ãbadi

ãbadi Forum

The ãbadi Research Forum is a dialogical space for critical reflection, collective inquiry, and knowledge production concerning everyday urban life in Iran as it unfolds amid multilayered, chronic, and intersecting crises.

Iran’s contemporary urban condition is shaped by the entanglement of political repression, economic instability, environmental degradation, infrastructural deterioration, digital transformation, social inequality, and ongoing forms of warfare and geopolitical conflict. These crises are neither experienced nor distributed equally. Their effects unfold through existing inequalities, producing uneven landscapes of vulnerability, precarity, and survival.

ãbadi seeks to investigate and document these transformations not as abstract crises, but as lived and embodied realities. We examine how urban life is shaped by political economy, environmental change, digital and platform infrastructures, governance, and the everyday labor of care, adaptation, and resistance.

Alongside material losses, Iran is experiencing profound forms of epistemic loss: the silencing of voices, the erosion of collective memory, and the disappearance of situated knowledges. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, artists, activists, and people with lived experience, ãbadi serves as a space for preserving, generating, and contesting knowledge.

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In Iran, urbanization has played a central role in establishing infrastructures of social control, labor exploitation, and resource extraction – all under the auspices of religious authority. The appropriation of natural resources and public goods has caused lasting damage to ecological systems, making the region suffer some of the world’s most extreme heat and pollution, as Nassim Mehran and Niloufar Vadiati argue in their contribution to the “Kin City” text series of Berliner Gazette. Link: https://berlinergazette.de/cities-in-custody/

This commentary conceptualises the smart mandate assemblage as rooted in clerical authority and a militarised oligarchy, with exclusionary neoliberal models of smartification. From national sovereignty policies to everyday urban life, this assemblage surveils space, disciplines marginalised bodies, and reshapes technological and infrastructural futures under the guise of innovation and modernity. Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/29768640251375558