Keshavarzian 211that fully enframed the one square kilometer (262-acre) area known as the
bazaar with the street system that borders it. Consequently, the Tehran
bazaar’s built environment—bordering streets, narrow allies, vaulted ceil-
ings, gates, and historic structures—have quite literally set it apart from
the rest of the city. Thus, in Persian “bazaar” has maintained its geographic
meaning alongside its newer metaphysical meaning of “the market.”
e bazaar, however, is not merely a geographic coordinate; it has Th
long been an active commercial market which brings together importers,
exporters, wholesalers, brokers, and retailers who have controlled large
sums of credit, employed tens of thousands of workers, and distributed
raw, intermediate, and finished consumer products through the city, the
nation, and to the international market.^19 While it is difficult to estimate
the exact number of workers and commercial units in the Tehran bazaar,
most sources estimate that there were between 20,000 and 30,000 com-
mercial units within the Tehran bazaar and the immediate streets during
the 1970s.^20 These large numbers of people were sorted into sectors and
alleyways, such as the shoemakers’ bazaar or the coppersmiths’ bazaar.
Traders, moreover, were located based on their position in the distribu-
tion network or value chain. For instance, import-exporters [tujjār] were
often located in the side-alleys, tributaries and caravansaries. The locale
functioned as a differentiating marker between economic activities within
the bazaar; that is, between sectors and positions in the commercial hier-
archy. As economic anthropologists and information economists explain,
this type of localization reduces the costs of searching for sellers and
facilitates the exchange of information about price, quality, and supply of
goods, as well as reputations and backgrounds of potential exchange part-
ners.^21 Thus, the spatial configuration, including the human scale of the
architecture, facilitated communication.
efore turning to a discussion of the Tehran bazaar’s “sense of place” B
and “location,” let me say a few words about the rather involved issue of
property ownership. The matter is complex because the bazaar has long
been made up of a patchwork of buildings and land owned by private indi-
viduals, religious trusts, members of the royal family, and more recently
economic foundations [bonyād] that manage property with the express
aim of distributing earnings and profits to the disadvantaged.^22 This frag-
mented situation along with the practice of key money and uncertainty