Evolution of the City | Isfahan – The Media Line

Tue, 7 Dec 2021 17:00 to 18:30 Greenwich Mean Time (UTC0) | 20:30 to 22:00 Iran Standard Time (UTC+3:30)

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The third in the series focuses on the evolution of the historic city of Isfahan, along the Silk Roads in Iran.

Urban Design Group in collaboration with Silk Cities

The third in the series focuses on the evolution of the historic city of Isfahan, along the Silk Roads in Iran.

By comparing cities across the world, we can understand so much more about the areas where we live and work, and the people who live within them.

Isfahan is one of the worlds most astonishing cities. In former times, it was its largest city, and even today Isfahan city centre is thought to be currently the worlds fifth-largest shopping mall. The city is at least 3,000 years old, and the influence of many different cultures and religions including Hellenistic, Sassanian, Zoroastrian, Persian and Islamic can be seen in its urbanism, architecture and art. The city today has a population of 2.4 million, and retains much of its past glory while dealing with the challenges and competing forces of the 21st-century global economy and culture.

Welcome

Dr Husam AlWaer UDG Exec | University of Dundee

Chair

Farnaz Arefian Silk Cities, Founder

Speakers

ISFAHAN: FACES OF RESILIENCE AGAINST CHANGING SPATIALITY

Prof Zahra Ahari Shahid Beheshti University, Iran

Isfahan is a living city with a long history from the pre-Islamic period. Located in the middle of the semi-arid zone of the Iranian plateau, it has been in the crossroad linking east-west and north-south historic trade routes. Throughout its long history, Isfahan has been prone to various hazards and major socio-political changes over time.

The first presentation will provide an overview to the formation of the city and highlight some critical moments of Isfahans urban history, examining how the vision of resilience colours the story of choosing the location of Isfahan and can be further traced in its history before the city flourished in the Safavid period.

Then, it will argue that during the turbulent times from the citys decline after the Shah Abbas I era until Pahlavis reign, constructing public buildings and spaces helped the city sustain its urban life while its spatial qualities changed. Interventions in different scales and directions, top-down, middle-up, and down-top, contributed to forming a sense of community and place attachment for various social groups and classes.

Historic resilience of Isfahan is evident in the preservation of its urban life, linking its past with its future through Isfahans long lasting history. Another sign of the citys resilience resides in deep collective memories of Isfahans residents, manifesting itself in itineraries and numerous writings from different periods.

PLANNING A TETRAPOLIS, INHABITING A COSMOPOLIS

Urban Form, Civic Communities, and Communal Rituals in Safavid Isfahan

Dr Farshid Emami Department of Art History, Rice University, US

In 1617, the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle described the new developments in Isfahan as forming a tetrapolis of four cities. The tetrapolis, he noted, had a cross-axial plan, divided into four quarters by the Chaharbagh (a 4km long, tree-lined promenade) and the Zyande-rd (the river that flows in the south of the city). Planned in the southern environs of the longstanding walled town, these quarters were constructed as part of the massive building campaigns that were implemented in Isfahan in the seventeenth century, when the city served as the capital of the Safavid Empire (1501-1722). Drawing on Isfahans historic stature and its ecological potential for sustaining a large populace, the urban design and expansion of the city turned it into one of the foremost metropolises of the early modern world.

This presentation explores the planning of the Safavid tetrapolis as a process that was intimately intertwined with the creation of a cosmopolitan capital city and a dynamic social environment. Settled by diverse communities and laid out on a rectilinear pattern, Isfahans new neighbourhoods engendered novel ways of inhabiting and experiencing the city. The sociocultural meaning and historical characters of these seventeenth-century developments can only be understood through a study of the lived experiences and communal rituals that they framed and nurtured.

CONTEMPORARY ISFAHAN

Dr Eisa Esfanjari Art University of Isfahan, Iran

Backed by its historic resilience and urban heritage, Isfahan has been facing ever-increasing competing forces and pressures of urban transformation over the last half-century. The third presentation will discuss the state of change and resilience in historic Isfahan, what features have been changed over time and what elements have been sustained in the current urban landscape. Reflecting various urban scales, the discussion will address four levels: the system, the entire historic urban landscape, entitled Manzomih in Persian; the centre, the sun of the system or the urban core often fortified, the sector, neighbourhoods and urban quarters, so called Mahalih, and the cell, the single building and monument.

This historic city has witnessed contradictory approaches in recent decades. From one side, the entire urban system has been valued hardly at all and parts of the centre and the sectors have been damaged deliberately. From the other side, there are also examples of individual buildings, urban elements and monuments retained in the present.

Photo from Phillip Maiwald: the dome ceiling of Lotfollah Mosque Isfahan

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Evolution of the City | Isfahan - The Media Line