Mashhad, Iran's second largest metropolis and one of the world's major pilgrimage destinations, displays pronounced spatial inequality commonly attributed to natural, climatic, or topographic conditions. The familiar “upper city–lower city” divide — bālā-shahr versus pāyīn-shahr — is often explained through geography: the western areas are higher, cooler, and therefore naturally attracted affluent settlement. This study challenges that naturalization. Using Foucauldian genealogy as its theoretical and methodological framework, it argues that what appears geographically inevitable is actually the sedimented result of successive power-laden interventions in urban space over twelve centuries.
Existing scholarship on Mashhad's spatial inequality largely falls into two disconnected streams. Quantitative studies (Rahnamā & Zabīhī, 2011; Khākpūr et al., 2018; Pūrrāhdārī et al., 2023; Rezāʾī et al., 2024) document the uneven distribution of housing quality, public services, and environmental amenities, effectively describing what inequality looks like. Descriptive urban-history studies (Sayyidī-Farkhad, 2013; Natāq & Hosaynzāde, 2023) trace the sequence of physical transformations but rarely examine the power relations embedded within them. The present study occupies the epistemological gap between these approaches: rather than measuring inequality, it genealogically investigates the discursive-historical processes through which inequality was produced and normalized.
The study is grounded in Michel Foucault's genealogical approach, which treats present-day social problems as the contingent products of historically specific power relations rather than as natural or inevitable conditions. Three Foucauldian concepts organize the analysis. Discourse is understood as the ensemble of knowledges, beliefs, and practices that in any given historical moment determines what counts as "natural," "necessary," or "legitimate" in urban development. Technologies of power refers to the concrete, material instruments — streets, walls, gates, courtyards — through which power is exercised, stabilized, and reproduced in space. Spatial inequality is treated as a descriptive concept denoting the uneven distribution of opportunities, amenities, and environmental quality across the city, distinguished analytically from the normative concept of spatial injustice, though several of the historical discourses examined contain dimensions of the latter.
The research adopts a qualitative, critical paradigm. Genealogy serves as the overarching approach; historical research with documentary and library analysis serves as the method. Sources include local and general histories, travellers' accounts, historical cartography, and contemporary secondary scholarship. Interpretive-qualitative analysis treats texts and maps not as transparent historical records but as discursive evidence from which patterns of power, semantic ruptures, and the politics of built form can be recovered.
The analytical process follows a five-step operational model: (1) identification of the contemporary problem (spatial inequality) and its decoupling from reductionist geographical or economic explanations; (2) determination of the genealogical starting point — the martyrdom of Imam Riżā (203 AH/818 CE) and the formation of the first urban nucleus around his shrine; (3–4) excavation of the power discourses operating across successive historical periods, with particular attention to ruptures, contingencies, and the pivotal role of the Safavid street construction; and (5) articulation of the connection between those historical transformations and contemporary spatial patterns.
Four criteria guide the identification and demarcation of discourses: the nature of power (religious, political, military, modernist); the type of physical intervention most emblematic of the dominant discourse; the spatial orientation of development (which areas were privileged and which were marginalized); and the form of the relationship between political power and the shrine.
I — Devotion and Pragmatism (203–617 AH). The city's formative phase was characterized by organic, radial growth centered on the shrine. Political authorities — Samanids, Ghaznavids, Seljuqs — acted primarily as facilitators of pilgrimage, constructing walls, mosques, bazaars, and caravanserais around the holy precinct without imposing a directional logic on growth. No spatial direction held priority over another. This balanced centripetal pattern constitutes the "baseline condition" against which subsequent deviations acquire analytical significance.
II — Timurid Rupture (8th–9th centuries AH). The survival of Mashhad during the Mongol devastation of Khurasan transformed it into the region's most important city and eventually a secondary capital of the Timurid realm. The construction of the Gawhar-Shād Mosque (818–821 AH) — physically larger and taller than the shrine itself — marked a fundamental shift in the logic of power: from service to the sacred to the instrumental use of religion for the display of political authority. Crucially, all major Timurid interventions — the mosque, the Chahārbāgh complex, the endowed estates of Sarda and Saʿdābād — were concentrated to the west (the "upper head," bālā-sar) of the shrine, planting the first seeds of a west–east spatial differentiation.
