Abadan and Khorramshahr, Iran
The histories of some cities are coiled with symbols, legends, economic upheavals, political revolutions, colonial occupations, and such like. The two cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr in the south-western Iranian province of Khuzestan are no exceptions. Both display a hybrid identity which has been forged out of global oil interests and acts of local cultural resistance. Add to this mix their unique climate conditions and the cultural practices of local people, as well as the often confusing old street patterns, and you’re in for a treat. The two river ports of Abadan and Khorramshahr – sitting not far downstream from Basra in Iraq – lie on the Arvand River, often referred to as Shatt Al-Arab, this being the Euphrates/Tigris confluence as it flows into its delta at the northern end of the Persian Gulf.
11.1 Map of Abadan and Khorramshahr on the border with Iraq and close to Kuwait
Abadan hence sits 60 km north of the Gulf shoreline. In terms of its local geography, the city is bounded by the Arvand River on its south-to-southwestern sides, this forming the Iraqi border, and by the Bahamnshir outlet of the Karun River on its north-to-north-western edges. Flowing off in the southwesterly direction is the aforementioned river to the Persian Gulf. Khorramshahr is the somewhat overshadowed neighbour just 15 km the north-west, and indeed they could on the surface be regarded as a kind of ‘twin city’. However, this would be to miss their subtleties. While the historically iconic cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr are geographically so close they remain so different in their cultural practices, urban fabric, housing types and political symbolism. Abadan remains easily the larger of the two, with a current estimated population of around 220,000 persons, compared to just 124,000 in Khorramshahr. Some argue that these differences and the contradictory historical journeys which the two cities have taken – in terms of urban structure, cultural identity and everyday habits – in fact make them complementary. Others might see the links merely in terms of having the same climate, an equal denial of past practices, and thus a casual attitude towards consuming and wasting energy. A closer look at the political history and human habitation of these two fascinating cities on the northern rim of the Persian Gulf offers clues as to how oil-rich cities are shaped both by local climate and the brutal pressures of the global market economy. The presence of oil in this area, especially in Abadan, has totally dominated the lives of local citizens and been instrumental in destroying its older, more climatically responsive, built fabric. An exploration of these tensions will form the substance of this chapter, following a brief background introduction.
THE ARRIVAL OF AMERICAN/WESTERNISING TENDENCIES
Abadan and Khorramshahr both grew steadily in importance after the discovery of oil and gas reserves. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company built its first refinery in Abadan in 1909–1913 and by the 1930s this was the largest in the world. Growth continued to boom after the Second World War, such that for a few decades Abadan was the largest oil-producing city anywhere; Khorramshahr played the role of an important supporting act. More recently, the urban development of Abadan and Khorramshahr has been shaped by their geographic location close to the borders of a number of oil-producing Gulf countries, notably with Iraq to the west and Kuwait to the south-west.
11.2 Abadan oil refinery in the early-1950s
Both cities thus became extremely active economically during the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), and during the latter stages of which Iran’s oil income soared from $22.5 million in 1954 to over $19 billion in 1975–1976.1 This staggering increase in oil revenue however brought little benefit for local citizens. The economic gap between the local majority and a transient wealthy minority (mainly Americans and Europeans) had become chronically unfair by the end of the 1970s. This situation also needs to be set within the major geopolitical changes of that era. Iran’s oil supplies and its strategic location, adjacent to what was then the Soviet Union, now Russia, were vitally important to the USA at all levels. This ‘invasion’ of Iran by the global market first began to be truly noticeable during the 1960s in all industries and in people’s everyday lives. As Hamid Naficy explains in his essay on new Iranian cinema of that era:
Regional media influences in Iran were replaced by global interests. American companies began selling all kinds of products and services, from feature films to television programmes, from TV receivers to TV studios, from communication expertise to personnel training: in short, they sold not only consumer products but also consumer ideology.2
Naficy continues by noting that the first Iranian television station, which was commercially based and privately owned, was established by Iraj Sabet, whose family also happened to be the agents for Pepsi Cola and various US advertising agencies. The new channel imported American programmes as well as dictating all the commercials broadcast on Iranian TV. By the late-1960s and early-1970s, products like Pepsi Cola and Winston cigarettes became a lifestyle image and a symbolic representation of the ‘western‘ world for Iran’s upper and middle classes.3 Indeed, what was particularly alarming about the arrival of American consumer products was their close association with the culture of pleasure being enjoyed by workers and middle-income groups. When the first Pepsi Cola factory opened to the west of Tehran, with its glazed façade exposing the process of bottling the drink, many working-class families went for picnics in front of the Pepsi factory rather than to their usual local park! This intrusion of ‘brand’ culture and its metaphor of American/westernised desire was vividly described in the work of the controversial female Iranian poet, film-maker and writer, Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–1967). In a poem of 1965 titled Someone Like No One Else, she wrote beautifully of her memories as a child.4 Farrokhzad was one of the most unconventional and sharpest commentators on the socio-cultural transformations being experienced in Iran at the time, bringing in references to everyday mass culture in her work.
