Seyed Hossein Iradj Moeini – författare

This book examines examples of contemporary situation of historic regions in the Middle East and its broader geographic context connected to the historic trade routes, offering cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives. The region is home to ancient settlements and early human endeavors to form cities, and across the region historic urban historic features, such as ancient city centers, still exist alongside contemporary ones. Many of those historic regions are along the Silk Roads. However, the urban continuity that once existed over generations in the physical and social paradigm have been interrupted by rapid urbanization, globalization and urban economic pressures, in addition to conflicts and frequent destructive natural hazards. It is often the case that dealing with such pressing issues in a historic city is more complex than dealing with those in newly built cities and urban areas. Based on carefully selected and updated papers from the Silk Cities 2017 International Conference, this book appeals to researches, practitioners and policy makers.

With over one billion people worldwide living in informal settlements and enduring substandard housing conditions, these areas present one of the greatest urban challenges of our time. The existence of informal settlements is deeply intertwined with global issues such as climate change, war-induced displacement, and colonialism. As sustainability becomes a central focus in various disciplines, including architecture, the path to sustainable urban development lies in addressing the problems of informal settlements.

Architecture''s relevance to this discourse is paradoxically highlighted by its perceived ''irrelevance''. Informal settlements are often overlooked as legitimate sites for architectural practice. This neglect stems from two assumptions: first, architecture''s traditional dependence on power and capital, isolating the marginalised who rarely have the chance to receive architectural services; and second, architecture''s perceived incapability to address urban-scale infrastructural problems, and thereby its reduction to aesthetic creativity and form making.

This book challenges architecture''s focus on the ''centre'' and its lack of ambition for creating a pervasive impact on cities. Instead, it highlights the profession''s potential to serve the common good and address urban-scale infrastructural issues and proposes the effective engagement of architects in informal settlements.

Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s dichotomy of margin versus centre in urban spaces, informal settlements are interpreted as spaces on the city’s periphery, created by the marginalised with limited access to power, capital, and authority. By revisiting interrelated concepts such as the production of space, the right to the city, social architecture, and spatial agency within the context of informal settlements, the book claims a space for architectural practice in these areas. It incorporates discussions on insurgent citizenship and critiques of the self-help approach, contextualising its arguments with architectural intervention precedents from around the world. The book concludes with a brief manifesto on practising architecture in informal settlements.

The book aspires to inspire architecture students, practitioners, and researchers to explore the profession’s potential in social problem-solving and to push the boundaries of practice towards inclusiveness for all urban inhabitants.

This book, based on conference excerpts, investigates various aspects of contemporary Iranian urbanism. The topics covered range from the impacts of political developments on the cities’ rapid socio-economic developments, to the cities’ troubled relationship with the country’s built-environment history and their frequently ill-managed exposure to Western notions of development and globalisation. Last but not least, the country’s vulnerability to natural disasters in an age of increasing urban-population densification is also considered.

Alongside more theoretically and artistically oriented debates, the book’s individual contributions turn their attention to the now much higher proportion of urban dwellers in the country’s rising population. It also discusses the policies designed in response to these demographic moves, including those to develop new towns, find housing for the excess population in existing cities, renovate historic buildings and create new public spaces. The practice-policy oriented contributions also include those concerning the country’s responses to natural disasters.

This book studies the production of urban culture in Tehran after 1979. It analyzes urban resistance and urban processes in underground cultural spaces: bookshops, cafes and art galleries. The intended audience is architects and urban planners interested in socio-political aspects of bottom-up space formation, but also those in humanities and particularly cultural studies. The idea of the book reflects architectural criticism and bottom-up processes of space formation. It analyzes alternative, non-official ways of forming cultural spaces in Tehran and the way they resist formally endorsed culture.

Cafés, bookshops and galleries, each take various and different sets of strategies to constitute their territory and their communities within the city. From temporarily occupying street corners (booksellers) to constitution of an underground network of unfixed meeting points, to using the modern paradigms of ownership and the idea of private property, primarily as a political tool for management, to claim a safe alternative sphere of art, and finally to semiotic spatial codifications of spaces to make them as a safe gathering places taking food as a means. All these three cultural spaces deal with various conditions to form specific forms of resistance practices, throughout processes that leave their spatial traces on the city.