This research project sought to highlight the cultural and historical roots of some of the basic correlations we presume to hold between the (meaning of modern) urban space and urban everyday life. The meaning of the city, as we presently understand it, not only includes socio-spatial features, but also has roots located in the cultural realm and in historical processes. I interrogate the meaning of modern city and modern subject by presenting Tehran and Casablanca as cities which offer examples that are in stark contrast to our myths of modernity. These cases show that in order to redefine the concept of the city (the goal of recent postcolonial or decolonial urban theory), we need to excavate the cultural myths and roots of the imaginative emergence of the modern city within a certain geography. This is an activity which will reveal different forms of subjectivities and perceptions of the modern city, born in the encounter with capitalist urbanism in different locations.
I explored historical archives of public conceptions of the modern subjectivity and city in Tehran, drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of the ‘birth’ of subject and the scholarship that interrogates the city as an imaginative production. As a part of this research project, I proposed a rewriting of the cultural-historical genealogies of key guiding urban concepts as a method for developing situated theories, provincializing ‘our’ urban theory, and letting ‘the city speak for itself’. I argue that this rewriting is only possible through investigating ‘new’ theories both at their embryonic stages and in the course of their historical development. Building on this idea, and by exploring literary, public, and cinematic products in Tehran at the advent (1900s-1920s) and height (1960s-1970s) of its capitalist urbanisation, I seek to contribute to wider postcolonial theory’s effort to create a cosmopolitan theory by invoking Tehran as a new ‘locus of enunciation’ and providing a speculative contribution to understanding spaces on terms that remain true to their singularity. This investigation of Tehran bears the traces of the theoretical development of a ‘non-material’ modernity, a modernity of ma’na, at both periods. Developing a situated theory of the contemporary urban space of Tehran is impossible without such genealogical readings. To further advance this idea, I suggest that the surgical exploration of archives – for example, interrogating how the self and the other have been defined in them – should be incorporated as a key step in our urban genealogical readings of new geographies. The study of conceptions of the urban self in the cultural products of Tehran, and Casablanca for the period from the 1960s to the 1970s, reveals an unwitting reproduction of the nuances of colonialist tendencies in representational efforts directed towards ‘decolonisation’, i.e. resistance films. These works, which have been key referents for understanding Iranian modernity, create a ‘negative identity’ by ignoring lived experiences in their locations, resulting in products that ironically contribute to self-colonising processes. I argue that this negligence took place due to a deeply ingrained practice of defining the self by its difference to an ‘other’. Thereby, I suggest, in order to enable the emergence of ‘decolonised’ situated theories from new locations, we need to extend the geographies of postcolonial thinking via a fine-grained examination of (resistance) representational work – that is, to move from focusing on global power relations to local microhistories and the micropolitics of archives. Without this move, the colonialist conceptions of ‘cityness’ will endure in the formation of our new theories.
The results have been published in journal paper ‘Urban space and cultural constrictions of modern subjectivities’ in Architecture and Culture (2024). Two papers have been accepted for publication (with major and minor revision) and two papers are under review in peer-reviewed journals. A book proposal is being prepared for consideration at MIT Press. Several presentations have been held in academic and non-academic settings such as consultancies and cultural events in London, Tehran and Tangier.
