In addition to the huge population moving from Tehran, people from all over Iran are migrating to these new towns. These new developments are notorious for social pathologies, like high rates of suicide among pupils and drug abuse. The residents talk about how a town’s population has doubled over the past six months, reaching 200,000. Yet, the town can hardly provide educational, social and health care services for 10,000. Here is the land of those cast out of their heaven — the metropolitan Tehran. And they all share is the bitterness of the fall. – Hashem Shakeri
Hashem Shakeri first glimpsed some of these ghostly concrete towers on a weekend drive in 2007. He was baffled by the idea that Iranians would be expected to live in the austere structures. “They were like a remote island,” he told me. “When I thought about the people who were supposed to come and live there, I couldn’t even breathe.” In 2016, he began to photograph the satellite towns and their residents. He started in Pardis; the name is Persian for “paradise.”
