image reflection

Tehran has been going through many shakes in the last few months following the presidential elections. These shakes, have, of course been non-seismic! This blog is meant to address the critical issues facing Tehran’s infrastructure and vulnerabilities, so it stayed quiet. However, although, during this sensitive time, infrastructure and role of engineers may seem to many of us as un-important or the last item on our list of priorities, it is in fact a fundamental step toward the common goals of all Iranians, regardless of their political agenda or crises.

Tehran remains to be highly divided and the government seems more divided than its subjects. But that is not my concern, as I’m sure many others are working on that. I am actually concerned about that part of us responsible for our own daily actions. I hear that construction projects are more or less dead in Tehran these days but are starting to move forward gradually. In the past few months, we have all been shaken hard by the wave of excitement and tragedies of our fellow Iranians. We all feel like we’ve been hit in the head a few times every day, watching the news or video clips of new stories. It’s draining, I know. But I also know that we always have a tendency to criticize others and not ourselves – the easiest job in the world.

Let me start with myself: I am trying hard to, as we say in Persian, not forget my mirror when I want to criticize others, including my friends, parents, teachers, and leaders. Hey, government filters, don’t panic. I am not saying anything bad about you. This is, in fact, about me and my fellow Iranians. So, you can relax…

a letter to mr. future president

[by SD]   Our role in the upcoming presidential elections, a topic I wonder about often as a student living abroad. I do not reside in Iran and have been out of the country for almost ten years. It is difficult to know what’s most important to the lives of Iranians from outside. But I am still and will forever be an Iranian and can still vote here in Berkeley; I would like to hope that my vote matters.

 

There currently seems to be two main choices in Iran’s upcoming presidential elections: Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Khatami, both with previous experience as president!

I think about which one of these candidates is more likely to make life better in my country, in a general sense. Well, it seems that “the quality of life” is highly subjective. To narrow it down: which one is more likely to improve the economy, quality of education (I mean real education), freedom of thought and expression, international relations, and finally the state of our infrastructure and environment? Who is more likely to advocate for ethical practice in various fields? How would either of these candidates advocate for ethics when cheating and bribery are a part of everyone’s daily life from an early age?

 

 

I wish we had more choices and more fresh faces among the possible candidates. But we have to choose one president among the choices that we have got. As an earthquake engineer, I naturally care a great deal about the policies that will be adopted under the next administration influencing the budget spent on improving and retrofitting schools, hospitals, and homes before the next earthquake strikes. There are also other urgent issues that I care about deeply related to education and the economy. So, I write this letter to the next president, whoever it may be, and hope that he will read it carefully and forgive my lack of awareness of other potentially critical problems on his agenda. If he happens to read this, I would like to invite him to join this dialogue and share his ideas with us on TehranShake, of course if he has the time!

 

A letter to my future president:

—————————–

 

Dear Mr. President to be,

 

Congratulations on your decision to run in the upcoming elections. I admire you for your brave decision and for accepting a heavy load of responsibility on behalf of our nation.

I wish you success in your campaign and more importantly in your term serving as president of an important nation. Of course, Iran has a rich history of feeding other cultures with its knowledge, philosophy, and arts, is in a critical geographic location, enjoys a large reservoir of natural wealth and human talents. Iran has a large population of talented youth and excellent institutions committed to their training and future growth. Yet, as you are definitely well aware, many things can be improved. The existing issues facing our nation make your job a most critical one for the future of the region and of the world. I am sure that you have your own agenda and priorities, but as an Iranian student living abroad I, along with many others, have the following requests for your office to consider in the coming years. If you or people who control your decisions disagree with any of these requests, I would be happy to discuss them further:

power of colors

[By Shideh]   On our way to Iran from San Francisco, we stopped in Amsterdam to change planes.  Shawhin and I got our coffee and orange juice (I’m the coffee person and he’s the healthy one) and we were on our way to find the gate for the KLM flight to Tehran.  It turned out finding the gate was much easier than expected.  All we had to do was to follow the large number of familiar eyes who spoke Farsi very loudly.  It’s not common to speak loudly among Iranians, but somehow it seemed like we all wanted to make sure others noticed that we are Iranian, kind of like a signal, a way of communicating, a way to make sure other Iranians see us and can come to us if they are lost or need help of any sort.  

