Iran International
Tehran's municipality is tearing up the cobblestones of the capital's historic pedestrian zones and laying asphalt, a change officials call traffic management and that architects and urban sociologists read as something older: the redesign of a city to make protest harder.
The work, underway in District 12, Baharestan Square and 30 Tir Street, is presented by municipal officials as a routine measure to ease congestion, carried out at the request of the traffic police.
Critics in architecture and urban sociology argue it cannot be read as a merely technical decision, and belongs instead to a long historical tradition: the use of urban design as an instrument of control.
When the city takes away the barricade
The link between redrawing a city's body and engineering its security is not new. Its most famous case is the great reconstruction of nineteenth-century Paris, carried out by Baron Haussmann on the orders of Napoleon III.
Until the 1850s, Paris was a city of narrow, winding, organic streets that let protesting citizens pry up the paving stones, throw up barricades and take control of their own neighborhoods, the world Victor Hugo drew so vividly in Les Misérables.
By demolishing the old fabric and driving broad, straight, uniform boulevards through it, Haussmann pursued two entwined goals: to strip the public of the ability to barricade the streets, and to ease the rapid movement of troops and heavy artillery for the suppression of unrest.
Later theorists built the insight into the foundations of urban thought. Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project and David Harvey in his work on the "right to the city" traced how space itself becomes a tool for reproducing ruling power and erasing the protester's presence from it.
Physical disarmament of public space
The replacement of segmented paving blocks with continuous asphalt functions, in effect, as the physical disarmament of the urban environment. Unlike uniform asphalt, cobblestones can be pried loose in a street confrontation, handing demonstrators ready material for barricades or for holding back advancing security forces.
Beyond removing potential projectiles, the smooth surface answers the operational needs of motorized units. Pedestrian infrastructure, with its uneven paving, varying widths, benches and street furniture, slows vehicles down. Coating these zones in asphalt creates uninterrupted corridors for special forces, water cannons and high-speed motorcycle patrols.
Eradicating gathering points
The repaving projects coincide with heightened enforcement against public gathering spaces in central districts, including the sealing of outdoor cafes and the removal of street furniture.
Pedestrian-friendly designs naturally create pause points where citizens congregate, engage in conversation, and form initial nodes of public assembly.
Converting pedestrian hubs into vehicular thoroughfares prioritizes rapid transit over civic presence, reshaping central public areas into channels designed for continuous traffic flow.
The removal of seating and outdoor dining areas reinforces this operational shift by eliminating physical spaces that encourage citizens to linger.
Reclaiming the street
Public thoroughfares have consistently served as primary arenas for civil expression during periods of political tension in Iran.
Highlighting the symbolic and practical weight of public space, prominent Iranian actress Hedieh Tehrani addressed security forces in a public message during the 2022 nationwide protests, writing, "My only way of communicating with the people is the street."
Similarly, exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi emphasized the importance of public thoroughfares during his calls for widespread demonstrations in January 2026, framing the reclamation of street spaces as a central objective for people.
Replacing historical pedestrian infrastructure with asphalt prioritizes security deterrence and vehicular velocity over civic life and urban heritage. By converting public gathering hubs back into high-speed transit corridors, municipal authorities reduce public space from a venue for civic engagement into an infrastructure designed to prevent assembly.
A shortage of credit is the main reason for the long queue and responsibility for allocating the necessary resources rests with the Plan and Budget Organization, Fatemeh Abbasi told the ISNA news agency.
Payments to those who qualify will begin as soon as possible once the funds are assigned, Abbasi said.
The nursing allowance is available only to those classified as having severe or very severe disabilities under Article 7 of the 2018 Law on the Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Government support still falls far short of the real costs faced by people with disabilities, a report published on Tuesday by the newspaper Payam-e Ma said. Treatment, rehabilitation, equipment, transport and ongoing care consume a large share of household income, the paper added.
The actual cost of hiring a carer is several times higher than the state payment and families are forced to cover most of the expense themselves, Behrouz Morovati, director of the Campaign for the Rights of People with Disabilities, told the newspaper.
Payments lag real care costs
The organization must operate within the framework of the annual budget approved by the Cabinet, Abbasi said. Payments stop in a limited number of cases when a person’s disability classification is revised from severe or very severe to moderate, she noted.
Delays have also affected livelihood assistance, with payments for many recipients halted since June on the grounds of a lack of funds, the ILNA news agency reported in July.
Of roughly 600,000 people eligible for livelihood assistance, only about 245,000 currently receive it, leaving more than 300,000 still waiting, Morovati told Payam-e Ma.
Some of those who do receive the payment also get a monthly stipend of around 21 million rials ($11).
Combined, the two forms of support amount to roughly 100 million to 110 million rials ($53–$59), a sum that bears little relation to the actual cost of living and the extra needs of people with disabilities, Morovati said.
Support levels trail global peers
By comparison, France’s adult disability allowance stands at about €1,042 a month for people with limited other income. Australia’s Disability Support Pension for a single adult reaches roughly A$1,201 per fortnight, or about A$2,600 a month, and can be paired with individualised packages under the National Disability Insurance Scheme that cover personal care.
Germany’s long-term care insurance pays cash benefits ranging from €347 a month at the lower care grade to €990 at the highest, with higher amounts available for formal services.
Nordic systems such as Norway’s typically replace 66 percent of prior earnings, subject to minimums and caps.