The arrival of the American consumer culture and its glittery products primarily benefitted Iran’s elite minority, creating a huge economic and cultural gulf with the rest of Iranian society. This was not only visible and tangible in Tehran, Iran’s modern capital, but if anything was probably even more representative of and reflected in cities like Abadan and Khorramshahr. Economic inequality, exploitation of local workers, and privileges given to expatriate Europeans and Americans can be seen in some of early Iranian movies. Most notable was the Abadani director, Amir Naderi, in his masterpieces ‘Tangsir’ (1973) and ‘The Runner’ (1985); both films are set in Khuzestan, where the sheer depth of oppression and local anger was bravely and masterfully documented in these films.
Importantly, Khorramshahr and (more specifically) Abadan played critical roles in the movement to nationalise Iran’s oil industry in the early-1950s, as well as at the decisive moments of victory by the Islamic Revolution over Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1978–1979.5 Indeed, it is argued that the two key events that were the turning point for the Iranian Islamic Revolution were the oil-workers’ strike in December 1978 and the burning down of the Rex Cinema in Abadan on ‘Black Friday’ in August 1978, with over 350 people killed in the fire. However, after this featuring role for Abadan and Khorramshahr in the late-1970s – with their heroic fight against the Shah’s dictatorship and its appalling human rights record – came the devastating physical, human and economic sufferings and losses which both cities experienced during the Iran/Iraq War (1980–1988).6 Even after eight years of fighting and occupation by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army, backed by America and France, neither Abadan or Khorramshahr ever gave up. Instead, both cities managed to resist until the Iraqi forces were driven out, with the result that they – and this time around even more so in Khorramshahr’s case – became the symbol (and indeed reality) for yet another historic Iranian achievement.
Yet despite contributing such rich layers of political and economic meaning within the socio-political fabric of Iran, neither of these two cities was rewarded with much attention or indeed resources with which to celebrate and share its historical importance with local citizens or tourists. Their unique urban planning, spatial characteristics and architectural details – which collectively offer a platform to discuss the relationship of climatic context and cultural identity to models of habitation – are likewise underappreciated, indeed even ignored. Rather, one needs to rely on undocumented local knowledge provided by the older generation of citizens still living in the two cities, often in a sad state of affairs; bizarrely, many older residents adhere to the myth of the pomp and glitter of ‘the good old days’, even if only for a few elite groups, back in the Pahlavi era. It is therefore important to transcend this condition of historical amnesia and urban neglect by looking more carefully at Abadan and Khorramshahr to find out how people might live in the northern part of the Persian Gulf. However, given that Abadan has for so long been the ‘dominant twin’, the bulk of analysis in this chapter will by necessity focus on it.
CITYSCAPE
Abadan lies on what is in effect an encircled island of 63km in length and from 3–19 km in width, abutting onto the Arvand River or Shatt Al-Arab. Looking from a bird’s-eye perspective when flying in from Tehran, one is fascinated by the regularity of the agricultural land around Abadan. The well-mannered forest of date palms – which still provide a sizeable percentage of world’s dates – hugs the city to its northern, eastern and western edges, giving it protection from the desert beyond. It is an unexpectedly pastoral image, given that Abadan is barely known for anything but its oil resources.
The airport to the north-west, just like the main railway station, is a facility shared equally by Abadan and Khorramshahr. On stepping out of the plane, one immediately feels the pleasant dry heat – that is, if you take care to avoid arriving in summer at any time between 12.00 noon and 6.00pm, when temperatures are usually in the mid-40s°C. During these ‘boiling’ hours in the summertime, when the heat becomes unbearable, you will hardly find anyone around; indeed, the airport itself is closed. However, in the months from November to April, local temperatures become far more agreeable.
