Social Science Research Council

The Iran Initiative of the MENA program has organized two workshops on the theme of “Cities and Citizenship,” each of which has brought together around 8-9 researchers from Iran with counterparts from the Middle East region and internationally. The papers and discussions have pointed the way to several interesting dimensions that could be usefully compared across the region, from urban citizenship to gender and space to youth politics.

These activities are crucial in beginning to build networks that bring Iranian social scientists into regional and global conversations and in developing understandings of social transformations in Iran that delve below geo-politics and state-centric analyses.

The first workshop was held on July 4-6, 2000 in Istanbul, Turkey in cooperation with Bogazici University. The discussions focused largely on the dynamics involved in the making of cities. Processes of constructing citizenship were examined through urban planning policies, channels of participation and competing public spheres.

The second workshop was held on February 5-7, 2001 in Beirut, Lebanon in collaboration with the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain (CERMOC) and brought together scholars from Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, the US, and Canada. While the first workshop explored the processes involved in the production of cities, this second workshop focused more on the meanings and practices of citizenship in the urban arena, including examining the relevance of the notion of urban citizenship in different contexts. An underlying concern of many of the papers was the variety of ways in which different social groups, including women, youth and nomads, may experience citizenship in different ways and contest various processes of marginalization. Another equally important theme that surfaced was the multitude of channels through which notions of citizenship, and practices of citizenship are organized.