Open Source Representations of a Dystopic Tehran

This paper discusses the representation of Tehran as viewed by those unable to physically be present in the city. Internationally imposed economic and trade sanctions have the effect of not only isolating the targeted country economically but also socially, constraining international urban perspectives and influences, to the point that images of the city and culture of the people are contorted and objectified as the patchwork product of images from Google Earth, Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, and personal websites. Since these are the only sources of information for absent observers, their understanding of Iran on a macro city level and micro personal level is distorted through the lens of a digital objectification. The representations of Tehran exclusively through the lens of the internet creates a cognizable alienation, anxiety, and moral decay of the city, not unlike depictions of a ground war, resulting in a generalized dystopic "global cognition" of Tehran. Ironically, this comes with its own beauty and fulfillment of our human desire for ruins as iterated by Piranesi when depicting the death of ancient Roman architecture during the 18th century. Using Kevin Lynch’s analysis of observers’ interpretations of information on cities in The Image of the City (1960), I will discuss the Noir Urbanism representations and imagined stories produced of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks through the darker depictions broadcasted on open source internet resources depicting Tehran. These open source representations of the city depict a betrayal of the cities utopian promise that was once advertised during the more accessible times before the Islamic Revolution, which could form a "global cognitive" perception that will influence future urban development.