How Resistance become possible in Vali-Asr

Street?Introduction

The uprising after the June 2009 presidential election

attracted international attention to the profound social

changes had been taking place in Iran. The sudden

emergence of citizen journalism, which put hundreds of

photos and hours of video recordings into worldwide

circulation on the net, materialized a notion which had

remained unaddressed till the uprising: the political

importance of space. The registered moments of chanting,

attacks, counter-attacks, hiding and escaping -- taken

from the hight of foot bridges and residential towers, or

from intimate distances from within the scenes themselves

-- highlighted the role of the boulevards, streets,

alleys, junctions, squares and other public spaces in

endowing the emerging movement with a body. Among many

consequences of the presidential election, a radically

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new awareness of socio-political public space aroused

critical questions such as: What kind of activities could

be carried out in which places, and why?

This paper will address this awareness and discuss a

street which has become the site of symbolic clashes

between protesters and security forces. Vali-Asr street

has come to embody and shelter protest since 2009 and in

this paper, I will discusses what is so specific about

this space and how this potentiality was produced.

Firstly, I will briefly introduce the street in terms of

its history, materiality and political economy. Secondly,

I will describe the characteristics that made this clash

distinct from those in other streets of Tehran. Thirdly,

I will explain how the street acquired such capacity with

reference to Lefebvre's notion of the 'Critical Zone' or

'Urban Space' and argue that this practice of protest

indicates the emergence of a new sort of urban fabric and

an attempt to materialize a Socialist zone.

For data and descriptions, I will be relying entirely

upon on-line resources: what people have registered in

weblogs, photo-blogs and websites in order to highlight

the collective production of knowledge on the matter.

1) Where is Vali Asr Street?

Vali Asr is a street which runs for nearly twenty

kilometres from Tehran’s railway station in the south of

the city to Tajrish square in the north. The street, said

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to divide the metropolis into western and eastern parts,

is described as one of the city vital veins. This tree-

lined street with its broad pavement has recently been

reconstructed and enhanced for urban walk. It was not,

however, built for the use of Tehrani residents. It is

said that Vali Asr, formerly called Pahlavi, was

constructed when Reza shah, the first Pahlavi Shah,

decided to build a road to connect his winter palace in

the south to his summer palace in the North. When the

street was built around a century ago, it was not open to

the public, and only the ruling bourgeoisie were allowed

to drive their cars through this gated route -- one of

the rare asphalted streets at the time. Later, during the

chaos of the Allied Occupation at the end of WWII,

Tehran's future thoroughfare was finally opened to its

residents.

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The middle class built their residences up the north side

of the street over the ensuing years, but it was not

until the process of urbanization following the1979

Revolution that the process of populating the upper-north

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part of the street accelerated to the rates seen in the

recent decades. During this period of rapid growth, Vali

Asr Street became the hub of the city's exchange process:

numerous shopping centres, restaurants, cultural and

educational institutes, offices of national and

international companies, libraries and parks appeared on

the outer edges of Vali Asr. The street turned into a

stormy stream of everyday life, bearing all the signs of

these changes without anything really lasting long on its

shores. The deep economic disparity that characterizes

Tehran, is only intensified on this site – as manifested

through its architecture, workforce, types of labour,

hybrid modes of production and exchange, and so forth.

The contrast between the luxury blight of its high-rise

buildings (caused by the growth of speculative capital

through trading in urban spaces, which has become all too

common) and the drastic increase in the visibility of

informal labour (construction workers, pedlars, etc)

testifies to the reinforcement of economic

liberalization.

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The length of Vali Asr St, which runs through a wide

range of social classes produces a hybrid stream of

moving population whose encounters are often antagonistic

and driven by class hatred. Moreover, the flow of

unpredictable commuting and transient populations who

daily cross Vali Asr for the sake of their jobs, public

services, personal affairs and so forth destablise the

nature of human contacts and proliferate the dominant

codes of communication.

2) What happens?

