We begin with the origin of the city/countryside dialectic and review the historical literature on the nature of the city. We then introduce the contradictions between urban and rural, acknowledging the important concept of the metabolic rift, followed by Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the “right to the city.” Finally, the analytical framing of popular rural social movements is discussed in the rural/urban contradictory framing.

This introductory chapter reflects on the importance of monuments, topography and symbolic space in the production of Augustan ideology, both reviewing the manifold ways in which the princeps sought to impose himself on the urban and Italian landscape, and seeking to contextualise these within wider patterns in the literary and cultural construction of space in the first century BC. After a brief review of the ‘spatial turn’ in Classical Studies, it goes on to identify six broad categories within which the construction and representation of space in ancient literary texts has typically been considered in recent scholarship: the relation between written and physical cities; the relation between space and hegemonic power; the contrasting paradigms of hodological and cartographic space; the relation between centre and periphery; space as a site of cultural memory; and the conceptualisation of poetics in spatial terms. A final section traces some key themes that emerge from the volume’s remaining chapters and relates them to these wider trends in Classical Studies.

The 1870s expansion of Tehran was a vehicle for the spatial commodification of vast sections of the new city. Through this expansion, the Qajar court managed to produce the new spatiality as a lucrative commodity. The commodification of the city accompanied an unprecedented socio-spatial bureaucratization. A combination of several factors –from preventing outbreaks of diseases to organizing a novel relationship between the state and society – helped the state to stretch its control and dominance over the spatiality of the city. In its initial steps, these early attempts were the manifestations of a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state, society, and the city. To use Lefebvre’s concept of abstract spaces, Tehran went through a process of spatial abstraction particularly after its 1870s expansion. This chapter demonstrates how this expansion followed delicate economic objectives, and how the Qajar court had pursued this commodification process through its spatial policies long before the actual expansion of Tehran. Afterwards, the chapter focuses on the bureaucratization process and argues that, from the first half of the nineteenth century, the state had already generated spatial strategies to prevent cholera outbreaks in the city. The chapter moves to the examination of the spatial strategies of the state for the legitimation of its power and demonstrates how the expansion of Tehran helped the state to stretch its spatial control and domination beyond the confines of the royal compound. It continues with the study of the social life and spaces of the new neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century and finds that the Qajar elites produced semi-private spaces modeled after European social space. Finally, the chapter concludes with the investigation of the spatial strategies of the state and the impact of the two processes of commodification and bureaucratization on Tehran.

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.