For Henri Lefebvre, space is a social product consisting of three elements: • representations of space – material manifestations of the built environment, urban space as well as symbolic representations of power • symbolic values produced by spatial practice – the way in which spaces are used in a quotidian basis. 1 Lefebvre explains that these elements are not independent, and it is the interaction between them that results in the production of space. inhabitants •
Tehran is not a generous city; public squares are traffic islands rather than stages for public life. Strolling around is a challenge in a city with immense snaking highways, overpasses and streets choked with four million vehicles. The unwelcoming physical space on one hand and the restrictive rules of appearance and behaviour imposed by the state on the other have discouraged the public life of the city. During 1980s public space was transformed into places that commemorated the revolution, religious authorities and the ongoing war. Repression shifted from the political domain to moral control of everyday life. People learned to organise their lives in the closed spaces of their homes far from missiles of war and revolutionary guards. 2 This decade was the period of invisibility, homogeneity and the disappearance of difference, the essence of public space. After the end of the war,Tehran had a return to public life and people gradually started to re-appropriate the space that they had renounced. In every city the state and the citizens contend with one another for urban
urbanism | public squares by farzaneh bahrami
below: everyday life on the edges of the road.
opposite top: a picnic on the highway verges of Tehran. It is a Persian tradition to spend the 13th day of spring in nature.
tehran portrait of public space It goes without saying that spatial identity of a city is formed by the character of its built environment. This identity however is shaped by other parallel processes; this comes to evidence in case of the cities like Tehran that have gone through radical changes in relatively short time.
bottom: silent protest, Azadi Square,Tehran, June 2009
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Manuel Llinás
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