ABSTRACT
Between 1960 and 1979 Iran was transformed. The growth of population accelerated. Between 1920 and 1960 the population doubled to 23 million: by 1979 a further cohort equivalent to the entire population of 1920 had been added. Most of the increase in population went into towns and into industry or services. It has been calculated that 3.7 million people left villages for towns between 1956 and 1976 compared to virtually none before 1934 and under three-quarters of a million between 1934 and 1956. In 1960 about one third of the population lived in towns; in 1979 very nearly half were urban. The number of inhabitants of Tehran grew most rapidly of all from nearly 2 million in 1960 to 4.5 million in 1976, a number which represented 30 per cent of the urban population and 13 per cent of the total population of Iran, compared with only 2 per cent in 1920. No other town had more than 700,000 people in 1976. Tehran was the centre of government, higher education and industry; it contained two-thirds of all university students, nearly one third of high school students and nearly one-third of all literates; about half of all factories were in or around Tehran.
