From the so-called Islamic City to the Contemporary Urban Morphology: the Historic Core of Kermanshah City in Iran as a Case Study (original) (raw)

2017, Proceedings 24th ISUF 2017 - City and Territory in the Globalization Age

The modernization of a second order city The Iranian cities like all cities in Muslim world were influenced by western modernization and had major changes. Before 1920 the traditional Iranian cities, including Kermanshah, shared the components and spatial relations of the so-called Islamic cities: city wall and gate, madrasih (religious school), hammam (public bath), bazaar (commercial district), citadel (governmental palace), Friday mosque, Mahallas (residential neighborhoods) that were divided often based on different ethnics or religions criteria and hierarchical networks of winding alleys and the numerous cul-desacs that link the houses to the city center (Borumand, 2009; Kheirabadi, 2000). In 1920 this traditional pattern experienced the beginning of new phase in urban and structure change (Ehlers and Floor, 1993; Marefat, 1988). The first steps for modernizing of Iran, especially Tehran as the capital, were taken during the regimen of Naser-ed-Din Shah in Qajar dynasty by the 1870s after his visit of Paris (Katouzian, 1996). But it was not fundamental until the early 1920s with monarchy of Reza Shah during Pahlavi dynasty (Habibi, 2006). The importance of urban modernization study in Iranian-Islamic Abstract. Pre-1920 cities in Iran were characterized by a number of features shared by other traditional cities of Islamic world. Although often criticized for their Eurocentric nature, the features of "Islamic city" can be useful as starting point to analyze the modernization process of these traditional cities and their crucial impact in their structural transformation. As the traditional cities of the Islamic world have been much more studied than the twentieth century changes that have transformed them, we need more holistic and integrated understanding about the changes derived from the modernization process. To explore the broad and widespread of their metamorphosis, it is more enlightening if we study second order cities, rather than studying the transformations of major capitals such as Cairo, Istanbul or Teheran, where interventions are more exceptional and more rhetorical. Therefore, this paper aims to study the historic core of Kermanshah city, to understand the link between urban and social transformations due to modernization process by tracing it historically. We will focus, particularly, on studying the stages of urban transformation and changes of urban morphology as well as conflicts and differences between traditional urban features with the modern ones. In other words, we are interested in understanding how traditional morphology and structure of residential and commercial zone are affected by the opening of new and wide boulevards in course of modernisation process, and how these changes influence everyday people life.