ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that after being selected as the Persian capital in 1788, Tehran’s development was primarily and predominantly a modern project aiming at meeting the requirements of the modern world and a changing society. Based on a critical reading of major moments of urban modernity from the mid nineteenth century onwards, it discusses how, despite the strong presence of anti-Western discourse at various times (more evidently in the post-Revolution period), a modernist, technocratic, and technologised attitude towards city-making remained dominant. Attempts to establish a critical or anti-Western trend in urban planning and architecture against the dominant modernisation project either remained as abortive rhetoric or remained marginalised and due to political changes failed to be consolidated into a competing discourse. The making of Tehran has been, and continues to be, an incremental encroachment of modernity that struggles for contemporisation.
