Tehran Municipality, under the pretext of widening the streets and implementing correctional lines, has enacted projects that have done nothing but push back residential structures from the street walls, compensating for the loss of development by selling off the remaining incomplete, sterile, and useless pieces to the public. These transactions are carried out using hundreds of articles and clauses that the municipality imposes within their strict and intractable regulations and bylaws.
The comparison of two images of a street, before and after such so-called corrective projects, visually illustrates the fact that street widening and the recession of residential structures, compounded by the increase in density, have practically created even narrower and more challenging streets due to the congregation of residents' vehicles. In such projects, what absolute negligence from urban planners faces is the public spaces connecting residential areas to transportation networks. Even if, exceptionally, there is a willingness to reconsider such elements, it typically ends up in programs that bring work into the home, effectively removing the commitments and obligations of the employer from labor rights, preventing labor gatherings and collective demands, essentially undermining workers' rights. Such projects shift part of the production costs onto the laborers, affecting the living spaces by introducing disruptive activities. This impacts mental health, workplace health, and safety, effectively creating crises in living spaces. In this context, minimalistic designs with complex relationships, the creation of unique perspectives, and less-experienced spaces with large and functional skylights, as well as the use of voids and elevated spaces, are the design principles of the project.
Our approach in such competitions was to avoid drawing, but now we believe that in this competition, we must draw "no."
Yes, agreeing to such programs is participation and complicity in the eradication of the concept of residence and the dismissal of the necessity of the existence of a factory. Granting legitimacy to such policies from the perspective of architectural elites who must eventually reconsider their rationalization of this agency is a call to action!
However, we hope for a day when Tehran Municipality will abandon its unconventional income sources and turn these small, non-constructible pieces, which ironically are the result of urban planning by the same entity, into public spaces: playgrounds, green spaces, free parking areas, simple community gathering spaces, and...
And, of course, we hope that an organization, authority, power, or social actors can resist this greed and stand up against it, just as Tehran Municipality, in its view, acts as a supervisor and blocks unauthorized constructions with its New Jersey-style concrete blocks, and that they can resist and fight against what are unjustifiable demands of the municipality.