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Social Justice or Modernization: Reconsidering the Aims Behind the Establishment of Iran’s Ministry of Development and Housing in 1964
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Seyyedeh Mitra Hashemi  , Zahra Ahari * |
| Shahid Beheshti University , Z_Ahari@sbu.ac.ir |
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Abstract: (77 Views) |
Objective: This article examines the explicit and implicit aims behind the establishment of Iran’s Ministry of Development and Housing in 1964. Its central question is how housing came to require an institution at the ministerial level in the early 1960s, and how this institutional change was connected to the state’s project of modernization. Against accounts that treat the housing crisis mainly as an unintended consequence of the White Revolution, land reform, and rural migration to cities, the article traces the formation of this crisis back to the mid-1950s. It explains how housing was constructed as a national problem, how this construction justified bureaucratic expansion and institutional centralization, and how the creation of the ministry expanded state intervention in the built environment.
Method: The study adopts a discourse-analytical approach. It examines the establishment of the Ministry of Development and Housing not as a self-evident administrative response, but as an event made possible through specific ways of defining housing, social justice, state responsibility, and modernization. The primary sources include newspapers, general and specialized journals, laws and official documents, debates in the Iranian Parliament and the Senate, minutes of the Economic Council, speeches and writings of the Shah, statements by state officials, and the positions of the regime’s opponents and critics. The article mainly studies texts produced in the years immediately before and after the ministry’s establishment, while also referring to earlier or later materials when needed to clarify its roots or consequences.
Conclusions: The article argues that the Ministry of Development and Housing emerged at the intersection of two discourses: social justice and modernization. The discourse of social justice framed housing as a public crisis and, by doing so, legitimized the expansion of state intervention in the built environment and the growth of bureaucracy. Yet the ministry’s mission cannot be reduced to housing provision. More than an administrative response to housing shortage, it became an instrument for advancing modernization and reshaping the country's built environment.
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| Keywords: housing, Ministry of Development and Housing, modernization, White Revolution |
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Type of Study: Research |
Subject:
محیط کالبدی
Received: 2026/06/2 | Accepted: 2026/06/10 | Published: 2026/06/16
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