Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran FROM THE PUBLISHER
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an active political movement emerged on the streets of Iran's largest cities. Poor people began to construct their own communities on unused urban lands, creating an infrastructureroads, electricity, running water, garbage collection, and sheltersall their own. As the Iranian government attempted to evict these illegal settlers, they resistedfiercely and ultimately successfully. This is the story of their economic and political strategies.
SYNOPSIS
The story of a grassroots political movement that flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
FROM THE CRITICS
Richard Bulliet
Bayat uses sources no one else has ever brought together for the purpose of studying the revolution, and he adds to them both his personal observations and uncommon sensitivity born of his own family background among the 'deprived.' The result illuminates the Iranian revolution while raising questions as to our understanding of underclass movements around the world.
Choice
Focusing on the immediate prerevolutionary period and the first decade of the Islamic Republic, Bayat discusses the economic and political strategies of ‘ordinary´ [Iranian] people, mainly in Tehran. . . . He demonstrates that, for these people at least, the populist revolution did not bring about the changes that they needed or wanted.
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