From 'Café Romance' to 'Darvazeh Ghar'; strolling through the streets of Tehran's District 12
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| Cafe Romance, photographed by author |
From 'Café Romance' to 'Darvazeh Ghar'; strolling through the streets of Tehran's District 12
Mahsa Alami
Her fingers full of silver rings, her lips shines
with a light red lipstick, her hair dies in blond, she is the manager of the
café Romance who showing off an infinite row of her regular teeth enveloped
with a sweet smile: ‘smoking or non-smoking area?’. Seems to be in her
forties, she is gliding around her café taking customers to their seats with
her long Tiered Gypsy skirt that is short enough to
unveil her Giveh (Persian traditional shoes). The
old style dark wood chairs and tables were decorated by a couple of books of Sadeq
Hedayat, who was the herald and pillar author of literary criticism of
modernity in the realm of fiction (Milani, 2004). The café was in fact an old
traditional Iranian house (room after another room) which was renovated eight
years ago. A group of teenagers rehearsing opera in one of the rooms for their
next week performance in the café, ‘since four years ago they are performing
opera on the last Wednesday of each month’ said the manager.
In the rooms, a soft jazz music satisfies guests, young boys and girls, who
are sitting chick to chick on the sofa or on the chairs, talking or discussing
a project on their Mac laptops. A long list of variety of Iranian teas and
Turkish coffees, sitting next to Fettuccine Alfredo or the Caesar Cardini’s
famous invention in 1924: Caesar Salad. Right outside the café (in Ferdowsi Square in
Tehran Region 12) the city looks embroiled and noisy crammed with brokers
who assimilate the business life into the sidewalks.
The massive reconstruction of the 17-storey dilapidated Plasco shopping centre
reminds everyone the national tragedy of the building collapsed in
fire in January 2017 in which ‘200 firefighters were battled the blaze and
trapped inside the building for several hours before it fell to the ground in a
matter of seconds’ (Metabunk, 2017). Meanwhile, a circle of brokers crowded
around a stranger, offering her dollar, shouting rates. The growing heat of the
late August afternoon, the crowd and the noises of brokers in the pedestrian thrust
people to disappear into Metro station.
Tehran’s metro is a playful underground city where the sheer flow of public life intermixes the realm of the city with the narrow realm of the train. The train as a public domain commingled people in single containers, yet voluntarily separating them by gender. In a sense that spontaneity of social life, which is gained in the company of others, can be released in mixed wagons where men and women’s bodies bear standing or sitting next to each other, but not in women-only wagons. The women-only wagon has another form of playful public domain: the zone of comfort.
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| Women Only Wagon, photographed by author |
‘The next station: Imam Khomeini’,
a voice announced. Sank into their seats, tiding their colourful scarfs nicely,
two old women were drinking a bottle of orange juice while laughing on their
memories about public bath: ‘we had to take so much food with ourselves
since we wanted to stay till afternoon’ and continue whispering. Probably
they were reminding each other that how in old days married and experienced women were
choosing their brides in the public bathes since they could see the young
girl’s bodies naked’ (Ahmadi, 2014). Four girls sitting in front of them
pretending to mind their own work through using their smart phones. A feeling
of comfort arouses which forms a realm of privacy within the bigger public
realm. Here, one forgets the Islamic regulations of the country and lets her
scarf to fall off on her shoulders, braiding or combing the hair, make up or even
change the scarf and their manto (a robe to cover the body). ‘I told her that you can do anything you want but not allowing him to take advantage
of you, keep your dignity’ she finished braiding her long hair at last, turning
her head around looking for a hawker who is selling elastic hair band. The
vivid mobile temporal market of the women-only wagons offers a pleasure of easy
shopping to the passengers. Regardless of their gender, saleswomen and salesmen
(the only men who are allowed to enter the women-only wagons) are circulating through
the crowd selling their inexpensive products. Some saleswomen wearing pollution
mask in order to not get recognised by others. Carrying their items in a
suitcase, facilitated with the latest technology of mobile card reader, they
thrive their business by hanging their goods from the horizontal handrails to
tempt passengers into buying. The rhythm of their voices is turning the wagon
to a theatrical stage where a repeatable speech melts the distance between the
speaker and the audience;
‘Ladies! This new mascara is made in
Turkey not in China, its price is 10,000 Toomans in bazaar while I am selling
it for only 5,000 Toomans’,
‘Ladies! Wooden set of forks and knives,
is all you need in the kitchen just for 10,000 Toomans’,
‘Ladies! Let me apply this new
technology of hair removal on your skin’,
‘Dearest ladies! All sizes of new
bralettes in all colors, without wires and prevents you from breast cancer’.
