Ideological mis-direction: Iran’s low income housing policy or surfing plebeian emotions

Abstract

This paper will explore social housing policy in Iran and attempt to illuminate the ideology underlying and facilitating these policies and the consequences that they induce. Ideology is as an essential and universal essence, it constitutes a society’s social reality (Žižek 2008). Any dominant ideology produces a series of fantasies that partially shapes the way its members contextualize knowledge, the economy, society, and obviously planning (Gunder, 2010). For instance, the egalitarian creeds underlying social housing are imbedded in a fantasy promise of addressing a deficiency, such as “better life for low income groups” or “the right of people to possess housing commensurate with their needs”, which also appears in constitutional laws, rules and policies of the state. Yet, this paper contends, following Gunder and Hillier (2009), that these policies and laws tend not only to, fail to achieve success, but also to often ignore and obscure other humanistic needs and democratic demands. In this vein, the attractiveness of housing and its related land policies make housing one of the most effective tool of popular domination (Laclau, 2005). Accordingly, governmental housing policy is often one of the most important tools for the manipulation of mass movements. This paper attempts to demonstrate, in an Iranian context, three main issues: first, the fact that housing policies based on the promise of egalitarian achievement can act as a hindrance to citizen rights and democratic demands. Second, housing policy can act as a political tool, which reproduces the dominant ideology, and third, as technocrats, planners facilitate the use of these populist and ideologically inducing policies. In more democratic and modern societies, the function of planning is a complementary to the market; however, in a non-democratic, reactionary and dictatorial populist system, the role of planning changes to become the actual distributor of public goods and services; this is sometimes at odds with democratic demand. In the shadow of this egalitarian rhetoric, populist policies are used to create the mass movements of government support and to legitimize decisions that have been made. The paper will demonstrate that the consequences of these policies are that over the thirty year period of the current Iranian regime, a consolidation of capital has occurred drawing accumulation from the wealthy and middle classes to the central government. This has hindered private investment in housing and the pertinent related industries, further increasing dependency on, and support for the current regime by the masses. In this regard, the policy inherently impedes the formation of social and economic market mechanisms to meet the needs of the populace and further reinforces dependence on, and support for the regime.