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‘Errors of Scale’: The Story of Tehran’s Abbasabad Lands

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Aerial photo of Abbasabad hills in 1975, showing the development of a dense residential fabric around the site. Source: Llewelyn-Davies International, 1976, Farshid Emami (2014). ‘Errors of Scale’: The Story of Tehran’s  Abbasabad Lands Ahmadreza Hakiminejad Published on   Konesh Space From cosmos to atom, what is going to be the reference to scaling cities? This is in fact a very old query. Aristotle in his  Politics , argues that many people think that a city “in order to be happy ought to be large; but even if they are right, they have no idea what is a large and what a small” city 1 . Referring to the city’s size of population in ancient Greece, the philosopher was not so fond of a city made up of what he called “too few persons”. For him, creating a “too populous” one did not seem to be a good idea either:  “it is difficult – perhaps impossible – for a city that is too populous to be well managed” 1 . The fact is that t he word scale is obscure. The lingui