An anthropological study of social and cultural barriers to creating nightlife in Tehran metropolis

Nightlife was formed due to the developments related to the industrial revolution and gradually became a kind of modern lifestyle, which has undergone many changes until today, and its late form is influenced by postmodern developments. The modern human, who is now caught in the wave of postmodernity, reproduces himself socially in these relationships and as he becomes socialized in metropolises, he starts recreating the metropolitan arena and its social and cultural relationships. In the meantime, the most important of these relationships is the projection of modern capitalist culture and its social and cultural requirements, and as a result, the lifestyle associated with it. Tehran, as the capital of Iran, despite its great capacities and with a population of more than eight and a half million people, lacks nightlife. The purpose of this research is to investigate the social and cultural barriers to create nightlife in Tehran .

The required information was collected by ethnographic method and using semi-structured interview and observation along with participation. The coding of the interview data in the next step has led to the finding of categories that we have analyzed in the conclusion. This research was conducted between February 1400 and April 1401 by ethnographic method. In order to carry out this research, the night life around the four main squares of Tajrish, Azadi, Pizarh and Shush have been directly and collaboratively observed on a total of 20 occasions due to their different spatial, class and leisure characteristics. The impressions of each field session, which lasted nearly four hours on average, were obtained based on recording points from observation, semi-structured interviews, and field notes. Interviews were often short, sudden and random, and only in a few cases led to a follow-up appointment and a longer interview. The conversations lasted between 10 and 50 minutes and these conversations were held between 10 pm and 2 am. After detailed implementation, the notes of the interviews were coded and evaluated at the sentence and phrase level for each of the interviews, and conceptual codes were extracted from the transcripts of the interviews .

After coding the interviews, we found 5 main categories of obstacles to creating nightlife in Tehran. These categories are: lack of infrastructure (including: lighting, public transportation, sidewalk construction, tourist guide and green space), lack of feeling of security (including: lighting, possibility of independent presence of women, possibility of family presence, access to police kiosk), Lack of attention to local culture (including: attention to regional subcultures, the agency of religious, scientific and recreational centers of each region), lack of management and planning (including: facilitating the presence of women, institutional participatory planning, needs assessment and creating space and program, understanding consumption cultural-leisure, legal facilities) and lack of sense of belonging (including: feeling of being forgotten, recognition of marginalized groups, empowerment, creation of nostalgic programs)