Controversy over a building; the municipality says it is not historic
The mayor of Tehran is said to have ordered the sale of a building in the city that critics consider historic. The municipality says it is not. The question that arises, apart from whether the building is historic or not, is whether the city sale continues in the capital?
In Aghdasiyeh, located in the north of Tehran, on a street that some Iranian media outlets describe as "specially named South Golestan," there is a two-story building called "Golestan Building" or "Mayors' House."
Some domestic media outlets have published a letter from Tehran Mayor Hanachi, reporting that the mayor has ordered the municipal real estate organization to sell the house for cash. According to these reports, the sale of the house is intended to cover part of the costs of development projects in the capital.
With the publication of this letter, some news agencies, such as Fars News Agency, reacted to the order to sell the house by calling the building historic, which is said to have been built during the "first Pahlavi" era. Emphasizing the "historicity of the Aghdasiyeh building," they considered the Tehran mayor's order to be contrary to the city management's practice of not "selling the city."
A high percentage of municipal resources in Iran are provided by construction fees, or in other words, urban sprawl. Hamshahri newspaper wrote in an article about this two years ago: "Urban sprawl means selling land and settling more people; that means reducing services; that means congestion."
The mayor’s advisor and head of the Tehran Municipality’s Communications and International Center has reacted to the news of the order to sell “a historical monument.” In an interview with IRNA, Gholamhossein Mohammadi said, referring to the published report on Janachi’s order to “sell the mayor’s house,” “Tehran Municipality has shown in practice that it even prevents the sale of historical houses by their owners and heirs, and when it is informed that these houses are at risk of being demolished or sold, it takes the initiative and buys them.”
He called the report's reference to the building as a "historical house" "far from reality."
Mohammadi wrote in a tweet about this, "This house is not a registered historical or heritage site."
Initial searches did not reveal much information about the building's history. The Fars News Agency writes that the building previously belonged to a court official. It has been used as a nursing home, the city's film secretariat or the municipality's public relations office during Qalibaf's time, a guesthouse for special guests or to receive ambassadors, among other uses attributed to the building in the years following the revolution. It is also said that the house was intended to be the mayor's house for a while.
It is unclear whether the house is historic or not, and what will happen to it if it is sold.
But what is unclear and more important is the number of historic houses in the capital and other cities that have either been forgotten, sold and destroyed in oblivion and silence, or changed their use; for example, the Anis al-Dawla house, which recently caused a lot of noise and it was revealed that this historic house was the residence of Tehran's butchers.
Regardless of the fate of this house, perhaps the uproar over this mansion will shed new light on the “city peddling” with the “lights off” in Tehran. Last month, Farhikhtegan newspaper wrote about city peddling in a report citing the large number of construction violation cases: “The greedy approach to these cases and the calculation of financial fines and the neglect of demolitions raise concerns and reinforce the suspicion that city managers are following the same old practice and looking at the city as a commodity, trying to generate income from illegalities and will continue city peddling in various ways.”
In a report on the same subject published two years ago, Hamshahri pointed to the record of Mohammad Hassan Malekmadani, the capital’s 53rd mayor, who in the early 1980s led to “the most important event in Tehran.” Hamshahri writes: “Malekmadani was the only mayor of Tehran who stood up to the sale of density. He believed that cities should not be run by city sales. Malekmadani announced that he would no longer sell density in Tehran.” What happened to him? Hamshahri: “Less than a few months later, he was dismissed.”
Source: DW