In contrast to Tehran, Abadan seems extremely calm and polite. There is a surprising absence of any smell of oil/petroleum, the very thing that modern Abadan is famous for. The city’s history predates Islam back to the Sassanid dynasty (224–651AD). Written legends suggest that Abadan was initially known for its salt deposits and mat-making crafts, and it later grew into an Islamic port city during the great Abbasid Caliphate. In Iran, there is never any shortage of legends and unofficial stories which offer more tangible insights into the life of cities than written histories do. Hence it is believed that the Prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali (his son-in-law and Islam’s first spiritual leader) somehow made references to Abadan as a place of paradise where ‘palm gardens and mosques come together making it ideal – ‘God’s creation’ – as a place of rest for Hajji’s, visitors to Mecca, to stay’.7 Here is important to note that soon after Islam was born, a regular movement by Hajji pilgrims took place from Iran across the Euphrates/Tigris River to the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina. Thus a city like Abadan, positioned on the edge of a river in the desert, also offered a perfect stopping point for Muslim travellers.
The already mature tradition of Iranian urban architecture, based on private mansions, gardens and courtyards, was readily adapted to the new demand to build Islamic mosques. With a central pond celebrating the role of water – an element used as a practical response to the hot climate and hence a staple of songs, poems and daily cultural rituals – the insertion of mosques into gardens was yet another variation on the Persian garden/courtyard typology. Indeed, the mosque came to replace the private mansion as the pre-eminent urban form, with the side benefit also of making traditional Persian gardens more socially inclusive. Hence for the Prophet Muhammad and the new Islamic leaders, the fusion of the emerging mosque typology with a sophisticated form of urban space served as a symbol of the new Islamic paradise-on-earth, as well as fitting easily into climatic conditions and cultural practices. Some of these very early mosques and garden courtyards are still visible in and around Abadan. Sadly, however, Abadan in later centuries has lost this urban continuity. Now, and certainly for the younger generation in the province – as indeed in the rest of Iran – the city is explicitly conceived of in terms of oil/petroleum income and the struggle of the Iran/Iraq War, rather than for its older tradition of shaded gardens, waterways and climatically responsive buildings.
11.3 Flames of the oil refinery and petrochemical complex dominating Abadan’s skyline
CITY OF FLAME: ABADAN AND OIL/PETROLEUM
The National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC) and the connected National Iranian Petrochemical Company (NIPC) serve to divide Abadan visually and physically from west to east. Incredibly, the floor area of both plants occupies nearly a third of the city’s area. So these are the two elements which constantly remind citizens of the presence of global forces in Abadan. Whenever one drives or walks around the city, the flames of the oil refinery and the petrochemical complex are always there, dominating the place from all directions.
It is worth here tracing the story of the oil industry in Abadan to see how this situation arose. Back in 1905, the whole region was indirectly controlled by British colonial rule, and one symbolic manifestation of this was the formation that year of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1908, oil and gas reserves were discovered in the city of Masjed-e-Soleyman – like Abadan, in Khuzestan province, but further to the north. To be able to export these supplies, by 1913 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had built a pipeline to its first refinery in Abadan, thereby instantly transforming the latter into a globalised city. As noted, within 25 years Abadan had the largest oil refinery in the world, even if there was still extreme poverty and inequality for most of its local community. Prior to the nationalisation of Iranian oil in the early-1950s, around 80–85 per cent of the wealth created was in British ownership. This contradiction between poverty and elitism remained in Abadan in different forms even after nationalisation, and exists today in different forms. None of the British colonial rulers, nor the Pahlavi regime which replaced them, nor even the subsequent Islamic Republic government, have bothered to explore the climatic wealth and social potential of Abadan. Instead they have just exploited the presence of oil and gas to feed Iran, and the wider world, with little thought about local citizens.
Abadan, as the ‘city of flame’, seems historically to have always been a transient city. Its population increased greatly after the discovery of oil, most of whom were skilled workers and engineers brought in from the rest of Iran, especially Tehran, or else from abroad. It is believed that during its peak from the early-1950s to the mid-1970s, less than 10 per cent of the city’s population came from Abadan or elsewhere in Khuzestan province. The other 90 per cent were from elsewhere, including a large number from Britain, continental Europe or the USA who were only there to work in the oil industry. This transient community was totally unfamiliar with the climatic condition and everyday cultural habits which over the centuries had created such a strong imprint on the urban character and spatial formation of Abadan.8
11.4 American oil-worker families arriving in Abadan
The extensive use of Europeans and Americans for technical and administrative staff was a deliberate policy on the part of British colonial powers to maintain control over the oil industry. This could be graphically seen in 1951 when Iran suddenly nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Britain immediately imposed economic sanctions and deployed its warships to blockade Abadan and all of Iran’s southern ports. Furthermore, they withdraw all of their technical personnel along with 300 administrators from Abadan. Iran’s counter-attempt to bring in technicians and consultants from other countries proved a failure, forcing it to turn to US support to run the industry.9
Meanwhile, the transient oil community brought its own forms of architecture, urban planning and living habits which in no way related to Abadan or the logic of living in that climate. Its unsuitability was reflected in the street layouts and building types erected during the 1960s and 1970s. Later on, when the city was attacked in 1980 by the invading Iraq Army, it was the non-local oil worker community that was the first to leave, including other Iranians. Moving as far as they could from the war zone, most never came back, meaning that only a few traces of their occupation survive today. I was told by a local shopkeeper who was one of the few from elsewhere in Iran who did return to Abadan:
People went away partly because the government was too busy trying to fight the war, as well as being extremely surprised by the attack, and so they did not provide any protections or facilities for those fleeing from Abadan. But we had to come back; after all, it is our home. This was not the case for Tehranis, who left Abadan and never returned.10
Restoration of full operational conditions at the Abadan oil refinery didn’t happen until 1997, and created renewed economic and employment activities. Once again, however, the oil worker community brought in from other provinces of Iran appears to be a transient one. The Islamic Republican government did introduce a variety of measures, including certain financial incentives, to encourage people to move back to the city to restart the economy. Yet the city of Abadan today seems to consist of displaced souls, with more and more new arrivals from elsewhere in Iran.
