on the streets of istanbul / re-imagining tehran istiklal avenue (istanbul) vs. laleh zaar avenue (tehran)

joan didion said “a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” society provides a vast space for the everyday to take place in different forms and natures for different people experiencing it. when there falls a gap between the tangible (objective) and the intangible (subjective), is when the city is reduced to merely a stage. a stage that causes no thought, no intellectuality and no sense of identity or belonging. this is when the tangible and the intangible go their own ways in opposite directions. this is when man is lost. in experiencing notions of ‘space’ and therefore ‘place’, man has always been involved in a dialectic relationship in which on one hand  he has always been in need of the passage of time and hence experience, and on the other hand he has re imagined and therefore attempted to reconstruct time through devices of memory. thus public space has become the shared ground for man and time to join and bring to life the notions of experience and memory in both an individual and collective manner. lefebvre (1991) argues that city plans exist as representations of space while at the same time urban space itself is constituted by special practices of everyday life. public space (including street, street market, community center and park) is a vital part of everyday urban life. public space is open to all, regardless of ethnic origin, age or gender and there isn’t limited time for using it. different age groups tend to use public spaces at different times of day and for different reasons. people spend time in the public space without spending money. modern and even classic urban' literature portray the importance of shared spaces in the creation of the notions mentioned above. williamson (1986) claimed that “the streets stand for shared existence, a common understanding”. the street therefore becomes significant not only from a spatial point of view but as a base and a script for the stimulation of experience and memory. therefore for tehran, a metropolis countering this process through a loss and erosion of its public spaces, its streets become the voice of its existence. through individual storytelling and first hand studies and phenomenology, this paper seeks to draw parallels between two scripts (streets) from istanbul [istiklal avenue] and tehran [laleh zaar avenue], two cities that share elements from their histories, religion and cultures. it will search for different notions and different means of presenting the everyday and their outcomes as products of different yet simultaneous trails of modernity. the tehran script will serve as a living entity in coma, and the istanbul script will examine its existence as a dynamic body moving forward in time.