By utilizing the notions of the communal sphere and segmented urban society developed in Chapter 1, this chapter investigates the relationship between society and the state as mediated through the spatiality of the city. It studies Iranians’ political practices in public spaces that contested the state during the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution. It seeks to better understand the troubled relationship between society and the state and its geographical manifestations. As a result of this troubled relationship, Iranian society managed to delimitate the absolutist monarchy and bind it to certain political and social norms. Two theoretical concepts stand out in this context: the public sphere and the political public space. This chapter deals with the relationship between these two concepts in a different geography, beyond the dominance of Western European and North American narratives. Drawing in part on Jürgen Habermas’s discussion in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, here I understand the public sphere as a medium between society and the state that enables the former to exert influence on the latter. Political public spaces provide unique platforms for people’s collective political activities, and do so in ways that intersect with other aspects of urban life.

Aiming to highlight the agency of ordinary people in Tehran’s transformation, I mostly scrutinized the shifts in two seemingly independent but inherently interconnected socio-spatial relationships: the spatiality of social life and social movements. Throughout the main storyline of this book, I illustrated that the transformations of these two relationships shared four common characteristics. First, there is an apparent departure from communal to class-based identities. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the social spaces of nineteenth-century Tehran were the outcome of the shared communal identity of their users; people’s communal ties colored coffeehouses, bathhouses, takīyyihs, and zūrkhānihs. In the same vein, communal ties played the main role in the formation of political public spaces and the public sphere during the Constitutional Revolution. However, the structural transformation of Iranian urban society resulted in the demise of the communal sphere and the rise of class consciousness based on shared economic and political interests. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, the modern middle class produced the main social spaces of mid-twentieth-century northern Tehran. Chapter 6 illustrated the role of this class alongside the urban working class in the production of political public spaces of the city in the 1940s and the early 1950s.

From the late eighteenth century, various sections of Iranian society, particularly the court and the elites, developed an acquaintance with European and American cities, their social lives, and spaces through direct visits, postcards, geographical texts, pictures, and other means of knowledge transfer. The analysis of Iranians’ wonder-like appreciations of Western cities helps to illustrate how this novel spatial knowledge determined the future of Iranian cities. This chapter suggests that the post-1870s spatial transformations of Tehran had been incubated in Iranian society – at least among the elites and the Qajar court – for decades. I argue that these transformations were the outcome of the gradual formation and development of a spatial discourse, rather than an abrupt change and a sudden disjuncture from the past. By adopting the Foucauldian conception of discourse, this chapter focuses on Iranians’ acquaintance with European cities, their social lives, and social spaces. The exposure to new ideas was not limited to the political landscape and had an impact on various aspects of Iranian society. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the growing relationship between Iran and European countries generated new forms of knowledge and transferred them to Iranian society. From culinary culture to the establishment of a new educational system, and from painting and theater to industrial and monetary organizations, various aspects of this impact have been investigated before.

My objective in this chapter is to investigate these questions through the examination of the relationship between society and the city in nineteenth-century Tehran. This relationship focuses on the spatiality of ordinary people’s daily lives. Social theories of space have become a common domain for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers as a means to investigate socio-spatial processes. In this chapter, I unfold this theoretical framework and explain the impact of the spatial approach on social and historical examinations of cities before presenting the main empirical analysis of daily life and social spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran. My objective is to socialize the spatial analysis and, more importantly, to spatialize the social analysis. This chapter focuses on the relationship between urban society and Tehran in the nineteenth century. It examines people’s everyday lives in the city and their religious and non-religious spatial practices. It investigates various social spaces of day-to-day interactions in the city. I start by presenting a social analysis of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century. Afterwards, I examine social spaces in two main categories: spaces based on religious gatherings and spaces based on nonreligious practices. This chapter ends with the examination of women’s social life and spaces in the city.

Chapter 6 dissects the drivers of Tunisian immigration politics before, during and after the 2011 regime change, focusing on the reasons behind restrictive policy continuity in the face of international and civil society efforts to initiate a liberal reform. I show that while foreign policy interests, the role of national identity narratives, and the imperative to secure state power over immigration have remained constants in Tunisian immigration policymaking, the role and weight of domestic factors such as public opinion and civil society activism in public policymaking has fundamentally changed after 2011. Yet, instead of triggering liberal reform in line with the revolutionary spirit, democratization has compelled political elites to put ‘Tunisians first’ and to sideline issues of racism and immigration. Ultimately, the bottom-up and external pressures that emerged after 2011 only led to minor, mostly informal policy changes that have not affected the restrictive core of Tunisia’s immigration regime in the first decade of democratization.