Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [104]
By 1971, when the land reforms were complete, it should have been apparent that the goal wasn’t being realized. About half of the best land, much of it owned by government employees or military officers, was neither redistributed to peasants nor mechanized into productive farms; the owners bribed officials to have their estates classified as industrial farms, even if they weren’t, or they simply stole the subsidies, or they “divided” out the most unfertile pieces of land and handed them to peasants. “Only a minority,” one study concluded, “practiced capitalist agriculture, using wage laborers, machinery, and production inputs such as fertilizers. The government did not encourage modern production techniques.”5
By the 1970s Iran was a net food importer, to an increasingly large degree. Imports were rising by 14 percent each year, so that by the time of the revolution almost half the country’s food was imported. The newly liberated farmers couldn’t compete with the imports, so the peasants became ever more indebted to the government, to the banks, and to private moneylenders. This led to a mass exodus, in which hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers left the villages every year. “Many abandoned the routine life of two bowls of rice and a jar of yoghurt in a cavelike adobe house of the village for the uncertainty of life in the city which promised, at the least, minimum wage for manual labor,” the scholar Tahmoores Sarraf wrote in his memoir. “Thus, instead of increasing consumption in the rural areas, the strategy reduced the rural population and agricultural output.”6 By 1978, three million working people had moved from rural areas to Iran’s major cities; counting their families, this meant that between nine and 12 million people had made a rural–urban migration in only 15 years.
When those villagers arrived in the city, there was nothing waiting for them. The Shah’s spending on factories and urban redevelopment projects was legendary and widely self-promoted, so it was with genuine bewilderment that millions of people found that they were not wanted in Tehran and unable to live or educate their children in even the most rudimentary conditions. The Shah had created a Potemkin façade of industrial growth and urbanization—a national automobile industry, attractive downtown buildings, and universities—but had paid little attention to either the rural or the urban livelihoods of the actual citizens who would form the majority in this new society. As a consequence, the number of illiterate adults rose from 13 million in 1963 to 15 million in 1977.
By 1979, 35 percent of Tehran’s population of five million lived in slums, squats, and makeshift settlements, with a million living in the new arrival cities on the edge of town. Those numbers kept growing. To keep the city appearing “modern,” the Shah’s regime aggressively pushed squatter-dwellers out of the center and into the unseen outskirts of Tehran, often using force to do so. Huge construction projects were taking place in central Tehran, but they involved universities, military barracks, automobile factories, government buildings, hotels, and airports. Little was spent on housing or the development of residential communities, except for the middle-class developments in the north.
“High rents effectively barred most people from the central zone of large cities,” the Iranian sociologist Misagh Parsa concluded in a study of the revolution’s causes. “As a consequence, shantytowns sprang up on the outskirts of urban areas. In Tehran, at least twenty-four large shantytowns containing thousands of families had arisen on the edge of the city … These shantytowns provided notoriously poor living conditions. Houses were generally erected by family members themselves, who were forced to pay exorbitant prices for black-market building materials. Drinking water was supplied