Cycling Cities: The Tehran Experience

At the foot of the Alborz Mountains, Tehran has long been a city of movement, ambition, and transformation. Introduced through royal courts and foreign adventurers in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle quickly became part of everyday life. Workers rode to factories, traders crossed expanding neighborhoods, and activists turned cycling into a visible form of political expression. Yet as oil wealth fueled rapid urbanization and motorization, bicycles increasingly gave way to cars, motorcycles, and sprawling development.

Cycling Cities: The Tehran Experience traces more than 130 years of cycling history in one of the Middle East’s largest megacities. Richly illustrated with photographs, maps, and historical sources, the book follows the bicycle from a symbol of modernity and social status to a practical means of transport, a tool of labor, and an instrument of protest and environmental activism.

Drawing on the Cycling Cities comparative framework, the book explores how urban planning, mobility alternatives, governance and infrastructure, social movements, and cultural representations shaped Tehran’s mobility landscape. It reveals how both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic embraced automobility as a symbol of progress, while cyclists continued to adapt, resist, and reclaim urban space.

More than a transportation history, this book offers a new perspective on the relationship between technology, infrastructure, class, gender, and political power. Tehran’s cycling story speaks not only to Iran’s past, but also to contemporary debates about sustainable mobility, public space, and urban futures around the world.

Authors: Kazem Afradi and Ruth Oldenziel
Release date: July 6, 2026