Teronto Fictional City
TerontoRBW : By showing us in the previous pages of Tales, the hidden face of Tehran, its underground art scene that reminds us of the Prohibition years of the 30’s, you make a beautiful demonstration of the fundamental role of the Creative Class in the development of Tehran. It is she who is preparing, and even inventing the Tehran of tomorrow. But this Iranian population, of whom you are part of, travels, exiles itself, and creates “hors les murs”, in Paris, New York, Toronto, cities that are home to many Iranians. On this point I would like you to tell us about the prospective project you are preparing for Tehran.SK : Between 2004 and 2006 I was assisting directly Hadi Mirmiran, the architect commissioned by the state to design a new masterplan for Tehran. With his team we came up with a fabulous proposal to rethink the capital through five ecological corridors that run through the entire city, on the traces of forgotten waterways, from the mountain to the agricultural plains. These five corridors are like five giant Persian gardens that restructure the city with water, an essential strategy for a metropolis of 13 million in the desert, and a direct response to Victor Gruen’s American model. Our project failed to continue after Hadi Mirmiran’s passing away in 2006. But it is a project that cannot be forgotten and deserves to become the base in continuing to imagine the future of this city. Indeed, I am working on opening a new dialogue with different actors, by placing Tehran in the middle of an international research lab on the city of tomorrow. I recently finished a comparative study of thirteen cities for an exhibit called Hydrocity in Toronto, in which Tehran and Toronto were both part of. These two cities resemble each other in surprising ways. Both were planned in the fifties and sixties on the same modernist principles of the motorcity. In consequence the road infrastructure took over everything and extended the city on virgin land. This sort of urban model provoked the abandonment of the downtown core, but also disrupted brutally the relationship between the city and its geographic context. In Toronto giant ravines were abandoned or even buried, and the waterfront has been totally disconnected by highways. There is a necessity in Toronto, like in Tehran to rethink the city, through its geography and infrastructures, in the objective to create new porosities in a modernist context that deliberately separated all functions.
