Writers, photographers and artists reveal everyday life in contemporary Iran.

This book, based on conference excerpts, investigates various aspects of contemporary Iranian urbanism. The topics covered range from the impacts of political developments on the cities’ rapid socio-economic developments, to the cities’ troubled relationship with the country’s built-environment history and their frequently ill-managed exposure to Western notions of development and globalisation. Last but not least, the country’s vulnerability to natural disasters in an age of increasing urban-population densification is also considered. Alongside more theoretically and artistically oriented debates, the book’s individual contributions turn their attention to the now much higher proportion of urban dwellers in the country’s rising population. It also discusses the policies designed in response to these demographic moves, including those to develop new towns, find housing for the excess population in existing cities, renovate historic buildings and create new public spaces. The practice-policy oriented contributions also include those concerning the country’s responses to natural disasters.

The Iranian city experienced a major transformation when the Pahlavi Dynasty initiated a project of modernization in the 1920s. The Rite of Urban Passage investigates this process by focusing on the spatial dynamics of Muharram processions, a ritual that commemorates the tragic massacre of Hussein and his companions in 680 CE. In doing so, this volume offers not only an alternative approach to understanding the process of urban transformation, but also a spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals that provides a platform for developing a fresh spatial approach to ritual studies.

During recent years, the topic of participation has increasingly been gaining importance in Iran – in the scientific field, in practice and rhetoric. However, in current scientific literature – and especially in English literature – there is little knowledge on the conditions, legal background, perceptions, experiences and processes of citizens’ participation in Iran. This book aims to shed light on the paradoxical question of participation in Iran: it is old and new, dysfunctioning and functioning, disappointing and promising. This slippery status of participation convinces scholars to suggest contradictory interpretations and understandings about the existence, functionality, and potentiality of this concept. The book therefore shows the different perspectives, interpretations, historical developments and case studies of participation in Iran, thus giving the reader a kaleidoscope view on the question of participation in Iran.

The story of a grassroots political movement that flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

This volume examines the major cultural, religious, political, and urban changes that took place in the Iranian world of Inner and Central Asia in the transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic periods. One of the major civilizations of the first millennium was that of the Iranian linguistic and cultural world, which stretched from today’s Iraq to what is now the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. No other region of the world underwent such radical transformation, which fundamentally altered the course of world history, as this area did during the centuries of transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period. This transformation included the religious victory of Islam over Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, and the other religions of the area; the military and political wresting of Inner Asia from the Chinese to the Islamic sphere of primary cultural influence; and the shifting of Central Asia from a culturally and demographically Iranian civilization to a Turkic one. This book contains essays by many of the preeminent scholars working in the fields of archeology, history, linguistics, and literature of both the pre-Islamic and the Islamic-era Iranian world, shedding light on some of the most significant aspects of the major changes that this important portion of the Asian continent underwent during this tumultuous era in its history. This collection of cutting-edge research will be read by scholars of Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Iranian, and Islamic studies and archaeology. Contributors: D. G. Tor, Frantz Grenet, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Etsuko Kageyama, Yutaka Yoshida, Michael Shenkar, Minoru Inaba, Rocco Rante, Arezou Azad, Sören Stark, Louise Marlow, Gabrielle van den Berg, and Dilnoza Duturaeva.