This chapter documents the development of the wartime Grand Alliance between Britian, the Soviet Union, and the United States, with particular reference to the personal roles, outlooks, and interactions of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. Without the deep personal bonds of the ‘Big Three’, the Grand Alliance may have been stillborn or collapsed under the pressures, contradictions, and challenges of war.

The experience of being tied up in Tehran while eating tangerines, and what it signifies as narrative, metaphor, and theoretical intervention. The chapter combines a personal story about a home invasion with an analysis of social and property relations in the space of the local neighborhood. The author establishes her identity as an arous farangi (a “foreign bride”), meaning both an insider and an outsider in the Iranian cultural community. In parallel, analysis of the history of the burgled house and the changing geography of its residential neighborhood reveals the complex transformations in Iranian class positions and urban spatial organization since the revolution. Whether tragic or absurd, the experience of being tied up in Tehran sets the narrative and interpretive paradigm for the rest of the book.

William Cooper’s rise from working-class living in London was steeper than Wilson’s but followed an equally complex pattern of social mobility generated by expatriate employment. The chapter charts his career and social journey from telegram-boy in working-class Bermondsey, underlining cultural factors supporting his rise in status. He progressed to junior telegraphy work on several Persian Gulf stations, then to supervision of a station in Russian Georgia on the Black Sea, and finally in Tehran, directing his company’s entire Persian telegraph operations, acquiring elite trappings of the Edwardian gentleman abroad. Telegraph management worked around the impacts of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Persian constitutional revolution of 1905-09, bringing him into close contact in Tehran with diplomatic and Persian elites, aided by his Bermondsey wife who earned a reputation among expatriates as an accomplished hostess. His elevation to elite status was underlined by his family’s adoption of an expatriate middle-class identity, and his middle-class masculinity and fatherhood practices, marked an intimate father-daughter relationship alongside firm patriarchal rules of behaviour.

This chapter charts Edgar Wilson’s elevation in status and class identity, embodying the book’s main theme, the capacity of expatriate employment to create career opportunities for ordinary Britons, in this case for the impecunious lower middle class. Wilson’s earlier family background, with schoolteacher parents, underlines the precarious position of the ‘middling sort’ in semi-rural districts during dramatic social and economic transformation, but then the role of education and culture in enabling the three sons to achieve professional and business careers. After marrying, and with dismal white-collar stagnation in London, his subsequent experience in Persia depicts a rare picture of life on a remote river port, Ahwaz, in the early years of oil exploration. The tragic loss of his first wife from typhoid left him with two infant sons, a grim price of expatriate social mobility. His transfer to Tehran, mixing with political and diplomatic elites, cemented his rise in status and authority, and brought a new romantic venture. Socially, Wilson had arrived.

Winifred Cooper’s birth as a middle-class expatriate followed parental decisions to embark on challenging mobile employment and adventure. However, the chapter shows how expatriate opportunities worked for young girls in unique, gendered ways. The expatriate social mobility argument here takes a more complex turn, charting a growing girl’s ability to exploit frequent travel and greater freedoms of privileged life abroad. Her education and social life shifted frequently between sites in Georgia, London and Tehran, and later Ahwaz, fostering a degree of maturity and linguistic ability. Her engagement with local politics and multicultural friends in Georgia, her work as a telegraphist, her popularity as a multilingual and fashionable ‘young lady’ at the Persian court and among Tehran expatriates, and management of successive hopeful suitors, underline the potential of expatriation to enable women’s independence and cosmopolitanism. Told mostly through a diary and letters, it ends with a compelling account of Winifred and Edgar’s early love story and a fashionable expatriate wedding in Tehran. It moves from two unknown English men, prospering in overseas service, to a complex dynamic of how expatriate identity could be exploited by the next generation and contribute to an unconventional, cosmopolitan marriage.

