نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله English
نویسندگان English
Aim: This article is grounded in the concept of "space" as a key to understanding urban relations. It explores how space is not merely a physical entity but is produced through social, economic, and political dynamics. The focus is on examining how dominant academic discourses, such as those in urban planning, architecture, and geography, conceptualise space. It also critiques how urban development plans serve the political-economic system by regulating and controlling activities through spatial strategies.
Materials and Methods: To answer the questions and advance the discussion, the present article, in its methodology section, considers the city as an epistemological concept, attempting to utilise phenomenology (which deals with the relationship between city residents and their place of residence) in support of an analytical study. And abandons logic in favour of a dialectical study, and what makes dialectical encounter with space possible is a methodological encounter with it. While the text relies on the entanglement of method, theory and spatial reality.
Findings: The article reveals that development plans are inherently political. Rather than being neutral, they reflect broader trends in architecture and urban planning that facilitate the manipulation of human living environments. It argues that each politico-economic system produces its own space, which inevitably leads to various forms of expropriation. These expropriations are integral to how space is produced and controlled, enabling capital to circulate more effectively.
Conclusion: To move towards the alternative theoretical basis of the present article, namely the economic-political reading of space, it is pointed out that although space is considered as a tool for domination and control, but also has possibilities, differences and resistances.
Innovation: A reading of spatial relations from the perspective of political economy discourse can provide the groundwork for a critical understanding of the mechanisms of space production and reproduction in Iran.
کلیدواژهها English
The discourse of space as a predetermined entity, rather than clarifying the social relations, including class relations, that exist within space, and instead of focusing on the production of space and its corresponding social relations, research falls into the trap of space itself. The questions that this article tries to find answers to are:
-What policies do the types of urban development plans and programs originate from, or what are the forces and relations that produce these plans, and based on what mechanism and stimulus do they seek to create change in space?
-What is the relationship of these plans to the concept of dispossession?
The theoretical basis of the present article is based on the critical paradigm, and its methodological philosophy is rooted in the interpretive paradigm.
The formulation of dominant discourse for spatial relations can be explained as follows:
The dominant discourse of urban planning in Iran reproduces the status quo by reducing spatial relations to mere physical issues. The underlying layer of this approach is that planned space is an objective and scientific entity possessing a neutral nature. By understanding space as a scientific object, the dominant logic begins to diagnose space as a pathological entity. This type of phrasing makes it easy for specialists in the planning system, such as architects and urban planners, to incorporate medical interventions into the space. Space is considered one of the means of production within the capitalist mode of production, and it is used with the intention of producing surplus value. The important issue is that today, production no longer occurs solely in space, but now space is also produced in the process of capitalist progress. Uneven development refers to the fact that social development occurs at varying speeds and in different directions across different places. Uneven development should be understood as a completely specific process that is both unique to capitalist societies and rooted in the fundamental social relations of the capital-based mode of production. Any exchange of goods and services (including labor) almost always involves a change of coordinates and location. They define an intersecting set of spatial displacements that create a distinct geography of human interaction. Spatial and territorial divisions of labor emerge from within these intersecting processes of exchange that exist throughout space. Geographical uneven development is thus a product of capitalist activity. The issue of cities becoming a place for the establishment of large companies and knowledge-based institutions, such as universities, research centers, or cultural industries, can be strategically an arena of competition between different cities. As an example of the competition between spaces in Tehran, we can mention the competition between the city's higher education spaces and universities. So far, more than five universities in the city have considered developing their spaces, and for some of them, development plans have been prepared and approved to justify the necessity of development and realize the ideological proposition of the public good. The absorption of surplus has entailed repeated urban reconstruction conflicts, often referred to as constructive destruction, which have frequently had a class dimension. It is the poor, the deprived, and those expelled from political power who suffer disproportionately from these conflicts.
Currently, the process of displacement in the implementation of urban projects is intensifying. Displacement is an important step towards creating a real estate market where the land and housing market is not already thriving. So that the land in the rent gap that begins to operate finds greater use for capital accumulation. In a city like Tehran, the commodification and privatization of public spaces, social housing, transportation, and other areas in recent years have created vast opportunities for the accumulation of surplus capital to be exploited. The corporatization and privatization of previously public assets, including universities and urban spaces, through the justification of various development plans, indicate a new wave of enclosure of public spaces.
The set of interwoven relationships through various urban policies and their manifestation in the form of numerous plans and programs leads to the production of a system of reality in which various matters provide the grounds for displacement and such concepts through a kind of naturalization. In fact, urban policies are given spatial expression through various plans and programs. Simultaneously, we are faced with a set of informal relations and forces that confront the surrounding space with a different logic. Since the aforementioned set of complex relations, through this method of space-making, progresses in a state that constantly allows for the formation of conflict, the logical end of the different methods of space-making leads to a state that is referred to as a space of conflict or a conflict of forces. This state actually expresses the issue that, as the saying goes, wherever there is power, there is also resistance. Our set of lived spaces is somehow created through the conflict of such forces.
The authors are thankful to some reviewers who criticize and remind us some discoursive considerations during research.
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
