Examining Iran’s development politics and planning in last three decades, this paper focuses on the failures of development goals of the Reconstruction Project of the early 1990s, and in specific on its urban agenda, promoted by the first, second and third development plans in Iran. ‘Development’ as a bundle of coordinated and intentional top-down interventions increasingly became a central pillar of governmentality in post Iran-Iraq war. Under the leadership of pragmatist president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, an ambitious economic reconstruction project was launched by public investments in industrial and urban infrastructures, ranging from hydroelectric dams, heavy industries, and transit systems. However, deregulation of labor and land markets, integral components of the economic shift incorporated in the project, encouraged speculative activities on land, housing and built environment, swallowed up huge amounts of private and public capital, and encouraged investments on the land property, luxury housing, resort developments, and malls and commercial units.
Given dual state structure of the Islamic Republic and conflicts between reformist and conservative camps over the vision of ‘developed Iran’ as cornerstone of existing crisis in the country, I examine how speculative urbanism fostered the economic base of such dual state structure, by creating new economic base for conservative camp and diminished the initial industrial plans through speculative activities on existing and future industrial sites. The paper relies on case studies of the industrial sites changing to residential in the process of privatization of the public industries, failing to compete with aggressive deregulated urban developments.
