Monday, July 2, 2012

Abadan: planning and architecture under the Anglo- Iranian Oil Company

by Mark Crinson

Industry and urbanization were brought to south-west Iran when large quantities of oil were struck there in the early years of this century. This paper explores the development of Abadan from these beginnings to the 1950s, and particularly the housing and planning forms adopted by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its architect James M. Wilson. Abadan was in effect a colonial company town whose early development combined spacious bungalow compounds for British expatriate workers, barracklike lines of huts for labour recruited locally and from India, and a rapidly overcrowded ‘native town’ under local municipal control. The Company used Wilson’s expertise in an attempt to answer the physical problems created by the growth of Abadan between the wars and to deect pressure exerted both by Iranian nationalists and the British government. In the garden suburb of Bawarda he created a model solution that used planning and housing form to represent ethnic and social harmony under the discreet paternal benevolence of the Company. This, however, was inappropriate to Abadan’s problems and quickly eclipsed by the political events that led to the Company’s expulsion in 1951.


more about urban Iran:

The influence of urban physical form on trip generation, evidence from metropolitan Shiraz, Iran

Evaluating integration between public transportation and pedestrian-oriented urban spaces in two main metro stations of Tehran

Tehran's "Bike House" Shines Green

THE ROLE OF PHYSICAL IDENTITY OF CITY IN URBAN SUSTAINABILITY (THE CASE STUDY: YAZD,IRAN)

The Mechanism of Transformation of Shiraz City from Past to Present

Earthquake Management in Iran A compilation of literature on earthquake Management

Good Governance, (as promoting in decision-making process) and its influence on urban strategic plans

No comments:

Post a Comment