Children of Paradise (34 page)

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G
HOLAMHOSSEIN
K
ARBASCHI
called for flowers. For Tehran had not only a budget shortfall: it had a beauty shortfall. Flowers would not house the homeless or purify the air, but they would remind Tehranis of what their city could be. In the spring of 1990, shortly after assuming office, Karbaschi asked Tehranis to put flowerpots at their doorsteps, at home and at work. Outside homes and shops, offices and hotels, the city’s residents obliged the new mayor with displays of color and greenery. This would be the least of all the things Karbaschi did—the least permanent, the least controversial, the least expensive. But it was symbolic.

Before Karbaschi, hardly anyone inside or outside Tehran knew or cared who the city’s mayor was. Thirty-five, slender, and square-jawed, with wire-rimmed glasses and a penetrating gaze, Karbaschi was to transform the Iranian capital so profoundly, for better or worse, that even his critics would call him the Iranian Robert Moses. He was a celebrity, with public fans and detractors. People instantly knew him on the street. Part cleric and part technocrat—the son of an ayatollah from Qom, he’d cut his seminary studies short to become governor of Isfahan in 1984—he was a manager, a businessman, and a powerful politician who attended presidential cabinet meetings.

The new mayor had a mission that his predecessors had not shouldered. A 1988 law required Iranian cities to become financially self-supporting. In a country with only minimal taxation, this law meant that the cities had either to make a new compact with their residents by raising taxes or to find something valuable they could sell.

If Karbaschi had raised property taxes in Tehran, he might have supplied the city with a stable economic foundation for the foreseeable future. He would also have taken a bold step toward democratizing Iran. To raise taxes, Karbaschi would have needed to negotiate with the public, to explain his plans, garner support, and be accountable to taxpayers for how that money was spent. These were steps the central government had never taken. Iran was a classic rentier state (the term was coined by an Iranian scholar in 1970): oil provided the central government with a stream of revenue that did not depend on the productivity or cooperation of its citizenry. Karbaschi did not alter this arrangement. Instead, he replicated it. Tehran might not have had its own oil supply, but Karbaschi saw that it had a more ingenious resource at hand: density.

The Gruen plan was a dead letter. It imagined an impossible city by the lights of the early 1990s, with buildings no more than two stories high. But precisely for this reason the plan, which was still on the books, was a treasure chest.

Karbaschi sold developers the right to exceed, sometimes by as much as 400 percent, the density limits set by the Gruen plan and revised slightly upward since. The municipality—the very authority charged with enforcing the Comprehensive Plan—raised its revenue by selling the right to violate that plan. When a firm presented Karbaschi with a new comprehensive plan for the city, he rejected it. He was better off keeping the old plan, which no one expected him to enforce, and exempting developers from it for a fee.

Karbaschi started with the city’s north. New high-rises transformed Tehran’s skyline without regard for earthquake safety codes—Tehran sits astride major fault lines—or neighborhood cohesion. Modern, featureless, built, like everything in Tehran, of pale brown concrete or pale brown
brick, they crowded into narrow alleyways and jostled one another loomingly close, creating dense, narrow warrens of steel-framed towers, each built on its developer’s volition, without regulation or plan, without open vistas or relief. At times the municipality even partnered with private developers and profited from the sale of luxury apartments in these new buildings. The construction sector boomed, becoming a major employer and economic engine for the city. And real estate speculation followed. The city faced a housing crisis—hundreds of thousands of families still needed adequate shelter—and yet, as many as 10 percent of Tehran’s housing units stood vacant, priced out of the market, built and purchased only for resale.

These were bonanza years for people who already owned their homes and could sell the vertical space above their dwellings. But for renters, life only grew more difficult. Speculation tripled housing costs, including rents, even while the average apartment size declined by half. Working people struggled to afford life in the capital. Many fled for the unregulated developments that fringed the city’s outer boundaries. Inside Tehran, there weren’t enough parking spaces, sewer lines, or garbage trucks. People complained. But in just two years
Karbaschi quintupled the city’s budget. Altogether, from 1990 to 1998, he raised $6 billion, three quarters of it from the sale of density. What he did with that money again made Tehran a showcase for the country.

