Social Engineering and the Contradictions of Modernization in Khuzestan's Company Towns: A Look at Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman

Abstract

After the discovery of oil in Masjed-Soleyman by employees of the D'Arcy Concession in 1908, the Anglo Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated in London. The oil cities of Abadan, Masjed-Soleyman, and at least seven other sister towns designed and constructed by the APOC in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Khuzestan, were the first modern and industrial towns in Iran and the Middle East. This essay studies Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman – company towns with, on the one hand, a modern and authoritarian structure and organization, and on the other hand, thanks to the heterogeneity and energy of their population, as well as the forbidding scale the cities had reached despite the company's wishes, a conditional modernity. The result of these contradictions were cities and urban cultures that were energetic and dynamic, but also eclectic and hybrid.