If the current trend in Tehran’s growing population were to continue, the capital will soon face a super challenge, warns Shahram Edalati, the deputy head of Tehran's Plan and Budget Organization.
“While Tehran Province has a 0.8% share in Iran’s total area, its population has reached 16.6 million people and it accounts for 25% of the country's gross domestic product,” he added.
These figures, he explained, show Tehran can be both the biggest opportunity and threat to the development of the country, ILNA reported.
Referring to the increasing rate of urbanization in Iran, Edalati said five decades ago, 70% of the country's population were rural, but at present, after half a century, 75% of the population have become urban.
The official also warned against the growing number of unofficial settlements as a result of increasing urbanization.
"Today, the population of the elderly people in Tehran is increasing, but at the same time the population in the suburbs of Tehran is getting younger due to significant migration to these areas. Most of these people are single men who migrated to these areas for work,” he said.
“Tehran’s suburban population is more than 5.5 million, of whom about 4 million live in unofficial settlements. Due to the aging population of Tehran, one of the most lucrative occupations will be caring for the elderly in nursing homes in the future.”
Asked about the number of people living in unofficial settlements inside the city of Tehran, Edalati said 1.5 million people live in unofficial settlements in Tehran’s urban areas.
He noted that out of the population of 800,000 people in the villages of Tehran Province, 300,000 live in homes vulnerable to earthquakes.
“About 350,000 people are considered neither urban nor rural population, part of whom live in tents,” he added.
The official explained that the only way to solve the housing problem in Tehran Province is urban regeneration.
Tehran Province Population Expected to Hit 20m in 5 Years
Tehran Province's population is expected to reach 20 million in five years. Its capital city, Tehran is the 25th most populous city in the world and its population is increasing by the year.
“Between 200,000 and 250,000 people are added to Tehran's population each year,” Masoud Shafiei, the head of the Management and Planning Organization of Tehran Province, was quoted as saying by ILNA.
The increase in population includes migrants from other cities and villages, as well as foreign countries.
Latest data released by the Statistical Center of Iran show the population of the capital city Tehran increased by 6.6% over five years from the fiscal year ending March 2012 to the year ending March 2017.
SCI estimated that 8,693,706 people and 2,903,435 households lived in Tehran in the year ending March 2017.
Of the 8,693,706 people who lived in Tehran, 17.4% were between 0 and 14 years old; 74.1% were between 15 and 64 years old and 8.4% were 65 years or older.
The size of household reduced by 0.1 people to stand at three members per household in the year ending March 2017 compared with the year ending March 2012.
Of the 2,903,435 households living in Tehran, 84.2% (or 2,445,016 households) had male breadwinners and 15.8% (or 458,419 households) had female breadwinners, indicating that one out of six households had women as the head of the family.
The relative frequency of women as householder has increased by 0.4% from 15.4% to 15.8% over five years.
New migrants (those who moved to Tehran from March 2012-17) accounted for 4.7% or 404,996 people of Tehran’s population in the year ending March 2017.
The findings of the National Population and Housing Census also show 94.8% or 7,638,837 of people living in Tehran were literate and 5.1% or 414,162 were illiterate in the year ending March 2017.
Out of 2,888,713 households living in apartments or houses in the city, 1,432,136 (49.6%) were owners of their residential units and 1,208,710 households (41.8%) were renters.
About 87.4% of the residential units in Tehran in the year ending March 2017 were apartments and 12.7% were properties other than apartments.
"About 23% of the suburbanized population of Iran live in Tehran Province," Tehran Governor-General Anoushirvan Mohseni-Bandpei was also quoted as saying by ISNA.
Residents of the capital city, Tehran, are increasingly migrating to suburban areas, according to Deputy Interior Minister Mehdi Jamalinejad.
"Unfortunately, we suffer from the so-called 'metropolitan inundation syndrome' as a result of mass migrations from villages to cities, and from smaller cities to metropolises," he was quoted as saying by Mehr News Agency.
"These migrations reached a peak in the [13]80s [2001-11]," he added.
Citing data gathered in the latest round of national census in the fiscal 2016-17, the official said Tehran is presently experiencing reverse migration.
Tehran has faced many challenges in recent years, including pollution and traffic to name a few. Due to its political, economic, educational and other advantages, the capital city has always attracted Iranians from other provinces.
Migration to Tehran to work, study or live temporarily or permanently has become a commonplace phenomenon over the years leading to growth in the city's population while giving rise to a series of environmental issues in the process. However, statistics show the parallel case of reverse migration, i.e., from Tehran to other provinces.
