In this chapter I investigate the post-Qajar era and demonstrate that, after the establishment of the Pahlavi state in the 1920s, the process of spatial abstraction reached new heights. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the Pahlavi state, particularly in the main cities of the country, undertook a massive project of social reform with widespread spatial ramifications. In Tehran, the municipality became the central state’s executive organ. The spatial strategies of the municipality resulted in the further decline of the communal sphere and the consolidation of the state’s domination over people’s daily lives and spaces. The codification of space was the state’s main method for accomplishing social reforms, modernization, and Westernization. By designing and imposing detailed guidelines for various communal spaces of the old city, the state disturbed the old, established forms of communal life. Similar to Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago, the Pahlavi state succeeded in imposing strict social control and discipline over urban populations through spatial guidelines. The state’s spatial codes, similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, stretched the state’s omnipresent control to every corner of the communal sphere. The Pahlavi state transformed the lived spaces of the old city into representations of space and means of social control.

This chapter introduces the volume, stating the central objective of the book – namely, tracing the rise, consolidation, and fall of Iran’s last two dynasties – and the political, social, and economic changes that each of the two dynasties, the Qajars and the Pahlavis, effected in Iran.