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This book studies the production of urban culture in Tehran after 1979. It analyzes urban resistance and urban processes in underground cultural spaces: bookshops, cafes and art galleries. The intended audience is architects and urban planners interested in socio-political aspects of bottom-up space formation, but also those in humanities and particularly cultural studies. The idea of the book reflects architectural criticism and bottom-up processes of space formation. It analyzes alternative, non-official ways of forming cultural spaces in Tehran and the way they resist formally endorsed culture.
Cafés, bookshops and galleries, each take various and different sets of strategies to constitute their territory and their communities within the city. From temporarily occupying street corners (booksellers) to constitution of an underground network of unfixed meeting points, to using the modern paradigms of ownership and the idea of private property, primarily as a political tool for management, to claim a safe alternative sphere of art, and finally to semiotic spatial codifications of spaces to make them as a safe gathering places taking food as a means. All these three cultural spaces deal with various conditions to form specific forms of resistance practices, throughout processes that leave their spatial traces on the city.
List of contents
I: Introduction.- II: 'The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary'.- Resistance in the city and theories of civil resistance.- City as a ground for plays of power.- Tehran: Power and resistance in the city.- The everyday practice of resistance in the city.- The use of space: Cultural resistance and its allegories in Tehran.- Possibilities and platforms of cultural resistance in Tehran.- III: The Types.- III.1. Alternative Bookshops.- Introduction.- Historiography.- Genealogy of the independent and alternative bookshops in Tehran.- Conflict of capitalism and culture.- Official and alternative bookshops: State-run, Independent, Unofficial and alternative (second-hand) and street.- Underground bookshops (second-hand and street booksellers) as a space of resistance.- Bookshop as a cultural platform for events and actions.- The community of independent underground bookshops.- A map of alternative bookshops in Tehran.- Spatial arrangements of alternative bookshops.- List of Case studies.- III.2. Alternative Cafés.- Introduction.- Historiography of the café in the modernised Tehran.- Genealogy of café as a space of resistance.- Alternative Café, and Coffee Shop.- A map of alternative cafés in Tehran.- Social coordinates of alternative café.- Café as a space of resistance.- Semiotics of architectural elements in café.- Endurance and instability of alternative cafés.- List of Case studies.- III.3. Domestic Art Gallery.- Introduction.- housing the alternative art gallery.- A map of galleries in Tehran.- List of case studies.- Notes.- Bibliography.-Image Credits.
Summary
Fully illustrated book with unique sketches, photographs and illustrationsInvestigates Tehran's new-generation alternative cultural scene through its spatial arrangements and their genealogiesAnalyses in detail the politics and semiotics of space making adopted by the Tehran middle-class urbanite, and unfolds their territory-making strategies