Although the hawkers are not
receiving equal attention, the high level of interaction between them and
others, regardless of social class differentiation, advances the sociability of
the space. However temporal, the train’s women-only wagon, celebrates an irregular,
informal, non-linear urban form which stands for the host of face-to-face loose
and free interactions among people. ‘The next station: Panzdah-e Khordad’
(accessing the Grand Bazaar, the name of the station recalls the demonstrations
of June 5 and 6, also called the events of June 1963 in which people protested
in Iran against the arrest of Ayatollah Khomeini). Everyone gets ready to get
off the train. Passing through the escalators, people hearing vague noises from
outside the station. By taking each step the noises getting loader. By the last
step it turns to a jumble of noises from invasive traffic, to men’s shouting:
‘Taxi;
The best fabrics in the city;
Persian rug;
Cotton candy;
Handcraft framed silk rug;
Moslem kabab;
Dollar;
Dried nuts;
Tabriz leather
shoes...’
Seems all Tehran is relocated in
Grand Bazaar. The main access of the Grand Bazaar: Panzdah-e Khordad Street was
pedestrianised in 2008 (ISNA,
2008). Here people orients themselves by the noises, smells and their vision
or simply by bumping into other strangers and asking addresses. As Benjamin (1997,
p: 169) declares ‘the stamp of the definitive is avoided here’. Buildings, all
shops or storage, are boxes in two stories which are being used as a popular stage
for daily commercial contact of people; the open flow between the inside and
outside improvising the opportunities for the spontaneous interaction and the ‘casual
physical mixing of people’ (Sennett, 2018; 223). The street life in front of
the shops renders a porous relations between the solid (the buildings) and the
void (street, square and alleys).
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| Panzda-e Khordad promenade, photographed by author |
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| Panzdah-e Khordad promenade, photographed by author |
Walking through Panzdah-e Khordad
promenade, there is Sabze Meydan (Green Square) in front of the main entrance
of Grand Bazaar, known as the first square of Tehran, used as a place to plant
greenery during Zandieh dynasty (1750-1794) and early Qajar era (1794-1925).
However it was served as the main place for the public execution as well, until
Amir Kabir (the chief minister to Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar) transmitted the
executions to another place and dedicated the square to daily-based gatherings
of people or ritual ceremonies. Keeping the same nature as a gathering place, today Sabze
Meydan is functioning like a stock market as well, full of currency exchange rate
traders and buyers. On the south part of the square, the crowd
flows into a small whole; the main entrance of Grand Bazaar. Passing or intending
to enter, people are stopped before the entrance to observe the infinite number
of bodies mingling, appearing or disappearing in front of their very eyes: the
bodies that ‘subsuming into the world of flux’ (W. Frank, 1991). The flux world
of bazaar, the unrest ambience of a lunch-time Saturday, encouraging
people to be part of a common everyday task:
‘When I was a
teenage girl, my mom was taking me to bazaar every time she wanted to go there,
so she wouldn’t be alone by herself. It was very masculine. Since we couldn’t
go to a restaurant there, my mom was making sandwiches to have on the way in
mini-bus from Tajrish to bazaar. In bazaar she was shy to ask the salesman a
bra for herself, so she would lie to say she needs a bra for her fat old mom
staying at home’, said a 63-year-old woman who lives in Tajrish, North Tehran.
‘I
was my father’s assistant since I was 4. He took me to restaurant here every
day. Taking a whole pors (a huge helping of a dish) for himself and a
posht-band (half of a helping dish) for me. But it wasn’t enough and I could
never ask him to get me another one because that was the tradition of bazaar;
shagerd (the assistant) should eat less than oosta (the master)’, said a 73-year-old rug seller, in the Grand Bazaar.
‘In old days, bazaar had a specific respect and
culture; bazaaries were pulling up the shop’s shutters by whispering ‘Bismillah-ir-rahman-ir-rahim (in the name of God, the merciful, the
compassionate). Also the last two months of the year when
families were getting ready for Nowrouz, bazaar became feminine with Chadori
women, even foreigner women should wear chador back then (worn by Muslim women,
chador is a large piece of cloth wrapped around body leaving only the face
exposed). Whereas now, no one respecting bazaar’s traditions anymore. Women
pouring into bazaar every day by metro with loose hijabs and heavy makeup
talking and laughing to salesmen. Salesmen are not trusting each other
anymore’, a 63-year-old bazaari explained.