It was in this social and economical context that Vali

Asr turned into a sort of exhibition where the upcoming

changes within the urban space were firstly and most

severely displayed . Accordingly, the first signs of

resistive social practices emerged most noticeably and

effectively on this street. Although, these practices

were ultimately broadcasted and addressed internationally

after revelations of the fraudulent 2009 election, they

had started nearly three months before the election when

the presidential candidates began their campaigns, and

their supporters resorted to the streets where they could

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practice politics in their own peculiar way. In the run

up to election day, hundreds of supporters, amongst whom

the “Green Army”, supporters of Mir Hossein Musavi, were

most prominent, would spontaneously gather on the corners

of the street, block the passage of people, distribute

leaflets, shout out their slogans and engage in

persuasive discussions with the passers-by. During the

last weeks before the election, Vali Asr Street

experienced an extraordinary time wherein the campaign

turned into a carnival of sorts, with youth blocking the

street with their cars and singing and dancing around

till early the hours of the morning. These demonstrations

of support intensified incredibly three days before the

election when Mir Hossein Musavi's Green supporters

responded to an anonymous text on their mobile phones,

flooded the entire twenty kilometre length of the street

and formed a human chain.

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What characterizes the crowd in these photos is their

form which is scattered and fragmented into small groups

here and there. And it must be noted that even before the

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election there were many scattered clashes between

various socio-political factions, as well as between the

supporters and participants in the carnival with the

police as they were disrupting the street's dominant

security balance. In order to explain my point, it is

possible to compare Azadi boulevard with Vali-Asr Street

where peaceful protests took place after the 2009

election.

These protests were known as peaceful protests whereby

the shocked security forces did not attack the

protesters, and I would like to argue that despite the

apt broadness and length of Azadi boulevards, they are

not suitable for protests with a hostile police.

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In the face of lethal state violence, after the first

month the protests were called onto Vali Asr Street

again. In this new round of protests, the activists

attempted to highjack the official ceremonies and subvert

the signification of the governmentally organised

demonstrations on dates such as the Presidential

Endorsement, Quds day, Student Day, Ashoora, etc. On

these occasions, the protests consisted not in a unified

presentation of opposition, but rather in many scattered

crowds moving between Vali-Asr Sq and Vanak Sq: chanting,

clashing with the police or anti-riot gaur and Basijis.

At this point, the protest dispersed into Vali-Asr's

open-ended alleys, only to meet again in another junction

further up or down and mingle with another small crowd.

Thus, the protest model possible in Vali Asr comes to

differ entirely from those in Azadi boulevard. This type

of a protest sustained its existence through convergence,

moving, clash, divergence and again convergence.

Meanwhile, the many offices, residential houses, public

parkings and shops hosted the escaping crowd until the

security forces left the scene.

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This model of protesting illustrates the capacity of Vali

Asr St to host a uniquely distinct mode of protest; it

allows for clashes to happen. It provides a space for

confrontation, for bodily and symbolic encounters to

happen between the protesters and the representatives of

the State. What makes this clash unique is that it is

possible to flee. In other situations (such as the lethal

clashes in Azadi Boulevard), either the encounter did not

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take place or the protesters become subjected to the

power of the State through drastic consequences (such as

death, imprisonment and/or torture). Nonetheless, these

confrontations also have a cost for both sides. As its

nature is antagonistic, the encounter is dangerous,

unpredictable and painful. The protests in Vali Asr St

mean being beaten brutally, dragged around and

drastically affected by tear gas and other chemicals. The

security forces cannot close the street to vehicles;

therefore the flood of people, cars and commodities is

continuous, so there are usually too many witnesses

watching both sides from the verge of the street. This

means no shooting will happen. Once, however, the clash

happens, no one has the upper hand at the level of the

street. Both sides experience a painful confrontation and

the balance of power is disrupted for hours. Both sides

lose their sense of orientation, not knowing where they

themselves and their peers are. In these battles, the

police are also wounded and as fearful as the protesters.

Hence, the protests maintain the opportunity to force the

State to recognise its power -- when the State leaves

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traces, material traces, on the wounded body of its

subjects.

This characteristic shapes the battleground mainly

because both sides have to act in small and fragmented

groups. Since, on the one hand, it is not possible for

security forces to occupy the street in large numbers due

to the non-stop process of exchange: the production of

surplus value in the street would be effectively

disrupted.

On the other hand, it is not possible for security forces

to unify since the many open-ended alleys of Vali Asr,

connecting it with other highways and main boulevards,

facilitates the constant flow of labour and sustains the

presence of the protesters in all directions. The only

way to maintain minor control for police is not to follow

protesters, but to keep the position at junctions and

disperse the protest from there.

3) Why?

