to live, with basic urban amenities. “Neither east nor west!” ran one anti-imperialist revolutionary slogan. In 1985, squatters lined a highway outside Tehran, mockingly chanting, “
Neither east nor west, neither water nor electricity!”

Outside Tehran, the migrant settlements quietly expanded. Squatters were not just building shanties now. They were building towns. To the west of Tehran, along the road to the neighboring city of Karaj, these towns quadrupled in population over a span of ten years. With the revolutionary regime preoccupied by domestic upheaval and a foreign war, the squatters created facts on the ground. They diverted electricity and water from the city mains, effectively stealing city services when they weren’t supplied. The land they seized was public land; the dwellings they built were private ones.

The Islamic Republic responded much the way the shah had done: with demolition, particularly starting in 1984. But it was a war of attrition. By 1989 the regime changed tack, working to integrate the new settlements so that it could control them, collecting payment for city services and even rent for the land. The Islamic Republic extended Tehran’s boundaries all the way to Victor Gruen’s final twenty-five-year expansion line, about a decade early. Then the regime infiltrated or replaced neighborhood associations in the new settlements with associations controlled by the clergy.

Neglect had not starved Tehran of residents or centrality. On the contrary, throughout the 1980s, Tehran was swelling, unchecked and unplanned, a convection of density and sprawl. Tehran choked on its own pollution, gridlocked traffic isolated its neighborhoods from one another, and green
space all but vanished. Forced Islamization had produced an angry and alienated middle class that sat cheek by jowl with the politically empowered but economically deprived. The streets were impassable, the atmosphere grim, the air filthy. Nothing worked. And the city was nearly bankrupt. Iranian property taxes were traditionally very low, and with oil revenues down, the municipality had few resource streams to tap. The scale of Tehran’s need—for fresh planning as well as public transportation and basic services—dwarfed its budget. In 1987 and 1988 the Islamic Republic commissioned a study on the feasibility of relocating the nation’s capital someplace more manageable. But economists concluded that it would make no difference. Even if the government left, the city would continue to suffocate. That was when President Rafsanjani decided to appoint a new mayor.