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Rural settlement
The topography and the water supply determine the regions fit for human habitation, the lifestyles of the people, and the types of dwellings. The deep gorges and defiles, unnavigable rivers, empty deserts, and impenetrable kavīrs have all contributed to insularity and tribalism among the Iranian peoples, and the population has become concentrated around the periphery of the interior plateau and in the oases. The felt yurts of the Turkmen, the black tents of the Bakhtyārī, and the osier huts of the Baloch are typical, as the tribespeople roam from summer to winter pastures. The vast central and southern plains are dotted with numerous oasis settlements with scattered rudimentary hemispherical or conical huts. Since the mid-20th century the migrations have shortened, and the nomads have settled in more permanent villages.
The villages on the plains follow an ancient rectangular pattern. High mud walls with corner towers form the outer face of the houses, which have flat roofs of mud and straw supported by wooden rafters. A mosque is situated in the open center of the village and serves also as a school.
Mountain villages are situated on the rocky slopes above the valley floor, surrounded by terraced fields (usually irrigated) in which grain and alfalfa (lucerne) are raised. The houses are square, mud-brick, windowless buildings with flat or domed roofs; a roof hole provides ventilation and light. Houses are usually two stories high, with a stable occupying the ground floor.
Caspian villages are different from those of both the plains and the mountains. The scattered hamlets typically consist of two-storied wooden houses. Separate outbuildings (barns, henhouses, silkworm houses) surround an open courtyard.
Urban settlement
Most of Iran’s population is urban. After a period of rapid urbanization from the 1960s into the first decade of the 2000s, about three-fourths of Iran’s population lived in urban areas, compared to just one-third in the 1950s. Causes of this rapid shift in settlement distribution included industrialization, social and political transformations, and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88).
Tehrān, the capital and largest city, is separated from the Caspian Sea by the Elburz Mountains. Eṣfahān, about 250 miles (400 km) south of Tehrān, is the second most important city and is famed for its architecture. There are few cities in central and eastern Iran, where water is scarce, although lines of oases penetrate the desert. Most towns are supplied with water by qanāt, an irrigation system by which an underground mountain water source is tapped and the water channeled down through a series of tunnels, sometimes 50 miles (80 km) in length, to the town level. Towns are, therefore, often located a short distance from the foot of a mountain. The essential feature of a traditional Iranian street is a small canal.
City layout is typical of Islamic communities. The various sectors of society—governmental, residential, and business—are often divided into separate quarters. The business quarter, or bazaar, fronting on a central square, is a maze of narrow arcades lined with small individual shops grouped according to the type of product sold. Modern business centers, however, have grown up outside the bazaars. Dwellings in the traditional style—consisting of domed-roof structures constructed of mud brick or stone—are built around closed courtyards, with a garden and a pool. Public baths are found in all sections of the cities.
Construction of broad avenues and ring roads to accommodate modern traffic has changed the appearance of the large cities. Their basic plan, however, is still that of a labyrinth of narrow, crooked streets and culs-de-sac.
Demographic trends
Nearly one-fourth of Iranians are under 15 years of age. The country’s postrevolutionary boom in births has slowed substantially, and—with birth and death rates lower than the world averages—Iran’s natural rate of increase is now slightly higher than the world average. Life expectancy in Iran is some 73 years for men and 76 years for women.
Internal migration from rural areas to cities was a major trend beginning in the 1960s, but the most significant demographic phenomenon following the revolution in 1979 was the out-migration of a large portion of the educated, secularized population to Western countries, particularly to the United States. (Several hundred thousand Iranians had settled in southern California alone by the end of the 20th century.) Likewise, a considerable number of religious minorities, mostly Jews and Bahāʾīs, have left the country—either as emigrants or as asylum seekers—because of unfavorable political conditions. Internally, migration to the cities has continued, and Iran has absorbed large numbers of refugees from neighboring Afghanistan (mostly Persian [Dari]-speaking Afghans) and Iraq (both Arabs and Kurds).
