The political economy of oil and its impact on the formation and expansion of slums in petro-states: the case study of Tehran

ABSTRACT This paper consists of three sections: (1) the history of the formation of slums before and after the Islamic Revolution, (2) the role of the political economy of oil in the formation and expansion of slums in Tehran and (3) the application of possible modes of intervention extracted from the new relevant literature phases. The grassroots factor in their formation is the high dependency of the economy on oil and the consequent flow of oil revenues toward large cities, and rural-to-urban migration as the result. Despite many attempts to solve the problems of slums in Iran, they have been doomed to failure simply because they have not taken into consideration the main cause, which is the political economy of oil. The results obtained from the interviews with the urban planning experts indicate that the preferred intervention strategy for such informal settlements is to pursue the Millennium Development Goals.