Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [107]
During the next twenty years, five comprehensive laws would be passed to regulate urban land, most of them restricting its use and exchange. This gave the government a de facto monopoly over the use of land, which raised prices. There were also large-scale public-housing construction projects, financed through petroleum revenues, almost all in the form of massive Soviet-style blocks of apartment towers. But this low-income housing was available only to workers employed full-time by corporations or governments, a condition that effectively excluded an estimated 60 percent of households.17
As a result, the arrival-city residents of Tehran were forced to plan for themselves. And, starting once again in Eslamshahr, that is what happened: They autonomously organized their own administration, an ad hoc, practical-minded municipal government that seemed oblivious to the ruling Islamic regime. Young architects and planners donated their efforts to replace the medieval-looking lanes with straight, wide streets; engineers tapped into the city’s electrical and water systems. In 1986, Eslamshahr issued its first development plan.
In the early 1990s, in a bid to halt the expansion, the Tehran government turned Eslamshahr into a formal, incorporated city. With almost 400,000 residents, it immediately became one of the 10 largest cities in Iran. This had two effects. First, it created a land-price boom in Eslamshahr. Second, the prospect of taxes, utility bills, building standards, and other costs of legitimate urban living proved too daunting for many of the poor, casually employed residents. Within a short time, Eslamshahr had spawned its own arrival cities. Two new settlements, Akbar Abad and Sultan Abad, appeared just beyond its incorporated borders and started growing fast. Within a year, these two villages had expanded into a dense urban expanse of 110,000 people.†
A major bulldozing and slum-clearance campaign was launched. In the summer of 1992 alone, 2,000 homes were destroyed. Confrontation between squatters and police became increasingly violent, reminiscent of the worst years under the Shah. Eslamshahr exploded again in 1995, in some of the most serious riots Iran has seen since the revolution. The cause was anger at rising government bus fares between the periphery and the downtown core, where most arrival-city residents work. But the protests took on an increasingly anti-regime tenor.
The regime was unable to snuff out the new arrival cities on the edge of Eslamshahr, and, by now, Akbar Abad and Sultan Abad have been able to win themselves a begrudging legitimacy from the government, though without any parks or schools, these settlements remain dusty, primitive places. When I visited Akbar Abad, I found myself in the midst of a sizable neighborhood of low mud houses being transformed piecemeal into four-story apartments, its residents all from one district in the central province of Yazd. As these sub-settlements have become increasingly legitimate and inaccessible to rural migrants, they themselves have thrown off new arrival cities on their own peripheries—one of them being Emamzadeh ‘Isa.
During the Ahmadinejad years, the Islamic regime, thrust into power by arrival-city residents on promises of property rights, did everything it could to deter migrants from settling in the margins, while trying to avoid the violent clashes that marred the 1990s, using quiet strategies such as the mass reforestation of vacant lands on the outskirts—using nature, rather than violence, to make it physically impossible to arrive. This tack has had limited success. A fifth of the Iranian population now lives in Tehran, eight million in