Figure 3 . Map of the expansion of Tehran from Early 1891 to 2010.
Source: Asef Bayat, Battle Field Tehran. New Left Review 66, November-December 2010.
https://newleftreview.org/II/66/asef-bayat-tehran-paradox-city
For a society that continues to function upon the act of consumption, spaces such as shopping malls are suitable examples to demonstrate the relationships between social actions and urban locations. Necessity of production of such spaces increases as societies show more willingness to consume. This willingness forms a flow of the society of consumers in the urban context and interior spaces.
Considering consumption as the dominant act of the contemporary societies, architecture becomes a representative of this act; and a good example of it, in such context, is shopping mall. Odabaşi (1999) indicates that ideology of today’s world is what the concept of consumption indicates. It is an ideology based on a wealthier life that occurs as a consequence of more production and more consumption. Dovey (1999) points to the mall as the collective dream world for the mass culture; captivating and inverting the urban. Thus mall is a zone of shelter and safety with order; it is predictable and is detached from the city in terms of both structure and meaning. As the mall captures sites for free play of meaning following the fragmentation and displacement of particular features of time and space; and it becomes the places within which people learn to consume. It seeks enduring festivity; it is a carnival without community and economic surplus without behavioral abandon; it is an illusion of civic life.
Considering shopping mall as successful and most popular building type of the second half of 20th century, as he claims, it is an embodiment of spatial practice in the societies. From the urban scale to the interior of malls, the flow of consumers is guided through spaces within which they act upon the dominant ideology of today’s world. In a city that is home to several shopping malls, the network of these buildings create a network of images. In such context, luxury, as a contemporary tendency in north Tehran, can evoke the dream world of consumption in its unique terms.
This paper seeks a better understanding of the recent tendency, luxury, in production of shopping malls in North Tehran. It addresses these issues at two levels; one is a selective theoretical background of the ideology of consumption and its related key concepts, shopping malls, and luxury. The other group provides an architectural background about Tehran and discusses its transformations due to the responses to the world of consumption. These provide grounds for a discussion about the exclusivity of the term luxury in the context of shopping malls in North Tehran, how it emerges in these spaces, and which effects ‘luxury’ has in this context.
During the study, ideas and theoretical discourses of scholars such as Henri Lefebvre on the production of space, Guy Debord on the society of spectacle, Fredric Jameson and Mike Featherstone on consumerism and consumer culture, Manfredo Tafuri on architecture, Kim Dovey on shopping malls and others have been adapted in order to create a theoretical ground for the argumentation about shopping malls as social productions in the contemporary city with a consumerist culture; and the rise of luxury as the new tendency in north Tehran via exploring the shopping malls of north Tehran.