| God Knows I Tried. An experimental approach to orientalism and the practice of writing. (excerpts) |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
In 1786, the Qajar clan that just gained power over Iran decides to settle down in the remote little town of Tehran, near the city of Rey. With their new country estate, the formerly nomadic Qajars revive the regionís interest in this sleepy hollow, nestled between the desert to the south and the Alborz mountain range to its north, where the northeastern capital of the Arab empire had once been (it had been destroyed by the nomadic Mongols in 1221). Tehran opens its own bazaar in 1809, and eventually outnumbers Rey in the 1860s, when it counts over a hundred thousand inhabitants. By the 1930s, it reaches the size of present-day Geneva, and for forty-odd years, from this point on, its population doubles with every decade: reaching the one million mark in the mid-fifties, it now counts roughly a dozen million inhabitants. It ís worth noting that just about 95% of the entire city was built after the advent of the International Style in architecture. That said, what exactly could the term "city of Tehran" signify, let alone its "stored imagination", "history", "identity" or "spirit", if over the past 25 years or so, eight million people joined the preceding four (themselves mostly newcomers). Tehran aside, this sort of urban condition is nothing unique in a global context, e.g. the Shinsan area off Macao went from 200 villagers in 1980 to about 2 million in 1996. |
