Theocratic authoritarian urbanism and performative right to the city: a case study of Tehran’s City Theatre
Dadpour, Rana (2025) Theocratic authoritarian urbanism and performative right to the city: a case study of Tehran’s City Theatre. City, 29 (5-6).
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Abstract
Authoritarian regimes govern through space as well as law and ideology. This paper examines the enclosure of Tehran’s City Theatre not merely as a preservation measure, but as a spatial intervention that reconfigures access, visibility, and memory in service of theocratic control. In Iran, where public space is tightly bound to moral doctrine and surveillance, urban planning becomes a tool of ideological discipline. Revisiting Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City, this study asks how this right is enacted when institutional participation is foreclosed and dissent is criminalized. Drawing on media archives, architectural histories, and digital traces, it interprets the fencing of the theatre as both material enclosure and symbolic erasure. I argue that under theocratic authoritarianism, the Right to the City is reconfigured—not extinguished—manifesting through gestures of refusal, mnemonic practices, and affective forms of civic presence. Rather than being claimed through institutional channels, the Right to the City emerges through symbolic endurance and spatial storytelling. This reimagining extends Lefebvre’s framework to ideological repressive regimes, where spatial justice unfolds not through participation, but through the performance of presence.
| Item ID: | 88413 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1470-3629 |
| Keywords: | authoritarian urbanism, cultural heritage preservation, public space contestation, Tehran City Theatre, theocratic regime |
| Copyright Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Apr 2026 00:18 |
| FoR Codes: | 44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4404 Development studies > 440404 Political economy and social change @ 60% 33 BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND DESIGN > 3304 Urban and regional planning > 330410 Urban analysis and development @ 40% |
| SEO Codes: | 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1399 Other culture and society > 139999 Other culture and society not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
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