Urban and Paradoxes of Tehran as a metropolis
A visit to Teheran is today the best way imaginable to throw the clichés of state geopolitics into disarray. This is not because certain characteristics forcibly conveyed by the Western media on the oppression, gloom and effective constrictions on personal conduct are not true or verifiable – quite the contrary. To all effects, these traits correspond to reality. Iran has laws that restrict the individual and collective freedom of millions of individuals. But alongside and beyond these aspects (which are indeed present and obvious) other characteristics of Iranian society emerge with great force, which stand in complete contradiction to those communicated by governmental geopolitical clichés. For example, there is an extraordinary ability to coexist with the imposed behavioural boundaries as well as a remarkable curiosity towards the outside world. The key to the mystery of Teheran is probably the paradox. Not only are things hardly ever what they appear to be, but every phenomenon ...
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| Ustratos focus on the economic and geo-strategic analysis, security problems of the nations, economic development, the history of the world, the geopolitical conflicts and strategic issues in Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and their strategic problems. |
1. The Geopolitics of clichés
Over the past three years, we have made several “incursions” into the sphere of geopolitics on these pages. We have done so (at the risk of astounding and bewildering our readers) with the conviction that a magazine like Domus today has an obligation to position architecture and furniture design within the real economic and international political situation. Two main outlooks have guided our endeavour. The first was to underline how the practices of architecture and furniture design, even the most local, individual and solitary kinds, are substantially linked to global geopolitical conditions. Two examples: in April 2006 (Domus 891) we dedicated the entire issue to the concept of Geodesign and the global dynamics of designing and producing complex objects. In our last issue (Domus 900) we explored how processes of Outsourcing intimately influence our work as intellectuals and spatial artisans. But there is also another crucial perspective for a magazine like Domus: that of entering the sphere of geopolitics as an active participant, to do what is possible for a global medium today in aiding the construction of collective images and multiple “public opinions” that encounter one another at an international level. For example, when we initiated the brainstorming project on the derelict Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang (Domus 882), we were thinking of the possibility to turn the cement pyramid into an “antenna” for ideas. A global antenna that would not only receive but also transmit messages and knowledge from a “mysterious” part of the world (seeDomus 893). And so it was. A magazine like Domus must play a role in our contemporary symbolic universe. It must play its cards, stimulate reactions, respond to attacks, and participate in the great battle in the semiosphere where the symbolic images and simulacra of our contemporary condition are mobilised. Interact with geopolitical realities. This issue features a lengthy special on Teheran, a large “rogue city” in international geopolitics. In our coverage, we could not avoid reflecting upon the terrifying distance that lies between real life in this multicultural cosmopolitan metropolis and the image of it propagated by geopolitics. We could not avoid considering ways for Domus to intervene in order to reduce this distance, which is based on the complicity between the people who govern Iran today and the people who control the world’s large international media powers. This complicity has isolated Teheran from public opinion all over the world and imprisoned it in obtuse clichés. One of our aims here is to contribute to breaking through this visual complicity, in the knowledge that a “monthly review of architecture, design, art and information” can observe and talk about places and phenomena that would otherwise remain invisible.
2. A visual complicity
There is no doubt that contemporary geopolitics is primarily based on relations between countries and governments. It is a series of alliances and exclusions based on national foreign policies. More than anything else, geopolitics has become a tactical game between elite government policies, with challenges, ripostes, promises and threats based mainly on pervasive, large-scale complicity. The complicity underlying today’s geopolitics has to do with the paradigms of vision. Regardless of its true aspirations, resources and obligations, every government wishing to play the tactical game of geopolitics must first develop a public image. This public image will dictate to a country wanting to play its cards in the great game of geopolitics which of its traits to show and leave visible and which to conceal. However, like the visible back of a pack of playing cards, this public image must be a shared one. This shared view is often based on a play of mirrors and projections, public images that are projected and reflected. It is therefore unsurprising that today’s geopolitics finds its prime tool in the major media, “the great operators of simultaneity” according to a definition by Paul Virilio. The countries with the most powerful media constantly draw on their technical-political staff to develop cliché-portraits of the public images of less powerful countries, which are then broadcast in the semiosphere through the global media. These stereotypical identities, these projections, are not just information on the identity and nature of countries, their alliances and exclusions. They also communicate the entry code required to join the game of geopolitics to the countries that are the “subject” of these clichés. Clichés – fabricated public images – are the “suffered” identity that every country is obliged to assume if it wants to join today’s game of geopolitics. Often a state and a government attributed with a cliché are aware of how arbitrary it is, but clichés cannot always be freely manipulated or even deleted. The risk in these cases is that you will be left out of the game. Cancelled from the world. On the contrary, you often have to accept the clichés and try to change them, so to speak, from within, changing certain traits and adding new ones but always staying within the framework of the cliché.