III — The Safavid-Shāh ʿAbbāsī Confluence of Power and Religion (10th–11th centuries AH). This discourse produced the single most consequential physical intervention in Mashhad's urban history: the construction of Khiyābān-i Mashhad (the Mashhad Avenue) by Shāh ʿAbbās I. Motivated by geopolitical imperatives — competition with the Ottoman Empire over pilgrimage revenues and the need to consolidate the northeastern frontier against Uzbek threats — Shāh ʿAbbās transformed the entire city into an instrument of political-religious messaging. The avenue, running through the expanded courtyard (Sahn-i ʿAtīq) and punctuated by two gates, imposed a linear geometric order on the city's hitherto radial structure. Every pilgrim entering the shrine had to pass through the royal street: a spatial argument that the Shah mediated between subject and Imam. The avenue's westward extension was approximately twice its eastward extension, amplifying the Timurid bias and institutionalizing the "upper–lower" polarity. What had been a topographic description became, through this intervention, a socio-spatial hierarchy.
IV — Flight to the Margin (12th–13th centuries AH). The post-Safavid period, encompassing the Afshārid and Qājār eras, is characterized by a shared spatial logic: power withdrew from the urban center and established itself at the periphery. The construction of an arg (citadel) by Malik Maḥmūd Sīstānī's troops at the city's edge introduced a new pattern — power no longer along the avenue connecting shrine to city, but in a fortified enclave apart from the urban flow. Nādir Shāh, who made Mashhad his capital, expanded the Timurid Chahārbāgh into a royal palace complex in the upper (western) avenue zone while simultaneously neglecting broader urban development. The arg–non-arg duality reproduced the class cleavage along the same westward vector that the Safavid avenue had established. What the avenue had once used to connect power and religion now separated elite from popular space.
V — Continuity of Inequality through Imposed Modernization (14th century AH/Pahlavi era). The Pahlavi period introduced modernist discourse but reproduced the inherited spatial logic. In the first Pahlavi era, the establishment of a municipal administration (1304 SH), the construction of Khiyābān-i Arg (1307–1309), and the concentration of modern state institutions — city hall, national bank, military headquarters, public garden — along the western axis created a new administrative-recreational pole in the west. The demolition of cemetery and caravanserai fabric around the shrine, followed by the encirclement of the holy precinct with wide roads (falaka), severed the organic connection between shrine and city. Under the second Pahlavi regime, the 1345–1346 Master Plan and urban renewal schemes around the shrine accelerated both processes: westward urban expansion (Boulevard-i Wakīlābād, the Ahmadābād residential district) and the physical isolation of the shrine from the living city. Modernization, in short, reproduced the historic upper–lower binary under new vocabulary — "modern" versus "traditional" — and did so not accidentally but along the same spatial vector that previous discourses had established.
The comparative analysis of five discourses shows that Mashhad's spatial inequality emerged not from a single decision or era but through a cumulative historical process in which each discourse reinforced and intensified earlier spatial patterns. Three recurring features appear across most periods: (a) major physical interventions consistently directed development westward; (b) political power repeatedly disrupted the organic relationship between the shrine and the urban fabric; and (c) limited yet persistent forms of social resistance — from the legendary “old woman’s mosque” under the Timurids to neighborhood resistance during the Pahlavi era — reveal that the relationship between power and society was never entirely unilateral. These genealogical findings do not claim deterministic causality but rather expose discursive-historical patterns that gradually solidified into a structural condition.
The study advances two theoretical propositions. First, the spatial structure of each era functioned both as an instrument of power and as the basis for reproducing that power in subsequent periods, creating a cumulative cycle that transformed historical contingencies into durable structures. Second, explaining spatial inequality through supposedly natural factors such as topography or climate is itself part of a discourse that obscures its historical-political origins; challenging this naturalization is therefore a prerequisite for meaningful policy intervention.
For urban planning, the findings suggest that Mashhad’s spatial inequality constitutes one of the least-recognized roots of present spatial imbalance, alongside natural, economic, and modern policy factors. Effective rebalancing strategies must therefore address this historical depth rather than relying solely on technical or physical solutions. The study also identifies two interconnected fractures — class inequality and the alienation of the shrine from the city’s living fabric — which cannot be addressed separately. Future research should examine post-Revolution power discourses and investigate social resistance discourses in greater depth.
Keywords: Foucauldian Genealogy, Spatial Inequality in Mashhad, Historical Street of Mashhad, Discourse of Power in the City