Iran’s capital dilemma: Relocation or reform?
By Zohreh Qanadi
Staff writer
The idea of relocating Iran’s capital away from Tehran has been floated by President Masoud Pezeshkian due to the city’s mounting
challenges.
“Tehran, as the country’s capital, grapples with water crisis, land subsidence, air pollution, and other issues. The continuation of existing policies and actions will only exacerbate these problems, and the only viable solution is to relocate the political and economic center,” Pezeshkian said.
The president emphasized that persisting with the current approach will render Tehran’s crises intractable. According to Pezeshkian, any efforts to expand Tehran under the current water scarcity conditions are a waste of time. He proposed that the government should lead the way in relocating, encouraging the public to follow suit.
Pezeshkian’s statement comes amidst years of expert warnings about Tehran’s problems and the lack of resources for its large population, estimated to be more than nine million in 2024. While some believe that relocating the capital is the solution, others advocate for balanced development across the country and avoiding political centralization.
Former Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi doesn’t share the president’s enthusiasm for the relocation, attributing Tehran’s woes to political entanglements. “Where do you intend to go?!” Karbaschi quipped in an interview with Sharq newspaper. “If Mr. Pezeshkian’s administration aims to address issues outside of political and emotional discourse and emphasizes expertise, they should consider the extensive professional work conducted on Tehran in the past. Unfortunately, the city’s management has become entangled in political complexities.”
The ex-mayor believes that Tehran’s challenges have become more intricate since the formation of the first Tehran City Council in 1999. He shares that the late president Aliakbar Hashemi concurred, advocating for a gradual approach to implementing the law on councils, starting with smaller areas, and then extending it to larger cities after evaluating the performance of the councils.
Acknowledging the complexities of managing a metropolis like Tehran, Karbaschi says, “Running a city, particularly a sprawling urban center like Tehran, is an immensely intricate task. A myriad of management entities with divergent agendas shouldn’t meddle in a mayor or city council’s affairs, tasked with the arduous job of untangling these interferences.”
Critiquing the centralization of power in Tehran, the former governor of Isfahan says, “Currently, we have a centralized government, verging on authoritarianism, that concentrates all administrative, political, cultural, and economic authorities in Tehran.”
Karbaschi went on to say, “Wherever in the world centralized governments have existed, devolving power to provinces and various regions has not yielded successful outcomes.” He advocates for “administrative federalism,” where centralized government authorities are delegated to managers across the nation.
Karbaschi, who considers Tehran’s population to be its most pressing issue, believes that if the Pezeshkian administration embraces decentralization, at least a third of Tehran’s population could be redistributed to other parts of the country, benefiting the government without incurring additional costs.
Additionally, Karbaschi maintains that there is no need for independent governmental organizations, such as the National Steel Company, the Tea Organization, the Tobacco Company, the Fisheries Organization, and dozens of other large public and governmental institutions, to be headquartered in Tehran.
He emphasizes that if the government decides to relocate all 160 predominantly governmental organizations, mostly affiliated with ministries, whose records have been scrutinized by the Ministry of Interior, and whose presence in Tehran is deemed unnecessary, to their primary locations in other provinces, it will foster employment opportunities and regional development beyond Tehran.
Arash Hosseini Milani, the head of the Environment Committee of the Fifth Tehran City Council, describes the project of relocating the capital from Tehran as “an immensely ambitious and challenging endeavor.”
In an interview with Sharq, Milani says, “In the current economic, social, and political atmosphere of the country, embarking on such projects necessitates extensive groundwork and foundation-laying, neither of which I foresee on the horizon. Among these prerequisites is robust financing to underpin the capital’s relocation.”
“Since the 2000s, it has been proposed in Tehran that the city can only sustainably provide water for a population of 7 million. To accommodate a larger population, it was suggested that water sources and catchment areas surrounding Tehran be redirected to the city, effectively reducing the environmental flow and agricultural and industrial water rights in the source basins,” he says.
Reacting to the president’s statement, Tehran City Council President Mehdi Chamran weighs in, “There’s no need for all the country’s issues to be centralized in Tehran. We have active ports in the south and north, capable of steering significant segments of our economy and industry.”
Chamran points out that various administrations have broached this subject in the past, without reaching definitive conclusions.
He underscores the importance of distributing the country’s affairs across all provinces and cities, deeming it a necessary step. Chamran, too, identifies water scarcity as one of Tehran’s significant challenges.
Former Tehran Municipality deputy mayor Abdolreza Golpayegani shared his insights with Entekhab on the topic of relocating the capital and the imperative to reform Tehran’s structures, saying, “Regarding the proposal to relocate the capital, which was raised in the previous two parliamentary terms, and for which the Ministry of Roads was tasked with conducting a study, the ministry’s conclusion was that instead of moving the capital, Tehran needed to be reorganized.”
Golpayegani added, “Considering all the government employees, we’re talking about a maximum of 1 million people who would need to relocate. So, the problem lies elsewhere. Consequently, the idea of relocating the capital, which pertained to the political capital, was abandoned.”
He continued, “I believe the focus should be on rehabilitating Tehran. Any proposal to relocate the capital ought to be rooted in sound methodology and sustainable development principles. Iran’s Seventh National Development Plan has created capacities that could potentially be harnessed to decentralize Tehran. If we shift the focus of development and job creation to smaller cities, we will resolve a significant portion of Tehran’s issues.”
Drawing attention to 15 global precedents of capital relocation, Golpayegani prompts a reflection on the country’s managerial and financial capacities, questioning whether they are robust enough to undertake such a move. The notion of relocating Iran’s capital from Tehran to another city has been floated numerous times, both before and after the Islamic Revolution (1979). During the Islamic Republic’s era, this topic resurfaced at the governmental level around 2013. In the same year, members of the parliament discussed the generalities of the “Bill for the Organization and Relocation of the Political and Administrative Capital,” which even reached the Guardian Council, but it failed to gain serious traction afterward.
Although none of these instances entailed in-depth studies or identified candidate cities capable of absorbing some of the country’s political and administrative centralization, some officials, including former Tehran mayor Pirouz Hanachi and former interior minister Ahmad Vahidi, have estimated the relocation cost to be between $70 billion and $100 billion.
A review of expert viewpoints here and the hefty price tag attached to this project suggests that adopting a decentralization policy regarding Tehran may be a more feasible course of action. “Administrative federalism,” which Karbaschi also emphasizes, could be a viable approach, implying that each region should enjoy administrative, cultural, and political autonomy, empowering them to manage their own affairs. If governors are to function as the presidents of their respective provinces, they ought to be endowed with the requisite authorities, rather than having to refer all matters to Tehran. Studies indicate that countries that have undertaken capital relocation grapple with twofold challenges: the old capital city remains saddled with all its problems, and the new capital, due to the concentration of authorities and administrative, political, cultural, and economic clout, becomes a new set of issues.
Moreover, relocating the capital doesn’t necessarily entail abruptly shifting all political, economic, and administrative entities from Tehran to another city. Given the rapid evolution of communications, it is conceivable to envisage dispersing Tehran’s centralization across multiple cities and provinces.
All of this calls for extensive and protracted research and studies, which successive governments have yet to seriously undertake.