3. Rogue States
One of the most convincing confirmations of the visual complicity that underlies contemporary geopolitics is the conduct that followed the definition of “rogue states” (linked to the concept of the “Axis of Evil”) given by President Bush in 2002. It is hard to say in what way the states of Iraq, Iran and North Korea can be likened to each other or even compared, apart from a general and never actually proven reference to their “contacts with international terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction”. Indeed, we know that the risks of nuclear armament, at least in the case of Iraq, have been proven unfounded. And we know that there are many other countries around the world that are embarking on equally controversial ways to obtain nuclear weapons. Not even the suspicion of an implicit interest on the part of American foreign policy in oil-producing countries (although North Korea has no oil fields) justifies the scenario put forward in 2002. Yet the geopolitical cliché of rogue states has had major effects on international relations, creating a barrier between the front of enemy states and that of states allied with Bush and Blair in the fight against international terrorism. This cliché has enabled those who coined it to gauge the loyalty and commitment of its allies, and to define degrees of danger and risk in enemy governments. But what interests us most is observing the reactions of the governments of countries that have been labelled with these partially undue “attributions”. To this end, we can say that in the past four years the governments of the two states accused by Bush of being the artifices of international terrorism have done very little to alter or deny the public image that has been pre-packaged for them. It may seem almost obvious that a government such as that of North Korea has done practically nothing in terms of media communication to deny the “rogue state” cliché. It is a country that objectively does not possess the cultural, political and symbolic resources to rally together a denial of this cliché status that reasserts its unquestionable isolation and illiberality. The case of Iran is different. One wonders what has been done by the present Iranian government to disclaim Bush’s accusations. Nothing or too little. If efforts have been made, they have been in the opposite direction: attempts to hide the multiculturalism, pluralism and tolerance that have always been in the structure of Iranian society. These are the very traits that could have scaled down if not belied the accusations of the United States’ government. Take the example of the recent “revisionist” conference on the Holocaust. Iranian society has always been an open, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society in which Jews have played and continue to play a major role (the city of Isfahan has Jewish origins). Racism is absent in people’s behaviour and in everyday life in major Iranian cities. The organisation of a spine-chilling international seminar that amasses all the most implausible and shocking positions denying the Holocaust (by neo-Nazis and the ultra-orthodox) could be an alliance strategy promoted by the Iranian government aimed at radically anti-Israeli Arab states. But this really does not justify such a clumsy and objectively unpopular move. In fact, unsurprisingly, it was almost totally ignored by the domestic media, while it appeared on the front pages of newspapers the world over. It was the perfect confirmation of the “rogue state” label applied to contemporary Iran. One would suspect that the objective working of a geopolitical cliché played a significant – albeit secondary – role in the decision to entrust such an unstable hodgepodge of individuals and groups with the task of defining Iran’s foreign policy in the Middle East. The acceptance of a “role” determined by the codes of state geopolitics and the removal of the information on traditions and conduct of tolerance and multiculturalism that are firmly rooted in the Iranian nation. The principal effect of state geopolitics is, in many cases, to produce a strong discrepancy, a split between a country’s international public identity, often reduced to a simplified label, and its true social and cultural identity. The clichés of geopolitics are the labels of today’s world. And like all labels, when applied they hide parts of the object they claim to represent.
