Assessment of Urban Texture Demolition and Renewal Process

In the gradual evolution process of the cities, buildings as the components of urban textures undergo multiple changes including repairing and regeneration or demolition and renewal. Subsequently, the textures will go through changes in terms of their physical configuration and contents and their identity will be either consolidated or redefined. The interference of exogenous and irrational variables in the evolution process would throw off the sustainable trajectory of changes and result in a spatial product which has no sensible relation to the necessities, requirements or logical order of changes. The widespread and speculative process of demolition and renewal of buildings in Tehran which consequently has resulted in a loss of identity in the urban textures, is an example of such spatial evolutions which calls for a precise study of the dimensions and reasons contributing to this phenomenon. This article reviews two main dimensions of this spatial process in the city of Tehran in the 90s and the 2000s. Firstly the significant number of demolitions and renewals in Tehran and its economic and financial forces are analyzed in a macro scale. In other words this question is queried that the abundance of production of physical space is relying on what incomes or financial revenues produced in the city of Tehran? In this regard the relation between the national oil revenue and the fluctuations in the scale of constructions is pointed out. Moreover, the effects of urban governance decisions on intensifying or balancing the widespread process of demolition and renewal will be analyzed, through questioning whether the urban governance takes an active or passive stance toward this process. Reviewing these two dimensions and considering the characteristics of this speculative trend demonstrates that the demolition and renewal of buildings and construction of new ones has a direct relation with the fluctuations in oil prices. Furthermore the textures resulted from this ongoing process not only do not possess a new characteristic or identity but also have lost the identity they had carried through time. Neglecting the identification of the causes and roots of this speculative process will result in dissipation of national capital along with a reduction in the quality of spaces both in terms of physical dimensions and identity.