Sidewalks of Tehran are today the battleground of contending candidates of the presidential elections of 2009 which will take place on 12 June. Urban spaces in the elections of the past 12 years have been witness to the coming together of diverse social forces. The state television and radio's lackluster coverage of the elections is in part responsible for the sidewalk enthusiasm of the masses.

In the next two weeks Tehran streets and avenues will beam with supporters of the main candidates and their placards. This fervor is not foreign to Tehranis, who in the intervening years have thronged the streets in spontaneous bursts of excitement to put their power on display. If before May 1997, younger Tehranis used the little-known name of {Mohammad Khatami} to team the sidewalks and demonstrate their desire for festivity and change in the structure of power, after the landslide elections, which saw an 80% voter turnout, they needed little pretext (like the victories of the Iranian national football team) to pour onto the street for a city-wide party and political exhibitionism.

When the student protests of July 1999 threatened to bring turmoil and mass protest to the city, it was Commander {Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf} who was appointed Chief of the Police Force. He soon realized and made others realize that the dilapidated security and police apparatus in power could no longer control the citizenry on the move. His new police force started to don new dress, ride expensive cars, and appear on every street corner. The Commander came to the battlefield using "social engineering" as his preferred weapon. He hired thousands of fresh members and changed the face of the police force for good.

In May 2001, this time more skeptical and disillusioned, the same young Tehranis took to the streets to send the "smiling cleric" Khatami to the presidential palace once more.

When in 2004 the Commander divested himself of his military rank to participate in the presidential race, it was the then mayor of Tehran who rode on another enthusiastic tide to reach the highest executive position in the country. Citizen Qalibaf's defeat at the polls was not the end of his public service career. After much political haggling at the city council, he took the seat of President {Mahmood Ahmadinejad} in September 2005 to become mayor. Among his first actions as mayor, he started the renovation of city sidewalks, something that had been neglected since the time of mayor {Gholam-Hossein Karbaschi} (1988-1998). A city that wanted to hurl itself towards the future had no time to waste on sidewalks. Instead, it focused on expressways and motorways. With Qalibaf, Valiasr Street, the longest running, north-south axis of the city, became a model for changing the face of Tehran towards a more people-friendly city.

Even though the renovation took almost a year to complete and despite the many hardships that it imposed on its users, it was ultimately greeted as a major achievement by pedestrians of a city whose streets had become a virtual parking lot for cars. For once, the municipality was doing something for the people.

A year after Valiasr, the municipality began work on the east-west axis of Enqelab Street. This time, the mayor apologized for the inconveniences that the renovation had forced on pedestrians, promising them more peaceful journeys in the future. Other sidewalks joined and are joining this campaign.

But when we speak of sidewalk we obviously have something more in mind than a place for pedestrians to walk on. The contraction of public spaces is one of the characteristics of post-revolutionary order and it has brought many unwanted consequences to the society, the least of which is the widening cultural gap between Tehranis of various economic and social strata. Political decision-makers obsessively guard public space fearing an image of Tehran other than that which they want to project as the paragon of an Islamic city. This very obsession, however, has forced people to associate only with their own economic class and sow seeds of discontent once they go back to their houses.

Perhaps the designers of Valiasr sidewalk, and then Enghelab, didn't realize that with the opening of public spaces, they went against the trend that their predecessor had set. The sidewalks of Valiasr today are the meeting ground of people from various social strata, from street musicians, to vendors, lovers and beggars. A people who meet, greet and quarrel with each other on the sidewalks are obviously different from those who passively sit in their cars, exposed to colorless fumes and colorful billboards. It could also be that those in power have no other choice. People who sit in their car coffins, combust internally and explosively, while those who converge onto sidewalks interact externally and reservedly.

In his four years as president, Mahmood Ahmadinejad has generously brought a fragile prosperity to homes; his munificence, however, has not extended to public spaces. For him who strove to help the poor and social outcasts, it wasn't clear that a society suffering from economic divisions to such an extent needed less a freewheeling largess than a reason to associate and interact with other citizens of this megalopolis who will otherwise have little reason to at least get to know and see each other. The outcome is that with the falling oil prices and the tightening of the government's economic expenditure, citizens are invited to tighten their belt but without gaining an inch on social understanding.

Sidewalks of Tehran are today a place to celebrate, catcall, make money, and of course political expression. It is these sidewalks that will determine the next president of the republic, for those who sit in their air-conditioned cars are doomed to watch billboards promising pleasures while sitting in parallel lanes waiting for traffic to unwind.