I felt the excitement of going home after 8 years; it was amazing being among all those familiar eyes, familiar accents, familiar smiles, or familiar complaints.  I realized in the middle of my excitement, however, that those eyes and accents were not our only guides to the right gate.  It was something much more visual and obvious: the black clothes!  Sadly I must acknowledge the current trend of fashion among my fellow countrymen.  Black, black, black.  All I could see was black, dark blue, dark gray, dark green, basically all sorts of varieties of black with different shades.  I told Shawhin if he noticed that we were the only ones not wearing black at the gate while we were waiting for our flight.  He laughed and nodded.  I saw that his happy eyes transformed to something more like worried happy eyes.  Well, I did not want to ruin this experience for him so I changed the topic.  I was however deeply concerned about the effects of this color on people’s everyday life back home.  Imagine living in a black city where colors are not widely accepted, are thought to be cheap, or are not even allowed in many public places.  I wonder if anyone in Tehran or other big cities in Iran worries about this, but there I was waiting at the gate deeply struggling with these thoughts and emotions.  I was emotional and excited with the thought of landing at the Mehrabad airport, seeing the Azadi tower when the pilot does a turn around it before landing, kissing the ground of my city, the city that really belonged to me.  My fear of black, on the other hand, was constantly on my mind.  I wanted to get the microphone from the flight attendant and ask all the passengers to change their outfits and wear brighter colors and was frustrated with my lack of power to do so. 

A girl in Sanandaj, Iran, wearing traditional colorful costumes. Photo courtesy of Ddokosic

iran’s international conference on integrated natural disaster management – this february

Today, we received a message from one of the chairs of the 3^rd International Conference on Integrated Natural Disaster Management scheduled in Iran for this February (2008).  The main themes for the conference are: earthquakes, floods, droughts, landslides, and hurricanes.  UNICEF, the City of Tehran, IAEM, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Shahid Beheshti University, York University, and Cranfield University are some of the sponsors of this conference. 

The deadline for submitting abstracts and papers is passed but you can still register and attend the conference.  If you have a paper that you’d like to submit, I personally suggest you send it even though the deadline’s past.  For more information: www.indm.org.  The image below is from their flash intro:

   

town carved from rock

A town famous for its beautiful architecture and energy efficiency.  Interesting video on National Geographic about Kandovan:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071205-village-video-ap.html

  

picture borrowed from: www.Anvari.org

notes from day 2 of the sustainability and public transportation conference

[By Shawhin]  The second day of the conference was even more interesting than the first for me.  There was a large focus on city planning, land use, and policy.  I’m continuing the same format as the previous post here and getting straight into details by presentation.  And again, if you want more details on anything, just let me know and I can elaborate.

notes from day 1 of the sustainability and public tranportation conference

[By Shawhin]

We concluded our first day of the conference a couple hours ago with many interesting issues discussed, ranging from policy to project specific practices to setting international trends in sustainability.  I took about 20 pages of notes!, which I’ve condensed here.  Provided below are first a concise general-picture summary of the discussions followed by a more detailed account by speaker/session:

 General overview:

• Attendees and speakers included elected officials (congress, mayors, regional agency board members), heads of transit and planning agencies, representatives from private firms, and other planners, lawyers, architects, engineers, and politicians.  A good mix.

pollution in tehran… continued

[By Shawhin] Continuing on the discussion in “pollution in Tehran…”, here are my two cents on the second bullet: managing/reducing population concentration.

I’m personally a big advocate of reducing the population in Tehran to a sustainable level.  As it stands, Tehran is Iran’s economic, commercial, and political capital.  With over 12million inhabitants (about 1/6^th of Iran’s 70million population), Tehran is the heart of Iran’s governance.