Measured Sovereignty: Scale as a Political Strategy from Shahestan Pahlavi to the Great Mosalla of Tehran

Abstract

This article explores how two successive regimes in Iran, Pahlavi monarchy and Islamic Republic, employed scale as a political strategy in major urban projects on Tehran’s Abbas Abad plateau: Shahestan (1970s), and the Grand Mosalla (1980s–present). Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory, this study treats spatial magnitude not as a merely technical measure, but as a political instrument that links legal frameworks, design, and ideology to the material production of urban space. Attempting to secure their authority on Tehran’s image and landscape, both regimes relied on a range of scalar strategies, from natural topography of the Abbas Abad hills to symbolically charged architectural forms. Together, these strategies turned the plateau into a compelling stage for expressing sovereignty, yet they also generated tensions whose sheer size produced delay, contestation, and enduring incompletion. The unfulfilled royal vision of Shahestan was later reappropriated in the form of the Grand Mosalla of the Islamic Republic, aiming to concentrate the masses, where piety and politics converged through comparably monumental forms. Scale functioned as a double-edged tool that helped both regimes redefine spatial orders, while simultaneously exposing the limits of centralized power when confronted with historical contingency, political dissent, and the practical complexities of building at a metropolitan scale.