The First Book on the History of Tehran Metro

The Underground City of Tehran

Hamid Qazvini
Machine Translation Edited by Mandana Karimi

2026-6-30

In addition to its historiographical aspects, oral history is an opportunity to transfer work and management experiences and create study resources for researchers in scientific fields in the political, social, cultural and economic fields.

Meanwhile, small and large industrial projects that attract and involve a set of material, non-material factors and specialized forces in various ways have a high capacity to become an attractive subject for oral history research.

One of these topics is the Tehran Metro, which is an attractive subject for oral history activists from the beginning of the idea formation to its design, implementation, operation and development. Especially since this project had been on the agenda since the final years of the Pahlavi regime and several foreign companies had tried to implement it and ended their cooperation with the victory of the Islamic Revolution. Political and security crises and Saddam's imposed war against Iran actually delayed its implementation until the early 1990s and it had to be implemented by relying on specialized forces and domestic companies. This time, the project faced resource limitations and sanctions on the one hand and social pressures from traffic and pollution in Tehran, which increased the necessity of its implementation.

The book "How was Tehran's Underground City Built?" is the first work in the form of oral history that has addressed this project. The book, with interviews by Mansour Fakhrzadeh and penned by Saeed Fakhrzadeh, has 496 pages and was published in 2025 by Sooreh Mehr Publications. As the author of the book said, the outbreak of the Corona virus and the change of city managers practically faced the factors related to this oral history project with problems in the course of the work, which caused the preparation of the book to be prolonged.

Saeed Fakhrzadeh, the author of the book and the director of this project, this time went to a different experience and approached a topic that had not received historiographical attention until that day.

As the author said in the introduction to the book, the idea of ​​​​oral history of the metro was raised and its process began in 2019. In this project, 90 hours of interviews were conducted with 40 people in 65 sessions.

The book shows that although the Tehran Metro is a project belonging to the Tehran metropolis, it is considered a national and infrastructure project, with the implementation of which Iran was included in the list of countries building metros and a great leap was made in this sector and its peripheral industries. Interestingly, with the construction and launch of the Tehran Metro, many technologies related to this industry became indigenous, and the groundwork for building metros in other cities in Iran was more than ever before.

An important point about such issues is the difficulty of the process of collecting information and compiling data. The abundance of information, numerous specialized topics, numerous narrators, political and factional margins, technical and executive dimensions, and other such matters present various obstacles to the work.

The narratives of people who have attended workshops or have been in the process of forming, launching, and advancing the project, along with the narratives of senior managers and policymakers, have presented a more complete picture to the audience. Today, in prestigious educational and research centers around the world, in addition to preserving documents and correspondence related to large projects, they also pay attention to recording the experience of activists and stakeholders. Naturally, such works provide the resources needed for strategic studies in the field of urban management and transportation management, as well as social, economic, and industrial studies.

The book The Underground City of Tehran includes the narratives of all the professional groups that participated in this project, so that the process of formation, construction, and launch of the project is made clearer to the audience. The author has tried to preserve the literature and tone of the narrators in order to preserve the diversity and originality of the text, and this helps the audience to become familiar with the intellectual angles and personalities of the narrators to some extent. Attention to detail is another feature of the book, which familiarizes the audience with the issues, challenges, options, and decisions at the heart of the narratives. Basically, the goal of oral history should be to understand the details and not rely on generalities. Tehran’s Underground City practically presents a journey through the history of the urban railway from its beginnings to recent years. The book is not simply the history of an industrial project, but rather, due to its infrastructural location and the attention of all political and executive elements of Iran, it is also a kind of retelling of part of the country's history and the impact of the political sphere or economic crises and problems caused by sanctions to the removal of obstacles and the launch and development of a project. Of course, in such projects, some narrators, who are mainly managers, try to present most of their performance reports in the form of general explanations, to tell memories. The interviewer and the author of the book have been able to force them to provide details and express memories or use other narrators to complete the information. Although the topics of published works in industrial projects are few compared to other topics, and the authors have fewer usable examples and models, the author and his colleagues have been able to present a noteworthy and readable work to the research space.

The division of the book into 9 stations is interesting in its own way. Although this division apparently shows the course of time, it would have been better if its logic had been clearer and if they had specified what set of data each station contains. It would also have been better if the specialized terms that are numerous in the text of the book had been explained so that the audience would benefit more from the text.

Although the volume of interviews was much greater than this and compiling projects that have numerous narrators is difficult, the volume of the book is appropriate. The addresses of the interviews and quotes are included in the footnotes of each page, which adds to the credibility of the narratives and makes them easy to search for in the future. It is also a good idea to include the narrators' images in the text.

The Ninth Station contains useful documents and images. One of the good things in this section is to include QR codes for the documents, which increases their use and exploitation in the digital environment.

In any case, this book is the first edition of the oral narrative related to the construction and launch of the Tehran Metro, published by Saeed Fakhrzadeh, and is a reliable source for getting acquainted with the successful Iranian experience of management and industry, under the strategic policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The content of the book has a high capacity for use in urban advertising, media programs, and explaining some of the achievements of Iranian expert forces in science and technology.