The Navab Regeneration Project and the Urban Ideal Détournement

Social and political forces have always had a role in the development of a city and as the foci of these influences change, the resulting city fabric begins to portray a mélange of urban ideals; merging, contrasting, and overlapping, ultimately representing a discontinuous evolution of past principles. Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has gone through the same process of urban quilting but the resulting aesthetic is atypical due in part to the authoritative government's heavy hand in city planning as well as the lack of a true democracy rendering the public interest void. In this political environment, "urban ideals" are the sole representation of an autocratic interest but can also function as administrative securities in a system with personal financial precedence.
A product of the ideological moiety, the Navab Regeneration Project is a large-scale urban development plan which follows the neo-traditional ideals of the Pahvali era, remaining formally stagnant in design but functionally adjusted and distorted to support the financial ideals of the Islamic Republic. The overarching "urban ideal" currently in place, adopted from a past ideology, functions as a bureaucratic gate of control, adjusting to maximize governmental financial gain.
This paper addresses the quilted construction of multiple urban ideals that exists on top of a neo-traditional framework in the city of Tehran.