Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [103]
Eslamshahr was Tehran’s first arrival city and remains its largest. It was built as a warren of narrow, mud-walled buildings, slowly supplanted with brick and serviced with electricity tapped illegally from the city’s power grid and water diverted from the mains. Unusually, most of its plots of land were formally purchased by the settlers from generally private landholders (who had no legal permission to subdivide their land). From the beginning, as it rose from nothing in 1968 to 10,000 houses in the early 1970s to hundreds of thousands in the 1980s, Eslamshahr has offered a parallel, highly organized but legally clandestine society and government, a model for all future arrival cities, independent from Tehran’s municipal authorities and Iran’s ruling regime—and frequently at war with them.
In media accounts, the 1979 revolution’s flashpoints are conventionally identified as the holy city of Qom, where the Ayatollah Khomeini and his circle of clerics delivered their rhetorical barrages against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after returning from exile in 1978; or in the bazaars of central Tehran, where the wealthy merchants merged their religious pieties with anti-modernist fury to back the Ayatollah’s movement. Yet these explosions occurred long after the revolution was well under way, and they would not have been society-altering events if this had merely been a revolt of the mosque and the bazaar. The revolution was not, until its final moments, an Islamic movement, and its motives and causes were not religious. It was a revolution of the arrival city, and its main cause was urban property.
As recently as 1963, when the Shah began his “White Revolution” to industrialize Iran’s economy, Tehran had been a small city without any major slum or shantytown developments, in a country that was largely rural. What happened over the next 16 years is an object lesson in the mismanagement of rural–urban migration. Rather than the Shah’s goals of creating “a prosperous, healthy, literate, well-housed, and largely (90 percent) urban society … with industry emerging as the employer of perhaps 40 percent of the labor force,”3 Tehran became, in less than a decade, the most migrant-packed city in the world, experiencing an urban growth rate higher than Calcutta, Bombay, Mexico City, or Manila. In 1956, only 31 percent of Iranians lived in cities; on the eve of the revolution, almost half did. And this enormous population shift occurred without any serious state investment in the migrants’ futures, without any government effort to turn the millions of new arrivals into urban citizens, without any effort to acknowledge the existence of arrival cities. As we shall see, the Shah turned the noble motive of urbanization into a self-defeating catastrophe.
The White Revolution was the Shah’s attempt to preempt the possibility of a full-fledged “red” revolution—for the forces of the left, and not of Islam, were seen as the sole threat to his regime. He attempted to do this, at a rapid pace, by bringing about the sort of change in Iran that had occurred in the West during the decades of the Enlightenment. “You are all going to have to run to keep up with me,” the Shah boasted. “All the old economic and political feudalism is over and done with. Everybody should benefit directly from the product of his own labor.”4 There was nothing misplaced about the Shah’s ambitions in themselves; in fact, he was seeking exactly what every developing-world leader should: an economy based on industry and services, a largely urbanized population, and a higher standard of rural living provided by an agriculture system that abandoned feudalism for intensified, high-employment food production.
The plan failed first in the countryside. Iranians were overwhelmingly villagers, and most of those villagers were peasant farmers, who grew by hand for their own consumption and paid