Self-built settlements in Iran as an alternative to social housing : urban poor housing strategies & the state's role in the expropriation of informal spaces : a case-study of Zoorabad-Karaj
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The housing crisis for low-income and vulnerable groups has been a significant challenge, particularly in socio-political contexts lacking social housing policies, such as Iran. In the absence of formal governmental support, the urban poor had no choice but to build their own shelters, mostly on common lands, to meet their housing needs. These self-built settlements are labeled as informal housing by state authorities. However, they have partially addressed the housing crisis for vulnerable populations. While it is the state's responsibility to adopt a custodian role and provide social housing, the Iranian government's hostile approach towards these self-built settlements needs critical examination. This research focuses on ZoorAbad, an informal housing settlement in Iran, to investigate the following questions: 1) How and through what grassroots strategies have the urban poor in ZoorAbad addressed their housing needs over the past 45 years? 2) What has been the government's response and the dialectical relationship between the state and ZoorAbad's self-built housing? Additionally, this study categorizes different groups of the urban poor in ZoorAbad and examines the power dynamics among them. A qualitative, extended-case methodology was employed, encompassing multiple layers of data collection: 1) Reviewing relevant policies, urban planning documents, academic articles, and theses on ZoorAbad and the national context; 2) Analyzing written and oral histories of grassroots neighborhood development, 3) Gathering the viewpoints of ZoorAbad's urban poor regarding their housing challenges and their interactions with the state, particularly concerning the Improvement Plan of ZoorAbad. The methods used include semi-structured interviews, walking, observing, and ethnographic analysis. Based on the extended-case method, two key conclusions emerge: 1) Self-built housing should be recognized as a viable alternative to social housing in socio-political contexts like Iran; 2) The concept of the "squatter government" reveals how modern (neoliberal) states, in specific settings like Iran, exploit urban planning and policymaking tools to confiscate common and private resources. To elaborate on this concept, this research presents another case – Roshankouh village – in Iran with a distinct socio-geographical context. It argues that such governments, rather than acting as custodians, expropriate, speculate on, and extract common resources, dismantle communities and advance oppressive agendas – such as the elimination of minority groups, like Baha'is in Iran.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".