Public spaces, as places of consumption, are windows onto unequal economic structures. In this chapter, I discuss different aspects of real and perceived inequalities in Tehran. I demonstrate that massive structural changes, such as the expansion of infrastructure and public transportation, have facilitated access to different parts of Tehran and a more equal experience of the city, yet different forms of inequality persist and are reproduced. Many public spaces offer a variety of opportunities for using space, ranging from walking in a public park to eating in high-end restaurants, all in very close proximity. Depending on what can be consumed and where it happens, public spaces bring inequalities to the fore as different groups often segregate within the same public space, following patterns that usually correlate with their ability to pay for products and services. Thus, in Tehran, as much as urban development may appear to work as an equalizer – bringing different socioeconomic groups together in newly shared public spaces – it highlights economic and social inequalities and makes disparities even more visible.

In Chapter 6, I offer a narrative of how Tehran, as both a physical reality and a conceptual entity, captures the imagination of its residents. The chapter is organized around two emerging cities. The first is a material city that is sometimes admired as “modern,” “developed,” or “comparable to other modern capitals,” and sometimes criticized as “a betrayal of Tehran’s history,” “superficial,” “fake,” “a parody of other cities, with no authenticity.” I explore a second emerging city, a perceptual Tehran, through the narratives that engage with the city as a symbolic entity. Through these expressions, I lay out how Tehran is perceived by its residents, showing that identifying with the city is common and that place identities are more influenced by a sense of belonging to the city than to specific neighborhoods. Furthermore, Tehran has become a new source of inspiration for an unprecedented number of artworks and literature in recent years. Accordingly, while the chapter explores perceptions of the city through narratives of its residents, it also draws on examples of works of art and literature to examine how the city is reproduced and, thus, remembered and celebrated.

In this chapter, I argue that geographical location and spatial orientation influence how residents of Tehran think about who they are and how they define and negotiate boundaries. In Tehran, the spatial locations of self and others in the hierarchical structure of the city remain signifiers of social status, yet the use of public spaces in different parts of the city and easier access to these spaces have complicated established social relations. I discuss how social, symbolic, and spatial boundaries are negotiated in a changing urban environment and how such processes create a sense of belonging or alienation – of being included or excluded – in different spaces. Furthermore, I show that while dividing lines among social groups in Tehran are conceptually powerful, they are not entirely class-based; rather, they are defined by a complex set of values and relations that are constantly questioned and renegotiated in public spaces.

The Introduction situates the book within the context of urban sociology, highlights the importance of the study, and outlines the arguments and contributions. I discuss my approach to the study of public spaces as multilayered sociological entities, rather than mere physical containers of events, people, and the built environment of cities. Studying how public spaces function at the city level, I argue that the meanings and values assigned to places are closely tied to where they are located and how they are used. Approaching public spaces as places where economic, political, gender, and social hierarchies are both reinforced and undermined, I show the complexity of social relations and coexistence in a rapidly changing urban environment. Key themes from urban sociology, sociology of culture, and inequality will be used to lay out the book’s arguments and contributions. I will also discuss my methods and provide an overview of the rest of the chapters.

Economic inequality is not the only form of inequality in urban contexts. In this chapter, I discuss other forms of marginalization in public spaces. Although my main focus is on social relations among citizens, the state’s control of public spaces is consequential in creating and sustaining structural inequalities that directly or indirectly impact social relations in public spaces. Whether controlling appearance and behavior (particularly for women) or suppressing certain belief systems and lifestyles, these state-imposed restrictions create inequalities that extend well beyond economic inequality in use of space. I argue that discriminatory laws or conventions (especially against women and those whose lifestyles or beliefs are not aligned with the ideals promoted by the state) are translated into unequal power relations in public spaces. This chapter examines how these inequalities impact perceptions of class and culture as social groups interact in public spaces and how public spaces are used to create spaces of being and belonging for marginalized groups.