Karbaschi invested in parks, freeways, billboards, malls, cultural centers, forest plantations, sports centers, and a glossy four-color newspaper. The pale brown city burst into color.
Karbaschi created six hundred new parks, three times the number there had been before; he turned thirteen thousand vacant lots into recreation areas; and he removed the fences from around the parks that already existed. Karbaschi’s parks had benches and playgrounds, basins and fountains, kiosks and food stalls, and they accommodated everyone from old men playing backgammon to teenagers surreptitiously exchanging love notes.

Karbaschi did not redress the city’s polarities—on the contrary, he was often accused of privileging the north with more green space and luxury development—but he linked the city’s north and south with fast-moving
freeways and renewed progress on its metro system. The neighborhood of Naziabad, in the slum-ridden south of Tehran, housed the city’s slaughterhouse. The area around it, fetid with animal parts, had long been a petri dish for urban blight, including crime and prostitution. Karbaschi closed the abattoir and turned its grounds into a magnificent cultural center, with theaters, cafés, galleries, classrooms, a library, gymnasia, an ice-skating rink, and a swimming pool set around grassy lawns. The Bahman Cultural Center became a destination, not only for South Tehrani youth, but for North Tehrani elites, who flocked there for film screenings and weekly concerts.

More even than the highways that physically united the city’s hemispheres, the migration of concert- and filmgoers across neighborhoods once stigmatized as impassable suggested that Tehran could yet be a single city. The Bahman Cultural Center was just the first of 138 such centers the municipality founded under Karbaschi. Some hard-liners disapproved of the Tehran mayor’s incursion into the country’s cultural life.
Ayatollah Khamenei warned Karbaschi against the erosion of Tehran’s “Islamic identity.” But the city’s cultural centers and parks also relieved pressures that were building on the Islamic Republic. For, by accident or design, the revolutionary regime had cultivated a garden it was ill-equipped to tend: young people, educated women, and new members of the middle class all challenged the Islamic Republic that had nurtured their growth. Karbaschi had found ways to embrace these demographics, even to harness their vital energy to the city he ran.

After Karbaschi, Iran’s urban life would never be the same. Iranians who left their country at the time of the revolution would pepper the world literary market with memoirs of life in a Tehran that no longer existed—one where alleys of low-rise dwellings were like shared compounds, with neighbors entwined in one another’s daily lives and rooftops where families slept on summer nights. The growing sea of poverty to the city’s south also had its place in that exile literature—an ill omen of social unrest, the tale of revolution foretold. By the end of the Karbaschi era, Tehran had become something at once more familiar outside and less familiar within, a megacity with teetering high-rises helter-skelter and pollution to rival
Jakarta’s and Beijing’s. The new circumstances called not only for a new literature but for a new approach to the very structures of city governance.

Everything had its price. At the bottom of Karbaschi’s achievement was the Comprehensive Plan he had reviled. Tehran’s economy was built on a commodity that was all but imaginary: the density Gruen had not foreseen, delivered with deliberate opacity into unaccountable hands. The city appeared to be working—better, perhaps, than it ever had. But to keep working, it had to keep on climbing into vertical space, haphazard and unregulated, in partnership with speculators and in excess of its plans.

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T
HE REFORMISTS WHO ACCOMPANIED
Mohammad Khatami to power set their sights on city government. Here was an open field, they surmised, where they could seed new democratic institutions—flowers within flowers, crosscut by the green valleys of federal government.

Among President Mohammad Khatami’s advisers, Saeed Hajjarian carried special weight. A touch of humor in his eyes set off the stern gravity of his jowls. His large gold-rimmed glasses rested on gray-stubbled cheeks even back when his mustache and closely cropped hair were still black. He was an intellectual who spoke of political theory like a science that could be applied—as though democratic reform were a series of chemical reactions Iran could fastidiously produce.

The term of art that he and his fellow reformists used was “political development.” Iran had experienced only authoritarian government. It needed accountable political institutions, but it also needed constructively engaged citizens. “Political development” referred to the cultivation of both. And so Hajjarian’s reform was not a matter merely of replacing authoritarian personalities with democratic ones. He envisioned building a vast political infrastructure that would begin with something Iran had never had: local politics.

