With the rise of urban fringe slums in Iran as a result of soaring housing prices, official statistics indicate that there are now more than six million marginalized residents in the country. The head of the Environmental Protection Organization states that marginalization in Tehran and other major cities has caused environmental problems.
Sheena Ansari, head of the Environmental Protection Organization, during a panel discussion at Sharif University, identified migration from small towns to the peripheries and outskirts of Tehran and other major cities as a factor causing environmental issues.
In the past decade, the emergence of environmental issues following the increase in marginalized populations has been frequently highlighted. In July 2021, a conference on this topic was held in Eslamshahr, which was historically one of the hubs of marginalization in Tehran.
The Social Studies Office of the regime’s Majlis (parliament) Research Center also published a report in December 2022 titled “Marginalization in Iran: Approaches, Policies, and Actions.”
According to this report, in 2021, there were 6,187,105 people living in city outskirts across the country.
The report indicates that the average growth rate of marginalization was about 7% between 1978 and 1981. In the subsequent period, from 1981 to 1996, the marginalized population grew at an average of 11%.
The growth of marginalization reached 19% between 1996 and 2006, and between 2006 and 2018, it increased to approximately 23%.
As a result, the current population of marginalized residents living in informal settlements nationwide has reached about 6.2 million.
The reasons for the growth of marginalization in earlier periods included factors such as the industrialization of agriculture before the 1978 revolution and the impacts of the war during the 1980s and early 1990s.
However, in the latter half of the 2010s, the cause of marginalization changed. In March 2023, Baitollah Sattarian, a faculty member at the University of Tehran, stated that in major cities, due to pressure in the housing market, residents of certain neighborhoods can no longer afford to remain there and are forced to move to smaller spaces or city outskirts, often resorting to informal housing. This was also confirmed by Ahmad Vahidi, the Minister of Interior in Ebrahim Raisi’s government.
