Control over the management of urban land use is one the local government powers with the greatest influence on the lives of residents (the other being the budget). Yet in Iran, despite political decentralization, the responsibility for land use rests with the central government and the relevant local branches of the relevant ministries. Chapter 7 reviews the history and legal framework of master planning as well as the economic pressures that led governments to ignore their municipalities’ master plans during the 1990s. The chapter describes how a controversial urban renewal project in the early 1990s led to calls for greater local participation in the development and design of plans by the new elected council. It then examines the effort to give the municipality a greater and indeed determinative role in city planning and land use management during the preparation of the third Tehran Master Plan 2003–2007. A success in the capital city would have created a precedent and model for many other cities. While national media brought the issue to public attention and local representatives had unprecedented involvement in city planning, ultimately the city council failed to achieved more than an informal role with formal responsibility remaining with the central government. The chapter concludes by highlighting the great difficulties and challenges of achieving greater local participation in complex and technical areas of local governance such as land use planning.

Chapter 6 first examines contention over the scope of local political representation. Covering the six rounds of city council elections from the first in 1999 to the sixth in 2021, the chapter shows how candidates and parties have been prevented from participating in city council elections through formal and informal processes of disqualification. It also shows how central government supervision and national administrative law constrains the range of local legislation the city councils can pass. I also show that the intergovernmental system is highly regulated and that central government-appointed representatives have broad power over elected officials at the province, district, city, and village level. This chapter concludes by pointing to the mixed legacy of the local electoral and political system created in 1999. On the one hand, central government bureaucracy and national-level laws blocked municipal governments from passing local legislation on most issues or raise the revenue necessary for fulfilling their legal mandates. For example, the first Tehran City Council failed to pass a Tehran Municipal Charter enshrining greater democratic rights for local civil society and autonomy vis-á-vis central government. On the other hand, elected local government became institutionalized as a coherent but subordinate component of the Islamic state. Within these narrow limits, thousands of creative and dedicated municipal councilors and employees did their best to represent their local constituencies and manage their cities.