Introduction
Consumption is a sustaining part of the human condition; like a living organism ingesting, digesting and excreting. Raw materials of social life are provided by the core activities of this organism: production, distribution and disposal (Dalgliesh, 2014). Consumption, known as an ideological act, conditions the social life through spaces as other mediators. The social and spatial networks of consumption let the development of contemporary cities, which commonly engage with favorable images and dreams of people. In that sense, the city of Tehran, as an eastern globe city, strikingly experiences the act of consumption and its consequential reflections onto the spatial organizations and social practices. Since the beginning of the 1920s, Tehran has been under the impacts of Modern capitalism and increasing consumption, which have been infused into everyday practices of its citizens. Many people are motivated to become consumers in fantasy as well as in reality; spatial productions and social practice have moved towards production of spaces that serve consumption as the dominant act of the contemporary society.
Tehran, with its nearly 500 years of history, was originally formed according to the spatial organization of Grand Bazaar. Transformation of Tehran, to its contemporary form, has started by the time of modernization of the country in the first Pahlavi period. ‘First Pahlavi’ (1920s- 1940s) Tehran was a city with monuments and public buildings representing the nation state and demonstrating power. Thus dynamism of the nation was political in that time. Growing desire towards modern lifestyle in Tehran has led to transformations in the urban image and types of social activities; and these changes have been results of Iran entering a capitalist phase. Thus, dynamism of the society has changed by the domination of the act of consumption since the mid-twentieth century. The 21st century Tehran is dominated by buildings such as shopping malls, entertainment centers and public parks, which evidently show that the dynamism of the nation has changed to commercial. By the expansion of the city, Tehran has turned into a network of programmed leisure.
The process of modernization, development and population of the city has caused a dramatic transformation of Tehran during the recent 100 years. As Amirhamadi and Kianfar (1993) explained, as a third world city, Tehran’s dramatic transformation was characterized with two parallel tendencies:
A rapid complex socio-cultural and economic development;
An extensive and cumulative uneven distribution of profit among social classes and neighborhoods.
Thus, the rapid development and outgrowing contradictions in Tehran reflect the city’s transformation process in which a pre-capitalist setting during a period between 18th and early 20th centuries became a transitional capitalist city between 1920s and 1950s; and changed into a capitalist city during the 1950s (Figures 1&2).