This book studies the production of urban culture in Tehran after 1979. It analyzes urban
resistance and urban processes in underground cultural spaces: bookshops cafes and art
galleries. The intended audience is architects and urban planners interested in socio-political
aspects of bottom-up space formation but also those in humanities and particularly cultural
studies. The idea of the book reflects architectural criticism and bottom-up processes of space
formation. It analyzes alternative non-official ways of forming cultural spaces in Tehran and
the way they resist formally endorsed culture. Cafés bookshops and galleries each take
various and different sets of strategies to constitute their territory and their communities
within the city. From temporarily occupying street corners (booksellers) to constitution of an
underground network of unfixed meeting points to using the modern paradigms of ownership and
the idea of private property primarily as a political tool for management to claim a safe
alternative sphere of art and finally to semiotic spatial codifications of spaces to make them
as a safe gathering places taking food as a means. All these three cultural spaces deal with
various conditions to form specific forms of resistance practices throughout processes that
leave their spatial traces on the city.
