Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in Late Twentieth-Century Iran: A Vital Past

What is the relationship between development as a globalizing project and the production of cultural specificities in developmental contexts? Utilising an architectural lens, this book illustrates how development instigates interest in the past and in the process, creates heritage. It show multiple uses of the past and their contestation in highly fluid social contexts. -- .

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Development, architecture, and heritage: The formation of a collective imagination 1 A vital past: Engaging nostalgia 2 Canvassing a future: The international congresses of architecture in Iran and the transnational search for identity 3 Heritage in the everyday: Housing and collective identity before 1979 4 Forming a future from the past: Realizing an everyday Islamic identity 5 Forming a national image through public projects – The Shahyad Arya-Mehr Tower 6 Tehran’s reluctant urban centre: Representing the national capital Conclusion: Design as the mediator of development and heritage Bibliography

About the Author :
Ali Mozaffari is ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship & Globalisation at Deakin University Nigel Westbrook is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia

Review :
'Contestations, appropriations, and politicizations are increasingly becoming front and center in the conversation about heritage. This book is particularly valuable since it tackles these issues in the context of a modernizing Muslim society. Insightful and cross-disciplinary it opens new perspectives on issues that reach far beyond the borders of Iran.' Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 'The last decades of the twentieth century, encompassing the late Pahlavi regime and the early years after the Revolution, is still a poorly understood period in Iranian architecture. In their new book, Ali Mozaffari and Nigel Westbrook use notions of development and heritage to unravel architecture’s complex intentions and practices. Avoiding more polemical accounts, the authors guide us with insight and wisdom through this fascinating period.' Mark Crinson, Professor of Architectural History, Birkbeck, University of London