Eerie Photos Capture Iran’s Abandoned ‘Paradise City’ Standing In The Middle Of The Desert

In almost all major cities in the world, people struggle to find affordable housing. If the state offers subsidised housing options, there will be no dearth of takers. However, this is not the case in Pardis (which means Paradise in English), a residential “city” built 50 kilometres or 13 miles away from the Iranian capital Tehran. The Iranian government launched the ambitious Mehr Housing Project in 2001 to offer affordable housing to lower-income families in Iran. The idea was to build a robust and well-connected residential city on the outskirts of Tehran. However, just a decade later, in 2011, the project was incomplete. The dream of “Paradise” is lost.

Today, there are scores of empty and half-constructed highrises in Pardis, which looks straight out of a post-apocalyptic movie. The city did not have any takers for several reasons. Some of the first flats, built under the Mehra Mer Housing Project, in Pardis, lacked proper sewage systems, inadequate water supply, and unreliable electricity. Additionally, there was little accessibility to big cities like Tehran, where those from the lower-income group worked.

The low quality of construction and its poor accessibility made the city just a cluster of highrises in the middle of nowhere. This deterred people from moving into the finished apartments. Iran’s soaring inflation rates made it difficult for developers to improve the apartment blocks or finish the incomplete ones. In 2011, the project was more or less abandoned. The 2017 earthquake in the region further damaged several buildings. Today there are heaps of building materials such as bags of concrete and piles of cable and wiring spread throughout the city.

Iranian photographer Hashem Shakeri created a photo series titled “Cast Out of Heaven” that focussed on how the Mer Housing Project failed to build Pardis. Shakeri photographed Pardis extensively and captured the sterility of the landscape.

In a conversation with the New Yorker, he explained that a handful of people who live in Pardis are doing so because they have no other option. He added that the residents of Pardis rarely spend time in the abandoned city and only come there to sleep. He said, “I wanted my audience to see the bitterness that applies to all of those towns. There is a recurrent, vicious cycle where people are sleep-deprived—they have to wake early and work until late to commute to Tehran, which takes a lot of time. They only sleep in the towns. Like Sisyphus, they have to repeat the cycle over and over.”