فائزه بوربوری

The term “free zone” refers to designated areas in which companies are taxed very lightly and it enhances global market presence by attracting new business and foreign investments. For over a century, governments around the world have sought to boost and exploit the economic power of their particular regions and zones by designating them as “special” or “free” economic zones. The trend of establishing such zones or areas have gained momentum in the last four or five decades with countries accounting for small businesses and millions of direct or indirect jobs. The Middle East, especially the countries in the Persian Gulf, for some and other reasons, have particularly embarked on such a trend. The current paper tries to highlight benefits and challenges faced by free trade zones in Iran, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, taking into account recent global financial crises.

Today’s urban life has encountered with a number of challenges especially in social and spatial arenas. Socio-economic inequalities, sometimes, emerges in the form of spatial inequality. Tehran, as a metropolis and capital, enjoys effective system with higher sensitivities in national system. The city, though, with a multi and complex system has brought a large population under its arena but at the same time it is considered imbalanced with continuous growth and development. In other words, Tehran, despite a role model for macro socio-economic system, suffers from spatial disparity and imbalanced services. One of the most obvious and sharp characteristics of Tehran is its north-south spatial inequality and polarization thanks to modernisation and its elements such as cars and emerging business districts. In the post-1979 Islamic revolution, the gap between rich and poor and spatial inequality in Tehran has widened despite the promise otherwise. Urban planners and sociologists in Iran have conflicting views about the spatial disparity where some call it a historical trend and nothing to do with the globalisation process whereas others think vice versa. To know whether or not Tehran can be called a global city, the current paper tries to illustrate old and new emerging inequality patterns in Tehran. For that matter, the theory of’ Global City (propounded by Saskia Sassen) has been analyzed based on spatial maps between 1996 and 2006.