Resistance under Urbicide: Everyday Resistance to Military Modernism in Reza Shah’s Tehran

Tehran during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925–1941) serves as a compelling historical case of modernist urbicide executed under a military dictatorship. During this period, a high-modernist, military-backed project was translated into a spatial language of large-scale urban planning. This agenda fundamentally transformed the urban landscape, aggressively clashing with the traditional urban fabric, everyday spatial practices, and cultural heritage. To make the city legible, governable, and securable, the state deployed massive demolitions, street-widening initiatives, forced reconstructions, grid-patterned boulevards, monumental architecture, and strict architectural and behavioral standardization. This research examines how resistance becomes possible and how it changes under conditions of widespread, state-led urban destruction driven by military coercion. The central question guiding this study is: what forms of resistance emerge when mass, planned destruction is deployed to re-territorialize the city, suspend effective property rights, and discipline urban life? Furthermore, how do residents actively resist the state's efforts to reconfigure spatial relations and expropriate private land and property? To what extent does the state actually achieve its predefined visions, and how does this violent encounter between state power and ordinary citizens ultimately alter the trajectory of urban life? Theoretically, the paper addresses these questions by synthesizing James C. Scott’s critique of high-modernist planning and "seeing like a state," Henri Lefebvre’s insights on the production of space and spatial resistance, Marshall Berman’s narrative of modernity's destructive/creative dialectic, and Michel Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and the spatial regulation of bodies. Through this multi-layered framework, the act of resistance is conceptualized as spatialized. Empirically, this study is grounded in a robust documentary analysis of historical archives. The research extracts primary data from state and municipal records, contemporary newspapers, and legal case files regarding property disputes and expropriations from the era. By utilizing the concept of "urbicide," this paper highlights that organized state violence directed at the built environment can be as devastating as violence against bodies. Here, resistance is analyzed at a critical intersection: it operates against the most ultimate and coercive form of state power (military authority) while defending the closest point to human everyday practices (the private lived space). Framing modernist planning as an urbicidal process driven by military rationality problematizes standard narratives of urban resistance. The paper traces the actual mechanisms through which military-backed planning sought to erase the old city and how the residents of Tehran continuously fought to reclaim it. By doing so, this research directly contributes to the core themes of Resistance Studies, deepening theoretical discussions on how resistance manifests in extreme, highly asymmetric contexts of authoritarianism and militarization.