The Anti-sprawl Policies in Tehran and the Creation of Spatial Injustice

Abstract The proliferation of anti-sprawl policies across the cities in the Global South and North appears to be a legitimate backlash to an ever-increasing rate of urban growth and expansion in the 21st century. Questions remain, however, around the outcomes of sprawl-controlling plans, the extent to which the Northern perspectives dominate the anti-sprawl rhetoric across the globe, and whether transferring them to the rapidly expanding Southern cities is rational and feasible. It is essential to acknowledge that the incentives and, in turn, consequences of urban sprawl in the Southern cities are substantially different from their Northern counterparts. Such divergences call for a new approach towards ‘provincialisation’ (Sheppard, Leitner and Maringanti, 2013) of urban sprawl discourses. This paper examines the intersection of anti-sprawl debates and spatial injustice and incorporates both empirical and theoretical elements. The empirical element examines the historical development of anti-sprawl strategies in Tehran since the 1960s and scrutinises the consequences of the urban containment policies and plans, particularly in relation to the creation of peripheral spatial traps and through the lens of spatial justice, citizenship and the ‘right to the centre’ (Marcuse, 2009; Harvey, 2010; Soja, 2013). The theoretical element contributes to the debate on the ‘theory from the South’ by underlining the dialectical interplay of centre and periphery within the trajectories of urban growth in the Southern cities and arguing for the need to develop multiple urban epistemologies capable of explaining the complexities of multiple urban conditions in the South. The core argument of this paper is thus twofold. First and through an empirically supported argument, it contends that anti-sprawl policies and strategies in Tehran act as catalysts in the densification/sprawl dialectical transformation of the cities and intensify the creation of unjust geographies in the peripheral buffer zones through displacement and compromising the ‘right to the centre’ of (non)citizens. Second and from a wider perspective, the paper argues against theorisation of urban sprawl as a universally relevant and applicable category of urban transformation and calls for a reformulation of the concept, its drivers and materialisation, and the institutional responses given to it from the Southern perspective.