Hajjarian pointed to a provision in Iran’s constitution that allowed for directly elected, autonomous city councils. Since the revolution, this provision had sat on the books much as the Gruen plan had, unrealized and
unenforced. Now Hajjarian insisted that holding city council elections would push the entire country down the path of political development. The campaigns would furnish a training ground for more than a hundred thousand new politicians who would otherwise never find their way onto the scene. They would also give Iranians a taste of competitive democracy and self-government.

Karbaschi had been a technocrat bent on getting his city working again, even if his policies were implemented through opaque and authoritarian channels. Khatami and his allies were cut from a decidedly different cloth. They sought to transform less the physical space around them than the very institutions of power. When Hajjarian looked upon the teeming, vibrant capital city, his eye fell not on the mechanics of running or planning a city of Tehran’s size but on the inadequate and antiquated structure of its government. Accountability and transparency were afterthoughts to Karbaschi; for Hajjarian, they were the whole game.

Iranian society, Hajjarian observed, crackled with activity, energy, and amorphous discontent. Elected council members could absorb some of that energy and channel it into a constructive relationship with the state. The Iranian public would begin to organize into interest groups, civic organizations, and eventually political parties. To start with, Hajjarian theorized, you really needed only two. People would decide which party came closer to representing them, and then press and shape it to their needs. More parties would follow.

None of this had much to do with the way Iranian cities had ever been run. But Hajjarian was nothing if not visionary. Karbaschi, he told an interviewer, had managed Tehran in a corporate fashion that favored elites and viewed the citizenry “
primarily as sources of revenue.” Hajjarian envisioned a city that taxed its residents instead and, in return, included them in its governance.

Thanks to Hajjarian, Khatami made holding city council elections a campaign promise, and he began to prepare the ground for them when he took office in 1997. The reformists set up a party, called Mosharekat-e Iran-e Islami, or the Islamic Iran Participation Front, to field candidates.

Mosharekat would become Iran’s national party of reform. But it began as a local initiative with a strikingly vague identity. Mosharekat’s members did not take a united position on the matter of selling density or articulate a better solution to city financing; it did not have a program for earthquake-proofing the precarious, overpopulated capital or for better regulating the construction that had become the city’s economic engine. These and other issues would come to divide and embitter the reformists in local government, leading to embarrassment and failure. For when they came to the Tehran City Council, having staked so many of their political hopes upon it, they seemed for all the world like a philosophy department that had been placed in charge of a foundry.

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B
EFORE THE ELECTION WAS EVEN HELD
, in April 1998, Mayor Karbaschi was arrested on charges of embezzlement, misconduct, and mismanagement. His real crime, many reformists speculated, was supporting Khatami’s presidential campaign, in which Karbaschi’s final push had made all the difference. For a few days the mayor conducted the city’s official business from behind bars. Demonstrations erupted on his behalf. The charges were byzantine and hardly incredible, but Karbaschi was wildly popular, and his arrest smacked of politics.

Karbaschi’s trial opened in June. The judge was also the prosecutor. The entire proceeding was televised. “The Karbaschi Show,” as it became known, was one of the most popular television programs in Iranian history. For the sake of viewers at home, the mayor requested that the trial be aired at times when it wouldn’t conflict with morning prayers or World Cup soccer matches. When a trial date conflicted with Iran’s match with the United States, the court agreed to reschedule it.

At the Imam Khomeini Judicial Complex, in a brown-paneled room with auditorium-style seats, the judge sat onstage, at a grand desk, while Karbaschi and his lawyers squeezed into wooden chairs below the proscenium. Karbaschi, gaunt and angry with a lock of lank hair falling over his forehead, was not easily cowed. He sparred directly with the judge, his characteristic
expression dour and intense, chin lowered, head tilted, a hard, skeptical gaze directed upward and sidelong at his interlocutor. “I don’t accept any of the charges,” he said on the trial’s opening day. “They are all lies.” The courtroom was packed, with several hundred more onlookers watching the trial on screens outside.