4. Architectural media and geopolitics of cities
In the light of these considerations (and with the potential of an international magazine of architecture and information in mind), we ought to wonder whether there is, today, any reasonable possibility of connecting state geopolitics (with all its rules, superficial syntheses and shadow zones) to geopolitics that explicitly reveal and convey the true characteristics of a nation’s social and cultural identity. We ought to wonder whether there is room today for a geopolitics that shows the true condition of a nation. Geopolitics that operates on a visual level and rejects the “reductio ad unum” of clichés, while acknowledging that every nation has a multiple identity. Geopolitics that works side by side with that of the states, connecting to it and representing its critical spirit. As we have repeatedly asserted (see Domus 866) we believe that the disciplines that observe and design space – physical and material space – play a crucial role in this sense today. Firstly, because the disciplines of architecture, urban planning and geography work on the visibility of their field of observation. They analyse, describe and design images of the inhabited territory that often act as powerful metaphors of a country’s social and cultural life. Descriptions of urban space, descriptions of architecture, its history and the ways of life inside it are always descriptions teeming with information on the deep-seated structures of a society. In a world in which urbanisation is so manifest, in which large cities are objectively capable of subsuming, absorbing and portraying the deep-rooted characteristics of nations, descriptions that construct “profiles” of a city are highly effective, because they highlight the stories, projects and traditions behind every city. One way to develop new geopolitics today could therefore be the creation of city “portraits”, urban “atlases” that, without claiming to be exhaustive, portray the prevailing and structural characteristics and customs of an urban community. This would diffuse public images that are not banal and reductive, and could help us to construct shared opinions on the positions of geopolitics in today’s world. However, if there is to be any mileage in this “geopolitics of multiple identities” (which is based on portrayal of the complexities of urban reality and the socio-cultural and economic characters of urbanised nations), we must be aware of the implicit limitations and weaknesses of a complex image compared with a simplified one in the global communication system. It is difficult to diffuse a complex image and just as hard for the targeted audience to remember it. It must operate on different levels if it is to be effective and compensate for the media power of geopolitical cities.
5. The Paradoxes of Teheran
A visit to Teheran is today the best way imaginable to throw the clichés of state geopolitics into disarray. This is not because certain characteristics forcibly conveyed by the Western media on the oppression, gloom and effective constrictions on personal conduct are not true or verifiable – quite the contrary. To all effects, these traits correspond to reality. Iran has laws that restrict the individual and collective freedom of millions of individuals. But alongside and beyond these aspects (which are indeed present and obvious) other characteristics of Iranian society emerge with great force, which stand in complete contradiction to those communicated by governmental geopolitical clichés. For example, there is an extraordinary ability to coexist with the imposed behavioural boundaries as well as a remarkable curiosity towards the outside world. The key to the mystery of Teheran is probably the paradox. Not only are things hardly ever what they appear to be, but every phenomenon also contains manifold explanations that sometimes contradict one another. Just think that despite a political regime that preaches an attitude of closure towards and condemnation of the of United States and the Western world, the culture of large sections of the Iranian people is strongly projected towards the West and – as many of the contributions at the round-table conference published on page 46 describe – towards the United States. The fact that Farsi, the principal language in Iran, is now the fourth most common language on the Internet shows how receptive and inquisitive young Iranians in particular (more than 60 per cent of Iran’s 70 million population is under 35) are towards the world. The situation of women is also paradoxical and dramatic. Women are forced to accept the veil but the veil (variously interpreted) is often a common “code” offering women a passage into social relations. The fact is that Iranian women are more modern, more active and more present in society than before the revolution. Seventy per cent of students are female and many women occupy prominent posts. Women have spatial restrictions: they cannot stop in the street; they can only walk from one place to another. But they are changing the public and private space. A modern woman is imprisoned in a traditional space. The situation of Teheran’s public space is also paradoxical. It is constantly invaded by thousands of cars, which in reality represent bubbles of private freedom moving through a rigid and controlled public space. In Teheran the car is a device that can provide private experiences in an invasion of public urban space, i.e. semi-private capsules where people can enjoy a freedom that is forbidden in public space. But in Teheran the