Ajam Media Collective
Urbanism
“This Place Should Have Been Iran”: Iranian Imaginings in/of Dubai
It is precisely the position between an Iran back home and an Iran abroad, or Iran’s present circumstances and possible future, which informs the sense of displacement so widely shared among Iranian expatriates here. For many Iranians, Dubai’s emergence as a global metropolis is imagined to have resulted, more specifically, from the displacement of Iranian modernity. Continue reading
Seeing Through the Haze: the Politics of Reporting Sanctions and Smog in Tehran
This winter has been a particularly rough one in Tehran. For the third year in a row, air pollution has frequently reached highly unhealthy levels, and schools and other public institutions have closed for days at a time in response. Although Tehran’s air quality has been a major issue for decades, never in recent memory … Continue reading
Towards an Armenian-Iranian Modern: Tehran Church Architecture & Post-Revolutionary Soccer Culture
A post written by Asher Kohn, a law student at the Washington University in St. Louis, focusing on the interplay between theories of jurisprudence and land use in Central Asia. Follow Asher on Twitter @AJKhn. For other articles in Ajam’s series on Armenian-Iranians, check out “A Bridge to New Julfa: A Historical Look at the … Continue reading
Welcome to Qom: City of Samosas and Mullah Factories
The first glimpses of Qom are always a let-down. The approach begins about an hour into the journey south on the Tehran-Qom road, when, after a long stretch of craggy red hills and dusty desert, the bus reaches the top of its last peak. As it passes the summit and begins its final descent, laid … Continue reading
Tehran from 435 Meters: The View from Geisha
Tehran is a city defined by a distinctly Islamic modernity. Although some have said it is not an “interesting” city (as Asef Bayat does in his brilliant article on the city’s urban development originally published in the New Left Review) and others have called it downright ugly, it has always held a special appeal for … Continue reading
Memory and Public Space in Tehran
Tehran is a city infused with politics. Every other street is named after a martyr of the Iran-Iraq war, and the most recent street signs include the word “martyr” in red ink on plaques otherwise uniformly blue and white. The sign below depicts an image of the martyr who gave his name to a square … Continue reading
