Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [102]
Most people in Emamzadeh ‘Isa come from the villages of Luristan or from the country’s far northwest; some are ethnic Turks or members of other non-Persian minorities. The men came first and worked during the late 1980s and 1990s in Tehran, staying in rented rooms in the nearer outskirts, before saving the money—or using family farming revenues—to buy a plot and build a house in Emamzadeh ‘Isa. People who have arrived more recently, from the countryside or from central Tehran, are forced to rent rooms in the houses out here, at rates that rise faster than incomes. Some of the original inhabitants, after less than a decade, have moved back to their villages in order to rent out all the rooms in their houses, since the landlord’s income exceeds any kind of employment a migrant could get.
Property prices in these far-fringe settlements are rising steeply for a reason known to all poor Tehranis: there is nowhere else to go. The city has aggressively, and sometimes forcefully, prevented any new settlements from forming. Indeed, Iranian studies show that rising prices, and the lack of any new low-cost housing developments, are forcing workers out of the central city and even its more established arrival cities and into these settlements—thus making them unaffordable for the latest wave of rural émigrés.1 The casual laborers occupying rooms out here in the far edge are realizing they won’t have any way to bring their families over or get a place of their own.
The Tehran urban planner Esfandiar Zebardast warns that an explosion is waiting to happen here on the edges of Tehran. “The rigidity of the urban planning system in Iran to adapt to fast demographic shifts, due to land-use restrictions within the city and rigid municipal boundaries, and the investments in infrastructure that are not commensurate with needs, have resulted in the spill-over of low-income urban groups into the periphery, the un-serviced areas,” he writes. As a result, about five million people, or 40 percent of the population increase that has expanded Tehran to 13 million people, now live in informal and mainly unrecognized settlements such as slums and shantytowns on the edges, a number that is growing.2
As this is occurring, the Iranian economy is caving in on these people. A state-run industrial sector and limited trade or investment provide jobs for the regime-connected elite workers, and a great vacuum for more recent arrivals. Forty percent of Tehran’s population, according to the Iranian Chamber of Commerce, lives below the poverty line, and half are unemployed. And, in a sign of the regime’s failure to provide for the arrival city, the usual escape route of education is virtually non-existent in Iran. In a typical year, 1.5 million graduates apply for only 130,000 university places.
The last time this convergence of circumstances took place—a rush into the city, a land-price increase, and a harsh government crackdown on the availability of non-planned land—Iran’s arrival cities provided the fuel for an explosion that changed the world.
A SPARK IN THE DUST
If you look north toward central Tehran from the rooftops of Emamzadeh ‘Isa, beyond a kilometer of wasteland, construction sites, and dirty roadside industry, you see rows and rows of identical, low-cost modern apartment blocks. This place, once the outer frontier of Tehran but