condition of urban architecture is also in some way paradoxical, as Kaveh Mehrabani describes in his text. On one hand the Iranian revolutionary language has for many years corresponded to a boorish and outmoded post-modernism, used to represent the rigid and intransigent message of Islamic fundamentalism. On the other, Teheran has an exceptional patrimony of modernist architecture, metabolised and reinterpreted in the mid-20th century by the Persian culture of Iranian architects. Thousands of buildings, scattered all around the city, accompany a sober minimalism of the facades with surprisingly plastic gestures and the explosion of ornamental details in wrought iron, reminiscent of Persian carpet design culture. The paradox is that the refusal by post-revolutionary governments to recognise the cultural and political value of this urban architecture has driven the regime’s architecture into anachronistic drift. It has driven it towards a vulgar post-modernism, a mixture of stylistic elements that draw on the worst types of European and North American architecture. Precisely the practice whose colonising effects the regime’s architecture would ideally seek to oppose. The nature of Teheran’s bazaar is equally complex. From many angles the bazaar is the true antidote to western rationalist culture and systematic planning. It is a post-modern urbanistic model that is nonetheless very old, based on a spatial paradigm linked to personal memory, unpredictability, invisible networks of habits, complicities and business relationships. But the bazaar is also the cradle of contemporary Iranian multiculturalism, multilingualism and multi-ethnicity (there are 50 different languages and only 50 per cent of the population speaks Iranian). It is a place where substantive powers intertwine. Inasmuch, the bazaar is an extraordinary public space that anticipates the possible future of cosmopolitan metropolises; a spatial device that continues to spread throughout the city and that represents a slice of a possible future for us. Teheran is a large modern metropolis, open and cosmopolitan, crossed by thousands of economic and political contradictions. The paradox, the complexity of relations between appearances and reality, between visible ublic space and the space of private relations, is an indispensable key to interpret the city. Teheran is not reducible to geopolitical labels. space and the space of private relations, is an indispensable key to interpret the city. Teheran is not reducible to geopolitical labels.
6. Antennas in geopolitics
What tools do we have to counter the media power of the geopolitics of clichés? How can we flank the simplifications of state geopolitics with the “complex” and more meaningful descriptions that arise from the geopolitics of cities, from the geopolitics of urban communities? What instruments do we have that can truly enable the descriptions of investigative journalism to break through the curtain, the wall of state geopolitics? As we know, it is difficult to oppose the media power of the geopolitics of clichés. But if there is a possibility, it lies in our ability to disrupt the visual complicity that springs up around the clichés of state geopolitics. It lies in our capacity to short circuit the complicity between those who diffuse and those who receive a simplified public image of their country. And to break this complicity it is necessary to produce visual mechanisms, devices that can disrupt the view of official geopolitics. As well as the inquiry into local spaces and communities, we must learn to oppose the geopolitics of clichés and invent, realise and establish bridges, interactive antennas of global communication. Today, the media of architecture (magazines, web sites, newspapers, television and radio programmes) play an important role. By dedicating attention to an architecture, to a space, they can create great simulacra in the global imagination. They can create veritable super-places capable of emerging like giants in the collective imagination. And they can create these super-places (Domus 885) from a distance, working from afar. Sometimes these super-places, these simulacrums are so powerful that they are stronger than the clichés of state geopolitics. They are more convincing and deeper rooted in the collective imagination than the simplified public images that are transmitted by state geopolitics. For this reason, today it is important to design and install antennas in the places of the world that are symbolically impoverished by the geopolitics of clichés. Antennas that not only receive but also transmit richer information on the social and cultural conditions of the places in which they are installed. Installing, even from afar, interactive antennas (such as that “designed” by Domus in Pyongyang) is the most effective means to counter a geopolitics that destroys – as Jürgen Habermas would say – any chance of communicative interaction. Domus, an architecture and information magazine, today possesses few but effective tools of critical intervention into the conditions of today’s world.
Ustratos focus on the economic and geo-strategic analysis, security problems of the nations, economic development, the history of the world, the geopolitical conflicts and strategic issues in Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and their strategic problems. Tags:geopolitical, strategies, economies, war, military, armed, economic development, international relations, history, geography, environment, , NGO, alliances, European Union, flags, USA, United State of America
