Modernization through defeat and disease: militarism, medicalization, and the municipal urbanism in Tehran, 1850s-1930s

Abstract

This article traces the process of urban modernization in Iran from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, arguing that it was fundamentally driven by the crises coming from military defeats and recurring epidemics. By examining the changing institutional history of Tehran’s municipality, the article reveals how the modernization of the city was envisaged and administered through three overlapping phases: a militarized municipality in the late Qajar period, a medicalised municipality after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and a medical-military municipality under the early Pahlavi state (1921–1939). Drawing on municipal laws, medical and municipal periodicals, architectural writings, maps, and visual material, it examines the transition from traditional ehtesab to the Constitutional Municipal Act of 1907, and ultimately to the forceful, biopolitical municipal reforms of the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, it demonstrates that Iranian urban modernization emerged long before city planning was consolidated as a distinct profession, forged through the intertwined military and medicalised discourses. These administrative shifts fundamentally reimagined the city, transforming it from a collection of isolated neighbourhoods into a unified, interconnected spatial body subject to centralized hygienic and bureaucratic oversight.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Planning Perspectives, 2026 · DOI ↗