A critical study of urban regeneration and gentrification in Rasht, Iran

This research study explores the background, rationale and characteristics of recent urban interventions having the aim of regeneration in Rasht, Iran. An introduction to the context-specific factors that play a role in urban changes is followed by a critical focus on finding the possible side effects and consequences of the resultant changes on everyday life of long-time residents of Chellehkhaneh, an old neighbourhood located in Rasht inner city, by way of a qualitative analysis of several in-depth interviews. The narratives about the changing relationship between interviewees and their neighbourhood represent the conflation of person–place emotional tensions with socioeconomic pressures. By observing pressures caused by urban regeneration in the everyday life of long-term residents, sufficient evidence was gathered to prove the existence of an interrelationship between regeneration and the pressures associated with gentrification in the absence of real strategies that could be adopted to control changes and their effects. The chosen reduction of social relations and involvement in social affairs related to the neighbourhood by long-term established residents of Chellehkhaneh as a prevailing behavioural mechanism adopted to tolerate imposed pressures was thus one of the main consequences of changes caused by urban regeneration in Rasht inner city.