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| Sabze Meydan, photographed by author |
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| The Main Entrance of Grand Bazaar, photographed by author |
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| Inside the Grand Bazaar, photographed by author |
As the main witnesses of historical, social and physical changes of
the bazaar, old bazaaries forming the main molecules of the Grand Bazaar’s body:
‘the Hajeb-od-Dowleh Timche (timche: roofed courtyards which confined with
shops or chambers) was in fact a gift from Nasser al-Din Shah’s mother to Hajeb-od-Dowleh
in praising the murder of Amir Kabir’, said a bazaari in his 80s. The
active interaction among social differences creates a new draw based
on the playful display of a collective manner: the ‘inclusion rather than integration’
(Sennett, 2018, 223). When it comes to the confines of the bazaar, there is a
‘closely knit hierarchical organisation in which people’s position and
obligations to one another are defined and recognised (Whyte, 1993). For
example the rich rug seller, who commutes everyday by metro from the most
affluent part of the city, and the cart puller who comes from
poorer part of the city in order to work for those rich bazaaries are representing the segmentation
of social classes which are not mixing at all. It seems the sociability among
people is happening in a transitory space. By concentrating the capital into
the hub of the bazaar and keep it alive to beat as the economic heart of the
country, the social fragmentation intensify on the bazaar’s periphery. The joy
and excitement of being part of the playful life of the Grand Bazaar transformed
into fear by reaching to the southern edges; Mowlavi Street and more towards
south in Harandi neighbourhood. In Mowlavi Street (after 8:00 pm) vendors are
not selling ice-cream or beautiful scarves. Instead they are selling one or two
items which has been either found or robbed from a better place. ‘I was a
teacher when I was young, now look at me selling watches on the street. Everyone becomes a thief these days, people are savage. This city has nothing to be loved, Tehran is always noisy with
traffic horns’, said an old vendor. Sitting on a corner of
the main street, wearing ripped dirty shirts, with their messy hair covering
their face, three men smoking opium pipe. A man feels an obligation to admonish
them. ‘Police is doing nothing here, this part of the city is less being
watched. They only arrest drug dealers, it seems we are not citizens of this
city to be protected by police’ said a young local. Walking towards south, for less than half an hour, the fragmented city falls into a sudden silence; a forgotten land infamously referred to as Darvazeh Ghar (literally, The Cave Gate, aka Harandi neighbourhood). Drug dealers and addicts dominate all narrow
alleys and streets, poverty mirrors the intense social class hierarchy right in neighbouring Grand Bazaar. Whereas in bazaar that the social classes were more
mixed and inclusive here is homogenised and integrated. The framework of
everydayness is slightly still here. Motorcycle echoes its raspy noise passing the
alleys looking suspiciously at strangers who are new to the neighbourhood. The
condition of city dwellers is more degraded here. ‘Tehran forgets us, we are
not part of Tehran, no one cares about us. But every four years during the
presidential election they remember that we are living here spending day and
night on the streets. They bring food and paint the walls. We
have no food, no shelter. Stealing is the only option’, said a homeless in Darvazeh Ghar. The whole urban space is decayed, left the neighbourhood unorganised in a way that its social practice disappears; ‘As a women I’m
not scared of these addicts, I am used to them now after 25 years of raising
here. Every time I’m leaving the house, an addict is the first thing appears on
the frame of the door. I’m sure some people see flowers when they are opening
their doors to the city’, said a 25-year-old woman.
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| a homeless in Harandi's alleys (Darvazeh Ghar), photographed by author |
The everyday narratives of the city of Tehran, can be read through the senses and voices of the main actors of the city; the people. Contemporary urban visionaries such as Sennett believes that the city should be a site for necessarily messy business of living not consisted of codes as means of organising and bringing order to the diversity and livelihood of the street (Sennett, 1976). The question is that how much the means and policies of organising the city, which are set to enhance the functionality of the city, have been fruitful when it comes to deprived and poor areas in cities? Does it mean that a poor, messy, noisy and disordered neighbourhood can be considered as a paradigm for the emergence of what Sennett refers to as 'a site for necessarily messy business of living'?
Notes:
Milani, A (2004) Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran, Washington, D. C: USA.
Tehran Plasco Highrise Fire and Collapse (2017) ‘Metabunk.org’, Available [Online] at: https://www.metabunk.org/tehran-plasco-highrise-fire-and-collapse-9-11-wtc7-wtc1-2-comparisons.t8338/
Ahamadi, M (2014)
Parseh dar Ahvalate Teroon O Teroonia (Loitering around Tehran and
Tehranians), Hila Publication: Tehran.
Sennett, R (2018) Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Penguin Books: UK.
Benjamin, W
(1997) One Way Street and Other Writings, second edition, Verso: New
York.
Sennett, R (2018) Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Penguin
Books: UK.
W. Frank, B (1991) ‘For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review’ in:
Featherstone, M., Hepworth, M. and Turner, B. S. (eds) (1991) The Body:
Social Process and Cultural Theory, SAGE Publication: UK.
Whyte, WF (1993) Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an
Italian Slum, 4th ed, The University of Chicago: USA.
Sennett, R
(1976) The Fall of Public Man, Penguin Books: England.
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