Assembling the Oil Complex in Khuzestan: Workers' Lives and the Built Environment of Abadan (1920s – WW2)

This paper investigates the intertwined global, national, and local processes that led to the assemblage of the oil complex in Khuzestan during Reza Shah’s reign through the WW2. I will focus on analyzing the transformation of the built environment of the refinery city of Abadan, since the urban space of this city was a key locale where the social actors involved in materializing oil as a strategic global commodity were interacting in protracted and contested processes that allowed oil to flow. These actors ranged from local and national state agents, Oil Company experts and operatives, British government operators, oil workers and their extended geographic and kinship networks across various communities, and the diverse urban dwellers of Abadan whose lives were intertwined with the expanding oil industry. The Island of Abadan was sparsely inhabited in 1911, but it had grown into a booming city of more than quarter of a million by mid century, faced with tremendous challenges. All the social agents involved in the oil complex actively engaged in remaking the built environment of the city according to their interests and priorities. The jumbled and eventually cosmopolitan urban space that emerged encapsulated the motives and intent behind these conflicting interests. The paper will focus on the institutionalization of the practice of urban planning by the Oil Company in the company town enclaves, the expansion of the indigenous non-company town that grew as a counter space to the planned company areas, and on how the urban ensemble of Abadan linked to its wider rural region and the national space. Oil workers, whose labor made the flow of oil a reality, were shaped in the protracted struggles and accommodations that were framed by the physical space and the built environment of city.