The Engineering Ordinance and Building Control Law — as its very title suggests — speaks of two distinct, unequal (though related) functions and institutions; and the substance of each, fused inside a single statute, has been awkwardly bound to the other. Were the technical and administrative regimes of engineering and of construction to be combined, what would be needed is a far longer, more demanding and more comprehensive law — and one in which the share given to building control, relative to the engineering system, would be far greater and more foundational. Whereas in the existing law, of a total of 137 articles, only the six articles of Chapter 4 deal with matters of control: the right to inspect the workplace, the technical building standards and the supreme oversight of the State. Of the 124 articles of the implementing regulations, only eight relate to control — and all of them concern the supreme oversight of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development over the work of the municipalities.
In spite of half the title of the Law being given over to building control, and in spite of all control being reduced to the supreme oversight of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development over the work of the municipalities, the performance of that Ministry over the past six years — even as the violation and weakening of the comprehensive plan continued, the sale of density rights and the unlawful intervention of the municipalities in matters belonging to engineers — has been such as to suggest that no breach of duty has occurred at all. Even the control measures begun in earlier years were halted and rendered ineffective.
More importantly, of the two functions and the two institutions envisaged by the law, building control — for which the State is responsible — has not only left the construction sector and its economy unsupervised: it has also inflicted irreparable damage on the soundness of professional practice and on the still-young engineering system. The discrediting of building and town-planning regulations, and the concentration of almost all the added value of construction in land, have reduced the share of engineering services to the bare minimum. The queueing of engineers in front of the desk that distributes signature-rights coupons is a telling display of how engineering work has been humiliated in the face of the surplus value generated, for the operators of the density-trading economy, by the violation of engineering principles and standards.
In the complete absence of building control, and under the rule of non-engineering — indeed anti-engineering — forces over the construction market, what responsibility falls upon the Engineering System Organization? Can engineers, citing the unfavourable conditions, set their professional principles aside? Young engineers who, in their first years of practice, have been confronted with such a difficult ethical test cannot be blamed too easily; but are the directors of the Organization themselves spared from blame and from being called to account?
The purpose of forming the Engineering System Organization was that the professional affairs of engineers should be placed in order along three principal axes — defining and overseeing the professional duties and rights of members; collaborating in drawing up technical standards; and continuous training and professional advancement — within a structure made up of the General Assembly, the Specialised Groups, the Board of Directors and the Disciplinary Council. The professional duties and rights of members were to be defined by the Specialised Groups, and on that basis their professional rights were to be defended; through the unique competence of an assembly of leading practitioners and seasoned members of the Specialised Groups, together with the building-control officers of the municipalities, the technical standards needed for construction were to be drafted and proposed to the relevant authorities for approval; and through a wide network of apprenticeship, enterprise creation and on-the-job training, the conditions needed for the professional growth of engineers were to be provided.
What induces an engineer who already holds professional competence and the right to practice to volunteer for membership of the Engineering System Organization is the felt need for order in his professional affairs, his desire that the Organization should establish such authority, and his belief that the standards and regulations of the Organization must be obeyed. By submitting himself to the Organization, he gives it the authority to bring order to professional affairs. The ordering of professional affairs, in turn, becomes a renewed authority that regulates the relation of the profession with whatever lies outside the Organization.
The inexhaustible source of the Organization's authority for establishing internal order and engaging the outside is the relation of membership. Yet most of the organizations — and Tehran more than any — instead of activating the relation of membership, which is the inward source of the Organization's authority and stability, have grown attached to authority drawn from outside sources. The clearest example is the Organization's repeated requests to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development for help in dealing with the unlawful intervention of the municipalities in engineers' work. Even though the Ministry never gave that help, could the Organization not, instead of submitting to the unlawful arrangements of the municipalities, have brought thousands of its members to bear, so that the municipalities themselves would have had to submit to its standards?
A crooked load never reaches its destination. An authority whose source lies outside the Organization is not only never applied in pursuit of the Organization's purposes; it leaves the Organization more helpless than before. Under the trial Law of 1371 (1992) and under the pre-Revolution law, membership of the Organization was optional for holders of the practice licence. The majority of the boards of directors during the trial-law period — in order to expand membership, enlarge the Organization and increase income from membership fees — petitioned the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development to make the issue of practice licences contingent on membership in the Organization, in defiance of the previous logical order — which is to say, to make membership compulsory. The Minister of Housing of the day, especially under the influence of his very cordial and friendly relations with the Tehran board (most of whom were prominent state figures and leading consultants and contractors), responded positively to that request. This friendly transaction inflicted the heaviest blow on the soundness of the Organization's structure and on the relations between its constituent organs; what is striking is that the supporters of this idea then regarded — and still regard — it as a step towards strengthening the Organization's standing and independence vis-à-vis the State; and what is even more striking is that, after the inversion of the relation between membership and the practice licence was carried over into the permanent Law of 1374 (1995), when the results of the Tehran elections came in, those very same supporters of compulsory membership complained that participation in the elections had fallen to less than ten per cent.
Numbers and a large membership only count when there is a real relation of membership between the individuals and the Organization. If the Tehran Organization were to be given a hundred thousand committed members instead of its present thirty thousand, in place of its present passive bond — the inversion of the relation between membership and the practice licence — sooner or later it would lead to the inversion of the engineering structure itself, of which some signs are already showing. Inexperienced and unknown engineers, who see no professional opportunity beyond the use of municipal signature-rights coupons, are — in the absence of an apprenticeship and enterprise-creation network, and not as a result of any redistribution of quotas from the municipality to the Engineering System — the first to accept this compulsory membership without hesitation; conversely, those who are more experienced, better known and possess higher professional skills gradually come to have no need for membership in the Organization. In this way the Organization gradually loses its leading forces. This is precisely the process of the inversion — the inner emptying — of the engineering structure. It is striking that, on the one hand, the permanent Law makes membership of the Organization compulsory, and on the other, by exempting public-works projects from the scope of the Engineering Ordinance and Building Control Law, it removes the engineers active in consulting and contracting firms — those who possess the highest level of professional experience — from the need to be associated with the Organization. This exemption is one further step on the road of the inversion — the inner emptying — of the engineering structure.
A final word: because of the weakness of their position, the Specialised Groups have so far been unable to play their proper role in framing the professional standards by which each discipline could, directly and independently, define its own specific identity. The continued marginalization of the Specialised Groups intensifies the emptying and inversion of the structure. Were they to be given their proper role, sooner or later their distinctness and their independence would, in turn, restore order to the structure of the profession.