The question raised here is: How did this type of protest

become possible in Vali Asr St? And more importantly, how

might this sort of political protest be extended to other

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streets, and is this capacity reproducible in other

locations. Henri Lefebvre's understanding of urban

revolution as what transforms the city into the stage of

what he calls the 'critical zone' or 'urban space'

provides a helpful framework for understanding the

intimate relationship between protest and location. This

'critical zone' is marked by tendencies, orientations and

virtualities rather than any determined reality. It

accommodates concrete contradiction. Lefebvre refers to

urban society as 'the society that results from industrialization,

which is a process of domination that absorbs

agricultural production. This urban society cannot

take shape conceptually until the end of a process

during which the old urban forms, the end result of a

series of discontinuous transformations, burst

apart'(p.2).

This space resembles a contentless form where encounter

and assembly are simultaneous. Defined as concrete

abstraction, urban is associated with the practices of

'living creatures, the products of industry,

technology and wealth, works of culture, ways of

living, situations, the modulations and ruptures of

the everyday- -- the urban accumulates all content

but is more than and different from accumulation… the

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urban is both form and receptacle, void and

plenitude, superobject and nonobject. It is

associated with the logic of form and with the

dialectic of content’ (p.119).

Lefebvre postulates that it is within these urban spaces

that a Socialist zone, which he calls 'the deferential

space' come into being. He asserts that contrasts,

oppositions, superpositions and juxtapositions replace

separation and spatio-temporal distance.

Accordingly, one of the defining characteristics of the

Vali Asr St protests included the possibility to

encounter, to clash, to remain free while subverting

previous power relations, and this might potentially

signify the formation of new social relations and

associated practices which bear a striking resemblance to

Lefebvre's critical zone. Vali-Asr St presents us with a

concrete example of the urban as a 'highly complex field

of tensions, a virtuality, a present-absent' -- a form

which had been envisioned and practiced yet had never

fully materialized. If we consider that the protesters

were using the routes reserved for the circulation of

labour and commodities to sustain the protest as well as

the fact that the protest happened simultaneously and as

part of the process of production and exchange of surplus

value, it is possible to read the protest as an attempt

to break the obligatory and repressed movement of people

and objects, as an attempt to break the organized network

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for and by consumption, an attempt to liberate from

merchandized time and to decolonize the public/social

space. Protesters set new social codes and practices

while escaping from the police -- breaking into shops,

residential buildings, construction sites, sport clubs in

their demand for a new and free type of movement not

tagged in relation to the production of surplus value.

They treated the street as a possibility to meet in ways

that moved beyond those of previously designated

encounters. In short, the protest in Vali Asr St sought

to claim the street from the controlling powers in order

to use its potentiality in the service of the people. It

is perhaps this context that created the possibility for

the United Frontier of Green Movement's call for a new

round of protests in March 2010. People were invited to

simply occupy their neighbourhoods' streets, junctions

and squares on the designated time and date. It seems

that it was an attempt to extend the fabric of protest to

the rest of the city. Yet, what has become widely

accepted is the fact that protest is about claiming the

city for the people. The Green activists in fact called

on people to meet acquaintances and strangers in the

street, to converse and liberate their time and space

from the codes of labour production and to experience the

city differently.

Conclusion

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The post-2009 election uprising in Iran has been

reported, discussed and analysed from many perspectives

by various corporate media and political frontiers.

However, this paper proposed that we view those changes

as the result of deeper social transformations which have

brought about new practices and created a new space --a

‘Critical zone’. Although, the changes have not yet fully

materialized the possibility of the above described type

of protest in Vali-Asr St, it indicates their imminent

emergence. Protest can be observed as a practice to

advance the changes further for the realization of

deferential space, a practice to decentralize the

accumulation of surplus-value in the street and go beyond

the cruel limits of this type of Middle Eastern late

capitalism. It is within this context that Tehrani

residents have come to view their city from a different

angel after the election. Prior to the events of 2009,

Tehran had been a major site of embarrassment with its

unlawful constructions, unbearable traffic and pollution,

hostile population and lack of history and pride. Now,

however, it is seen as a city which embraces and embodies

changes. Today, Tehran is appreciated as the organic body

of 'the urban' with Vali Asr St still at the forefront of

this transformation.

*This paper was presented at the conference Counter-

Hegemonic Spaces, April 2011, at University of

Nottingham, UK.

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