عدالت اجتماعی دوره محمدرضاشاه

the urban population is a product of this period: formerly, the old residential quarters had included families of all ranks. High officials, older families, merchants, ordinary artisans, and petty traders lived side by side in the same city quarters (or Mahallat). Clearly, rich and poor houses were very different in every respect; but, by and large, they were built on the basis of traditional Iranian architecture. More significantly, this ensured social contact between different classes: the rich were in daily contact with the ordinary, the poor and even the beggars. But all this began to change when new wealth led, in the case of Teheran, to an entirely unplanned movement towards the northern parts of the city, into new houses the building of which was facilitated by the state's free grants of urban land to army officers and the higher civil servants. The damage was completed when the poor immigrants began to settle in the declining districts; and the departure of the rich left no local influence for the environmental protection and renovation of the old districts by city authorities. In the southern parts of Teheran, many old houses with large tree- shaded gardens were levelled off by property speculators, who built new little hovels in their place and no one cared. Meanwhile, tremendous social and psychological pressures were applied to those older families which had fallen behind in the race, to make them move out of their traditional districts at all costs. The sense of community which, in spite of class differentiation, had always been present in Iranian cities was lost perhaps for ever.

Homa Katouzian