According to the Statistical Center of Iran, the findings of the National Population and Housing Census in the fiscal 2016-17 show a total of 350,632 people migrated from Tehran to other provinces between March 2011-12 and March 2016-17. The provinces of Alborz, Gilan and Mazandaran were the top destinations for migrants from Tehran.
Meanwhile, 516,922 people migrated to Tehran during the same period. A majority of the migrants came from Alborz, Lorestan, Hamedan and Khorasan Razavi provinces.
Tehran's population density is 969 per square kilometer, which is 20 times higher than the national average. With a population of about 13.26 million people (up from 8.15 million registered in the previous census conducted in 2011-12), the capital city has an overal 16.5% share in Iran’s total population. The city is home to 41.9% of the country’s urban population, according to the latest census.
Although the number of people coming to Tehran surpassed those who leave the city during the period under review, reverse migration is seemingly on the rise amid growing environmental problems in the capital city and saturation of opportunities.
In fact, air pollution and fear of earthquake have been cited as the main reasons for people wanting to leave Tehran.
Economy of Tehran Province
Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture has recently released a report on the economy of Tehran Province. Below are some of the report’s findings:
With an area of 13,500 square kilometers, Tehran ranks 29th in terms of area but first in terms of population among Iran’s 31 provinces.
Tehran’s urbanization rate stands at 94.3%, while the average rate is 75.4% for the country. Tehran Province ranks second after Qom in terms of urbanization.
With the exception of unemployment, other labor market components are not favorable compared to the country’s average rates. The employment rate in Tehran stands at 36.9%, which is relatively too low.
The services sector has the biggest share in Tehran’s labor market, as agriculture only accounts for 1.5% of the market. The industrial sector’s share in Tehran Province and the country are almost similar.
Although nominal Gross Domestic Product of Tehran grew by 800% during the fiscal 2011-21, the share of the province from Iran’s GDP has remained the same. In the fiscal 2020-21, Tehran’s share from Iran’s GDP stood at 22.4%, which is almost equal to that of fiscal 2017-18 (22.5%). The province’s highest GDP share was registered in the fiscal 2015-16 with 23.8%.
Tehran’s services play a major role in the country’s GDP of the sector. Notably, the province accounts for 79% of Iran’s GDP from “information and communications” and 65% from “finance and insurance”. However, it accounts for only 0.7% and 4.4% of “mine extraction” and “agriculture” respectively. In the fiscal 2020-21, Tehran’s share of the country’s GDP in “electricity and gas supplement” became bolder and increased by 9.4 percentage points to 16.8%.
The services, by a wide margin compared to other sectors, creates the highest GDP (72%) in the province. One of the most important reasons behind the sector’s high share in GDP is the concentration of public services in the province, as the capital city is home to a vast number of buildings in its urban areas which in turns comes along with a relatively high share of real estate, retail and wholesale services.
“Real estate”, “wholesales and retails” and “finance and insurance” together account for 46% of Tehran’s total GDP and 64% of that of its services sector.
The share of “construction industry” and “building” in Tehran Province’s GDP stands at 15.7% and 4.7% respectively, lower than the country’s average (18.6% and 5% respectively).
“Petroleum products”, “food industry”, “rubber and plastic products” and “medicine” have an aggregate share of about 52% from the province’s total GDP.
In the first eight years of the past decade (March 2011-21), the general trend of Tehran Province’s real GDP growth was upward, similar to that of the country.
With the intensification of sanctions in the fiscal 2018-19, along with the Covid-19 pandemic in the past two years, the country’s production was affected, although the two factors’ impact on Tehran’s GDP was less intense compared to that of the country’s GDP in the fiscal 2018-19 and fiscal 2019-20.
However, in the fiscal 2020-21, this trend was reversed as the impact on the province grew larger while it subsided for the country nationwide. Tehran Province’s real GDP stood at 1.76 quadrillion rials ($6.4 billion), almost unchanged compared to the figure in fiscal 2017-18.
The general trend of Tehran Province’s GDP growth over the past decade (fiscal 2011-12 to fiscal 2020-21) was positive, as the average annual growth in this period stands at 2.3%. The figure is higher than the average annual growth of 0.3% registered nationwide. Compared with the economic growth of the country, except in the fiscal 2017-18 and 2018-19, the trends registered for both the country and the province were aligned. This is while the recession period in the province was shorter.
The growth of Tehran between the fiscal 2016-17 and 2018-19 grew at a faster pace compared with the country’s average. But in the fiscal 2019-20, the provincial growth stood at -0.03%, while the country’s economy grew 1%.
During the decade under review, “water and electricity” with an average annual growth of 15.4%, had the highest average GDP growth.
The rate for “accommodation and food services” declined by 9.9% annually, which was the highest (-62%) in fiscal 2020-21 and the main reason behind the decline was the impact of Covid-19.
