TEHRAN – There are 3,268 hectares of rundown areas in Tehran, 40 percent of which has been renovated, head of the Tehran City Council commission on urban planning and architecture has said.

However, Mohammad Salari explained, mostly renovations concerned the old buildings not the area’s infrastructure.

“The most important barrier to retrofitting rundown areas is the lack of coordination, which will be broken down by setting up a renovation headquarter to be a coordinative body and pursue the issue,” Fars quoted Salari as saying on Wednesday.

Tehran needs renovation through an urban regeneration approach, in which the city’s infrastructure being retrofitted and modernized, to do so, apart from citizen participation, the developers and investors must cooperate, he further explained.

Pointing to the renovation of 40 percent of the total 3,268 hectares of rundown areas in the capital, he regretted that only old buildings have been reconstructed constituting 40 percent, while the city’s infrastructure and public facilities have not been reconstructed.

Kaveh Ali-Akbari, head of the renovation of rundown areas organization affiliated to the Municipality, said in November 2018 that over 5 percent of the properties in the busiest province of the country are extremely old, according to the statistics published in the Iranian calendar year of 1385 (March 2006-March 2007), once the statistics are revised, a considerable increase will show up.

“Currently, over 1.2 million people live in rundown areas, amounting to 15 percent of the total population of Tehran,” he added.

On December 27, Tehran Mayor Pirouz Hanachi said headquarters for sustainable renovation of rundown areas in the capital city of Tehran has been established.

In a tweet Hanachi explained that “after two years of putting off the matter the headquarters for sustainable renovation of the rundown areas in Tehran was formed… we are planning on taking effective steps by mobilizing integrated management and public participation to renovate the rundown areas.” 

In the national budget bill proposed for the current Iranian calendar year 1397 (started on March 21, 2018), Majlis (the Iranian parliament) has approved a $200 million budget for renovation of rundown areas.

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