About 40 percent of Iran's urban population is marginalized and homeless.
Migration from rural areas to cities has become widespread over the past four decades. This has fueled the phenomenon of marginalization in Iran. According to the Minister of Transportation, 19 million people are either marginalized or homeless. A disaster for society, a challenge for the government.
Abbas Akhundi, the Minister of Roads and Urban Development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, announced new statistics on marginalization and poor housing in Iran on Thursday, July 5. At the “Sustainable Urban Regeneration of Sistan and Baluchestan” conference, he estimated Iran’s urban population to be around 59 million people.
Many segments of the country's urban population have been pushed to the outskirts of cities. According to the Minister of Roads and Urban Development, 19 million people in Iran are marginalized and homeless.
Mehr News Agency quotes a cleric as saying: "About 35 percent of the country's [urban] population lives in a state of disarray, which varies up to 41 percent."
Continued increase in immigration
The Minister of Roads and Urban Development emphasized at the aforementioned conference that poor housing and living in dilapidated areas are not limited to Sistan and Baluchestan and have become a widespread phenomenon in the country.
Abbas Akhundi has assessed migration from villages to cities as a national phenomenon. A look at official statistics indicates that over the past 4 decades, the rural population has been continuously decreasing. The decrease in the rural population is not necessarily a negative phenomenon. The important thing is to attract these people to urban life. This is while the number of marginalized people around large cities is continuously increasing.
The Minister of Roads and Urban Development has announced a 2% decline in Iran's rural population between 2011 and 2016.
Suburbanization and urban fabric
The main problem with slums is that they lack identity. The lack of streets and communication routes in slum areas prevents these areas from "finding an identity" and connecting them to the urban transportation network.
Furthermore, basic living conditions are not available in marginalized areas. The lack of these conditions, including government services such as education and health services, deprives production.
Abbas Akhundi called the "identitylessness" of marginalized neighborhoods a national challenge and said: "The approach of the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development is to define neighborhoods, and these neighborhoods want their own structure in terms of facilities, including schools, mosques, markets, and social relations, and it is not just on the map."
The Minister of Roads and Urban Development spoke about the necessity of attaching the margin to the text and placed the principle on creating "public space and urban structure" in these areas, emphasizing that "a place without streets, social structure, and identity has no value."
Source: DW
