This article is an overview of housing policy in Iran, whether in terms of the planning, design, or construction of a single residential unit. At the national level, housing is seen as an important economic activity: it has the potential to create employment, to promote services related to the industry, and to affect the financial market and the banking system. The questions of determining a society's need for housing, of how to translate that need into tangible demand, and of how the market steps into each of these elements — and the problems inherent to each — are examined here in the light of demand-side affordability. The role of government in policymaking, in promoting urbanization, in developing new towns, in regulating the financial market and in securing the needed building materials is also discussed, along with the role of architecture and urban planning — from the individual unit to the large complex — in creating a viable living environment for the family and for the community as a whole.
The home is the smallest unit — the cell — of the social fabric and the hearth in which a family's culture is nurtured. It is the place where the child lives from the moment its eyes open on the world until physical maturity, and where its character, interests and emotions take shape; and when the child grows up and steps onto the stage of society, the memories of that home remain in its mind until the end of life. As the hearth of the family, the home holds an honoured place in our culture — which is why it has been said that “a lamp permitted at home is forbidden in the mosque.”
What are the most important elements of a pleasant childhood memory of home? The warmth and intimacy of the surroundings; comfort; the affection within and around the home; ease of movement; direct contact with nature; clean air; sunlight; the breeze; access to wholesome produce such as fresh bread, vegetables, meat and dairy; access to the cultural centre of the community and to culture-shaping services and needed facilities; and the journey to and from the workplace.
If these simple, intelligible criteria — one by one and taken together — were consciously present in the minds of the architect, the urban planner and the authorities, we would have no difficulty in designing the interior environment of the home, the cluster of homes and the neighbourhood, or the network of services to the people. In other words, with conscious thought and conscious action we should be able, at the least social and economic cost, to create an intimate, clean and beautiful environment for people's lives, free of environmental and social pollution. Whether in a house with a courtyard or in an apartment, we should have clean air; at night we should be able to see the stars, without having to put a mask over our faces for fear of pollution when crossing the street; we should meet our needs with the least energy spent in commuting, without losing our nerves to the disorders imposed by the urban environment — so that, instead of squandering hours of our precious time commuting between home and work or making unnecessary trips to complicated public services, we might spend that time and energy on more important and more useful things.
Housing today, in city and countryside alike, is beyond the means of many people — a longing that stays in their hearts. The construction and housing industry is one of the most employment-generating sectors of the economy. In Iran, the state's share of the national economy is four times that of the private sector; the state plans the entire economy, and housing — as one part of the whole national economy — is by its very nature a part of the five-year national development plan. In the documents of national planning, the past and present state of housing is set out on the basis of statistics and national indices — average persons per room, the built area of a residential unit, population growth and its changes in city and countryside, household composition, purchasing power and its rise in relation to inflation, and the capital invested in housing — and policymaking in the housing sector, and its instruments, are addressed. It is desirable that this planning be undertaken in relation to the growth of urbanization and the policy of physical development, within the framework of a national land-use (amayesh) plan — for housing alone makes up about 70 percent of the urban fabric and plays an important role in the pattern of distribution.
The medium- and long-term plan thus framed within national development policy is written into executive programmes, and the executive programmes are drawn up and carried out in the form of forecast annual appropriations for the executing agencies. One telling example of these programmes is the output of building materials — cement and steel, for instance — at a level that makes possible the construction of a given amount of residential floor area each year. The appropriations that the private and public sectors forecast and allocate in the plans create employment; the specialized, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manpower thus required is obtained through other, allied programmes, including the training of manpower. Construction is one of the most employment-generating sectors, and it is usually stimulated deliberately in the periods after an economic crisis, when unemployment is high (especially after war), so that — while providing shelter for the people and repairing the damage of war — the minimum livelihood of the unemployed may also be secured. This, of course, is the outward appearance and a simplification of a complex scenario; and the statistics on which these calculations are based are telling.
For example, in 1350 (1971) it was estimated that about 70 percent of the residential fabric of Iran's cities and more than 90 percent of the residential fabric of the country's villages was worn out. Given the vast volume of construction, some of that worn-out fabric may since have been repaired or renewed; but the redefinition of housing quality after the recent earthquakes has overturned all the bases of the earlier estimates. Even that part of the residential fabric which in the past was estimated to be “sound” must today be reconsidered.
The most important calculating parameters of housing in national planning are need, demand and supply. Need embraces the largest figure, for it is the total residential space, divided among units, required by the households that have no home — those under the pressure of housing and living in hard conditions. Realizing this in Iranian society, whose population is rising and whose urbanization is spreading at the cost of emptying the villages, is almost impossible; moreover, the index of need, given the “worn-out” state of the existing housing, points to an even larger number of residential units that must be built.
Against need stands the index of demand. Need is greater than demand; but in each slice of time a part of need turns into demand — and that is when the means have been provided for the “applicant”: when the financial resources and income of the applicant are such that he can enter the market to buy a residential unit. Having a need for housing but not being able to provide its means (sufficient income, the necessary liquidity, plus bank loans and borrowing from friends and acquaintances), you do not enter the group of “applicants.”
In Iran, demand for housing — the lever that moves the housing market — differs fundamentally from the West. Iran is a country with a cash-based monetary economy, as against the credit-based monetary economy common in the West. This difference in the type of monetary economy is so great that it bars a considerable portion of the “needy” from entering the club of applicants. In the West, someone seeking to buy a house who can show a fixed income — an income whose monthly quarter or third could cover the mortgage instalment — can, without doubt, buy a house with a 20-year loan; the banks are satisfied with this criterion. Even if his ability to pay is in doubt, if he has a sum equal to 10 to 20 percent of the price of the house, he can borrow the difference; and the lender, if unable to collect the instalments on time, recovers his money by auctioning the house, having secured in advance, from the buyer's down-payment, the cost of the auction and any possible fall in the price of the unit.