There is a mysterious, ominous feel to the oil refinery/petrochemical plant in the way it overshadows the city, rather like in The Castle by Franz Kafka.11 It’s an impossible space to penetrate, literally and metaphorically, so one can only imagine the hidden, bureaucratic layers of power within. Citizens talk about it, mentioning the social divisions created in the Pahlavi era, the money it has generated, the foreign managers and engineers implanted from outside, the way which the city has been designed around it in a secretive and inaccessible manner. The stories one hears from locals about the past and present life of the oil refinery invoke a specific image; as an alien object, this global representation is still untouchable in their minds. Industrial plants constitute a huge part of Abadan’s identity and yet are unable to identify in any meaningful sense with the city’s everyday life.
NON-PLACE?
The pattern of continuous immigration and the sudden gains and losses of population make Abadan a service city – perhaps even a ‘non-place’ – within the national and global marketplaces. If there continues to be little attention to how to create a sustainable local community, the problem will simply be perpetuated. What, then, ought to be the physical identity of cities of this kind? Other key issues of cultural identity are also being swept under the carpet. Almost all of Abadan’s southern and south-western borders are shared with Iraq, reminding citizens of the bitter 1980s conflict in which Abadan was under direct siege for 18 months. Driving around the city, almost every taxi driver tells you of their experience of war as if it was yesterday. Half-demolished buildings likewise offer strong reminders of those moments. This psychological presence of the Iran-Iraq War, which ended 23 years ago, is of great concern, and of course the same problem exists in neighbouring Khorramshahr.
A concerted process of post-war reconstruction would have been the ideal scenario for both these war-damaged cities, and indeed a localised, environmentally-driven regeneration programme on socially sustainable lines would have fitted the stated policies of the Islamic Republic government. Hashemi Rafsanjani, who from 1989–1997 was the first Iranian first president after the Iran-Iraq War, tried to push for extensive rebuilding. He favoured private development and free-market investment linked to the newly introduced concept of real estate, echoing to some extent what was happening in Britain under the Thatcher government. But all that has happened since then is a vague promise of establishing a ‘free economic zone’ in Abadan, similar to those in Kish Island or Dubai, which if introduced would simply freeze out local citizens once more and, critically, perpetuate unsustainable forms of development.
11.5 Half-demolished buildings in Abadan as reminders of the Iran/Iraq War, as photographed in 2009
In addition, it is not clear why Iran’s bold reconstruction projects from the 1990s, including a Californian-style oasis – called Arge-e-Jadid12 – created from virtually nothing in the middle of the desert, didn’t touch upon Abadan and Khorramshahr given their historically important locations on the Arvand River/Shatt Al-Arab. There is a very real argument that the cities deserve far more attention and investment than has hitherto been offered to them. They could be turned exemplars of urban reconstruction based on specific climatic conditions, use of natural resources, and ways in which cultural identity is reconnected to urban lifestyles. Similarly, it’s also unclear why some of the bonyads – charity foundations which became devoted to religious purposes following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and also highly effective in redistributing the wealth of the upper-class minority from the Pahlavi era – haven’t been asked to consolidate banks and regenerate empty properties in the Khuzestan region to promote socio-economic reconstruction.13 Instead, large numbers of properties which once belonged to the elite during the Pahlavi dynasty, some of which reflect imported colonial architecture such as from Britain or the Netherlands, remain unoccupied and left to ruin in Abadan and Khorramshahr. Instead, they ought to be reused as prime examples of how to redesign old dwellings for a new cultural context.