Khosrow Mostofi Janet Afary The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaEconomy of Iran
Overview
The most formidable hurdle facing Iran’s economy remains its continuing isolation from the international community. This isolation has hampered the short- and long-term growth of its markets, restricted the country’s access to high technology, and impeded foreign investment. Iran’s isolation is a product both of the xenophobia of its more conservative politicians—who fear postimperial entanglements—and sanctions imposed by the international community, particularly the United States, which accuses Iran of supporting international terrorism. The Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 expanded an existing U.S. embargo on the import of Iranian petroleum products to encompass extensive bans on investment both by U.S. and non-U.S. companies in Iran. These prohibitions included bans on foreign speculation in Iranian petroleum development, the export of high technology to Iran, and the import of a wide variety of Iranian products into the United States. Overtures by reform-minded Iranian politicians to open their country to foreign investment have met with limited success, but in the early 21st century U.S. sanctions remained in place.
Iran’s long-term objectives since the 1979 revolution have been economic independence, full employment, and a comfortable standard of living for its citizens, but at the end of the 20th century the country’s economic future was lined with obstacles. Iran’s population more than doubled in that period, and its population grew increasingly young. In a country that has traditionally been both rural and agrarian, agricultural production has fallen consistently since the 1960s (by the late 1990s Iran was a major food importer), and economic hardship in the countryside has driven vast numbers of people to migrate to the largest cities. The rates of both literacy and life expectancy in Iran are high for the region, but so, too, is the unemployment rate, and inflation is regularly in the range of 20 percent annually. Iran remains highly dependent on its one major industry, the extraction of petroleum and natural gas for export, and the government faces increasing difficulty in providing opportunities for a younger, better-educated workforce, which has led to a growing sense of frustration among lower- and middle-class Iranians.
Still, the government has tried to develop the country’s communication, transportation, manufacturing, and energy infrastructures (including its prospective nuclear power facilities) and has begun the process of integrating its communication and transportation systems with those of neighboring states.
State planning
The national constitution divides the economy into three sectors: public, which includes major industries, banks, insurance companies, utilities, communications, foreign trade, and mass transportation; cooperative, which includes production and distribution of goods and services; and private, which consists of all activities that supplement the first two sectors. The constitution also establishes specific guidelines for the administration of the nation’s economic and financial resources, and after the revolution the government declared null and void any law, or section of a law, that violated Islamic principles. This prohibition restricts individuals or institutions from charging interest on loans, an action considered illegal under Islamic law, and also places limits on certain types of financial speculation. These restrictions have heretofore made Iran’s participation in the international economic community problematic, which has led to harsh financial conditions and a strong reliance on local markets.
From the first years of the revolution, two different factions have sought to impose their own interpretation of Islamic economics on the government. Islamic leftists have called for extensive nationalization and expansion of a welfare state. Conservatives within the religious establishment, who have maintained strong ties to the merchant community, have defended the rights of property owners and insisted on maintaining privatization. Both factions, however, have generally supported the government’s restriction on Western banking practices. Although Iran’s first postrevolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, refused to takes sides in the leftist-conservative debate, the effects of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) prompted increased state intervention in the economy. The government gained a virtual monopoly over income-producing activities by nationalizing private banks and insurance companies and increasing state control of foreign trade.
Reform
The economy continued to lag despite Iran’s move away from public control of the financial system after the end of the war in 1990. The election of Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997 promised social and economic reform, and a number of key government positions were filled by reformist clergy and technocrats. Nonetheless, no steps have been taken on numerous proposed plans to reduce state control of the economy and encourage privatization, and the government’s economic policies have remained unclear. U.S. sanctions have also continued to hamstring Iran’s economy by restricting access to Western technology, despite the willingness of some European and East Asian companies to ignore these measures. Conservatives within Iran’s government have been willing, in limited instances, to ease the restriction on interest-bearing transactions but have continued to block reformists’ plans to introduce large amounts of foreign capital into the country, particularly investments from the United States. Foreign investment has remained a contentious issue because of the adverse social and political effects of foreign economic entanglements in Iran’s past.