In Iran this situation is reversed. The share of credit (loan) relative to the total price of the unit is trifling; the loan term is short, so the monthly instalments are high and the interest rate is dizzying. The bank's valuation of the unit being transacted — which remains mortgaged to the bank as collateral — is also made below the day's price. In other words, instead of the bank curing the buyer's pain, the borrower must move heaven and earth to guarantee that the bank reaps its desired profit. An ordinary person's borrowing from a bank is like the heavy dowry pledge in the marriages of some bazaar families.
Another point: in the West, people sometimes hesitate between buying and renting, because bank interest is low and the supply of housing is plentiful — and in places such as Canada, which has a small population, the rise in the price of housing is slow and the choice is wide. In Iran, by contrast, because of the dizzying level of bank interest and high inflation, if someone can buy a house, the rise in rents ruins him; the price of property rises with inflation, but the person without means falls further from the housing market every day. A third point is the high share of land cost in the price of a residential unit in Iran, which sometimes exceeds 50 percent — whereas in the West this cost is 10 to 15 percent. The cost of land ties up a considerable part of an Iranian household's financial means.
The role of government institutions
Housing is not separate from urban planning. Seventy percent of the fabric of cities is residential, and of the remaining 30 percent an important part is devoted to the services of residential areas. In these two activities the government has a guiding and an executive role; but the government's direct operation (tasaddi-gari) is so extensive that officials themselves have grown weary of it. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran has intensified the government's involvement in all fields, including housing and urban planning. Despite officials' repeated emphasis on reducing the government's direct operation, the volume of that operation still exceeds the volume of the staff and guidance work of the state agencies — particularly in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
Serious objections attach to the mission of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in providing housing. The most important of them concerns the way it deals with new-town building. Most of the townships under construction are old plans for dormitory towns, whose initiative before the revolution lay with the private sector, when traffic volume was less than a tenth of what it is now. Building dormitory towns at present serves only the automobile industry; other groups suffer from it. Housing cooperatives, which in these townships were once to some extent justified, belong to government employees who — like teachers — work in a fully distributed way within the fabric of the cities (in schools, for instance) and who, by the principles of urban planning, should live near their workplaces so that their time and energy are not wasted in commuting.
A second point is that housing projects are built mainly alongside the main highways, in linear form. Linear development is the worst kind of urban development: the residential units in effect end up beside a large, smoke-filled tunnel and add to the heaviness of traffic. Pardis township in Bumehen is a clear example of this kind of development; the expansion of this township has today reached Bumehen. The Tehran–Ab-Ali or Tehran–Damavand route, once delightful, beautiful and full of charm, has today become a smoke-filled, polluted tunnel — so that the name Jajrud could be turned into “Jaj-dud” and Rudehen into “Dudehen,” for the river has given way to smoke. Worse still, the recreational service centres for children — which ought to be far from crowding, noise and pollution and located at the heart of residential areas so as to make children's movement easy — have been built right beside the road, at the smokiest spot. The Bumehen fairground has been built right next to the main road. The Ministry of Housing and the Ministry of the Interior, which share responsibility for urban planning, give themselves no worry in this regard.
In today's world the best townships are those whose residential character is matched by a self-employment character. Otherwise we must witness unnecessary commuting that consumes hundreds of hours of people's time, susceptibility to countless illnesses arising from environmental pollution, and the emergence of nervous tension in people. Only the unbridled automobile industry profits from this kind of development. Instead of playing the role of the largest builder of residential buildings in the country, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development could undertake hundreds of guiding and staff measures to make it easy for people themselves to provide housing — rather than taking the initiative out of people's hands and being the builder itself. Establishing a balance in the production, supply and distribution of building materials; standardizing building materials (cement, steel joists and rebar produced in Iran are below international standards, and this is one of the causes of a building's collapse in an earthquake); combating corruption in construction supervision; teaching people methods of self-help; coordinating rural development; preparing guide plans for one- and two-storey buildings and teaching them; and dozens of other programmes — these are the main duties of an agency called the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
If the rules of housing construction in Iran were enforced, then — in cities most buildings are one or two storeys, and no supervision is exercised in their construction; good materials are used but poorly executed. What passes for building codes and standards in Iran is inherited mostly from before the revolution. Today, in the world, much work has been done to introduce new standards that are still unknown in Iran — among them standards for plumbing and drinking-water fittings that prevent the use of lead in making and coating pipes. Building paint, especially for residential buildings, should contain no lead compounds. Asbestos in building is a serious hazard and must not be used. The cutting of stone and terrazzo in the manner done at the work site in Iran — its dust and noise filling the surrounding space — and the way stone cladding is fixed to a building's façade are in the construction of many countries by no means permitted and are counted as offences. The bodies responsible for building in Iran are still not sensitive to these matters.
In the end, housing can be examined from two viewpoints. One is the individual — micro — view: the architect's view of a single residential unit or of a cluster of units. The architect begins with a summary picture of the land, the subdivision plan and the surroundings of the project, and takes the financial capacities of the project's executor as its executive document; the architect does not trouble himself with executive concerns unless he runs into a design problem in execution. The second is the macro view, which looks at housing from the standpoint of national planning as a social and economic problem and seeks the answer to the question: what should we do so that people may enjoy better housing and a more fitting life? In other words, the architect works in the confined world of “supply”; the long road from the origin — “need” — to the destination — “supply” — must be smoothed by others. Between these two there is a great distance, and the two are strangers to each other. Perhaps the urban planner can fill this gap.