Even in those countries extra disability-related expenses frequently exceed benefits, yet the absolute gap between official payments and real care costs remains markedly wider where baseline amounts stay at the levels recorded in Iran and eligibility for nursing support is restricted to the most severe categories.
The distance between available payments and the actual expenses of care continues to leave large numbers of disabled people and their families carrying the main financial burden themselves.
In the study of migration and bilingualism, Persian is, for many children of Iranian immigrants, a heritage language: a language passed down through family and cultural background while another language dominates their schooling and social world.
The term is not the same as mother tongue. A mother tongue is usually the first language learned in childhood; a heritage language may lose its dominant place very early, sometimes before the child can read a word of it.
For Iranians, this is not merely a question of language teaching. More than four decades of political, social and economic emigration have built a multigenerational society outside Iran, one now entering its third generation.
The question is no longer how many Persian words the children know. It is how much of the language, the family memory and the direct connection to Iran will reach the generations after them.
One generation weakens a language; the next can lose it
Starting school is one of the deepest turning points in a child's linguistic life. The host country's language is not just the language of lessons; it becomes the language of friendship, play, jokes, music, the internet and most of the child's social world. Even in a family where the parents speak Persian at home, the real share of Persian in the child's day shrinks, steadily and without anyone deciding it should.
The shift rarely happens suddenly. First the child understands Persian and answers in Persian. Then she still understands her parents but replies in the dominant language. Later, Persian narrows to family matters and daily routine, while feelings, schoolwork and personal disputes migrate to the other language.
Nor are understanding, speaking, reading and writing a single skill. A person may understand Persian almost completely yet grope for words when speaking, or speak fluently yet be unable to read a simple text. At that point, direct access to Persian literature, media, history and much of the written world of the language closes too.
The experience of other immigrant communities shows how deep the shift can run within two or three generations, a pattern sociolinguists have described since Joshua Fishman's classic model of three-generation language loss.
In the United States, 89 percent of first-generation Latino youth and 79 percent of the second generation report speaking Spanish well; in the third generation the figure falls to 38 percent, and only 26 percent report strong reading and writing.
Canadian data show the shift happening inside the family itself: in households where both immigrant parents shared the same non-official mother tongue, 24.4 percent of children used only English or French at home, against 2.5 percent of their parents.
These numbers are not about Iranians and cannot be transferred to them directly. But the pattern they draw is unambiguous: a language's strength in the first generation is no guarantee it will reach the third.
When the shared language shrinks, the hard conversations shrink with it
The consequences are not only cultural. One of the most consequential facts of immigrant family life is the gap that can open between the linguistic reach of parents and children.
A child usually learns the host country's language faster and deeper than her parents do. A father or mother may handle the new language perfectly well for work and errands, yet still feel a memory, an emotion or a complicated thought most precisely in Persian. The child may lack sufficient Persian in exactly those places.
In childhood the gap barely shows. School, food and tomorrow's plans need only a narrow band of language. Adolescence demands other conversations: anxiety, love, identity, discrimination, gender, politics, the future, the family's own disputes.
A shrinking common language does not by itself produce a family crisis, and the difficulties of immigrant families cannot be reduced to language. Economics, the migration experience itself, generational difference and social pressures all play their part. But the more complicated the conversation, the more the linguistic ceiling makes itself felt.
In Iranian families, the bond with the older generation carries its own weight. A child with limited Persian can manage daily talk with her grandparents. Hearing the story of a life, the memory of an emigration, an argument about history, is harder.
For a community whose modern experience is knotted together with revolution, war, repression, protest and wave after wave of departure, this is not only about preserving literature and culture. Language is one of the principal carriers of family and historical memory. The narrower it becomes, the more the next generation's access to its own family's lived experience will depend on summaries, and on translation.
The third generation: who will teach Persian, and with which Iran?
About the coming generations there is still no comprehensive data. Nobody knows how many Iranian children abroad understand Persian, how many speak it, how many can read and write it. Even the size of the diaspora resists precise measurement, because countries classify people differently, by birthplace, citizenship, ancestry, ethnicity or language.
Yet the third generation's challenge is already visible in outline. The first generation typically carried complete Persian out of Iran. The second may hold a reduced version: strong comprehension, weaker speech, little literacy. When that generation becomes parents, its narrower Persian is no longer a private matter; it directly constrains what can be passed to the next child.
For Iranians, teaching the language carries a political complication too. Many immigrant families are caught between the need to preserve Persian and their distrust of institutions that are official, or tied to the Islamic Republic. Not everyone has access to a Persian school, and some parents refuse to let their child's language lessons come bundled with religious instruction, ideological content or the state's official narrative of Iran's history and identity.
So the question is not only how Persian should be taught. It is who teaches it, with what content, and with which image of Iran.
A few hours of weekend class will not carry a language on their own. A language survives when a child has reasons to use it: books and media made for her age, friendships with other Persian speakers, and the ability to talk in Persian not only about home and food, but about her own world.
For part of the second generation, Persian is still the language of home but no longer the language of life. For the third, the question is more fundamental: will Persian remain the language of home at all?
That question is not only about the survival of a language. Its answer will decide how directly generations who may never live in Iran can reach their family's memory, their people's modern history and the Iranian experience itself; whether Iran, for them, will be a land whose language they know, or a story that always arrives in translation.
