The Creation of an Urban Form
"‘Since the War’, Wilson reported, ‘a very great and widespread spirit of Nationalism has been introduced and fostered throughout the Middle East. . . Though the Company probably incurs less of this [jealousy] than the political services do elsewhere, it must introduce measures to meet it’. If the new concession was one such measure then housing was to be another. Wilson pointed
particularly to the disparities in housing provision as contributing most to the dangerous divide between the Iranian and British employees. He proposed to meet this problem with a new residential area, to create Bawarda as a kind of manifesto of racial mixing, an experiment in non-segregation whose very design would ‘afford that link or bridge over the present gulf between these two groups of individuals’" [Quoted in Mark Crinson, “Abadan: Planning and Architecture under the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company,” Planning Perspectives 12, no. 3 (1997): 341, doi:10.1080/026654397364681.]