In the conclusion, I bring the components of the book together, arguing that the findings in each chapter relate to a broad framework that explains the social functions and meanings of public spaces. I discuss how perceptions of self and others, in both the economic and cultural senses, act as essential components of urban experience. Through these discussions, this concluding chapter lays out the opportunities and limits of studying public spaces as a means of understanding social relations in changing urban contexts, and it suggests potential paths for future research.

This chapter provides an overview of Tehran’s urban development and shows how the city’s growth has been influenced by natural settings, cultural ideals, and economic and political processes. I explain the class structure of the city (moving from the north to the south, one perceives a gradual shift from wealthier neighborhoods to poorer ones) and its historical and geographical evolution. With an emphasis on grand urban visions, I discuss how natural, historical, and political forces have contributed to the unequal structure of the city.

This book is about an ontological shift in the conceptualization and representation of the spatiality of Tehran, the capital of Iran, as the outcome of the formation and establishment of a novel spatial discourse. Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, this novel discourse sidelined the indigenous knowledge of Iranian urban society and the state and became the legitimate sources of imagining and producing the spatiality of Iranian cities. It transformed the spaces of the social, political, and economic processes in Tehran and elsewhere in the country. This shift was ontological and spatial, meaning that it brought about novel frameworks for urban society and the state to produce the spaces of their daily practices and strategies. This shift was discursive, leading to the abandonment of the traditional and indigenous spatial understanding in a long process of knowledge production; society and the state internalized a novel form of knowledge as the authentic source of producing the spatiality of social, economic, and political relations. This shift targeted both the state and society; it was top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. As the book suggests, since the mid-nineteenth century, this new spatial discourse has reproduced Tehran; the contours of the current city should be read through the analysis of this discursive transformation.

The 1870s expansion of Tehran was a vehicle for the spatial commodification of vast sections of the new city. Through this expansion, the Qajar court managed to produce the new spatiality as a lucrative commodity. The commodification of the city accompanied an unprecedented socio-spatial bureaucratization. A combination of several factors –from preventing outbreaks of diseases to organizing a novel relationship between the state and society – helped the state to stretch its control and dominance over the spatiality of the city. In its initial steps, these early attempts were the manifestations of a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state, society, and the city. To use Lefebvre’s concept of abstract spaces, Tehran went through a process of spatial abstraction particularly after its 1870s expansion. This chapter demonstrates how this expansion followed delicate economic objectives, and how the Qajar court had pursued this commodification process through its spatial policies long before the actual expansion of Tehran. Afterwards, the chapter focuses on the bureaucratization process and argues that, from the first half of the nineteenth century, the state had already generated spatial strategies to prevent cholera outbreaks in the city. The chapter moves to the examination of the spatial strategies of the state for the legitimation of its power and demonstrates how the expansion of Tehran helped the state to stretch its spatial control and domination beyond the confines of the royal compound. It continues with the study of the social life and spaces of the new neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century and finds that the Qajar elites produced semi-private spaces modeled after European social space. Finally, the chapter concludes with the investigation of the spatial strategies of the state and the impact of the two processes of commodification and bureaucratization on Tehran.

My objective in this chapter is to investigate these questions through the examination of the relationship between society and the city in nineteenth-century Tehran. This relationship focuses on the spatiality of ordinary people’s daily lives. Social theories of space have become a common domain for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers as a means to investigate socio-spatial processes. In this chapter, I unfold this theoretical framework and explain the impact of the spatial approach on social and historical examinations of cities before presenting the main empirical analysis of daily life and social spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran. My objective is to socialize the spatial analysis and, more importantly, to spatialize the social analysis. This chapter focuses on the relationship between urban society and Tehran in the nineteenth century. It examines people’s everyday lives in the city and their religious and non-religious spatial practices. It investigates various social spaces of day-to-day interactions in the city. I start by presenting a social analysis of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century. Afterwards, I examine social spaces in two main categories: spaces based on religious gatherings and spaces based on nonreligious practices. This chapter ends with the examination of women’s social life and spaces in the city.