By Euronews Persian
Published on
Iran used its appearance at the World Urban Forum in Baku this week to call for international support for post-war reconstruction, telling delegates that tens of thousands of units had been damaged or destroyed in dozens of towns and cities since February.
“We expect by conveying this message that other countries will understand our reconstruction message,” Gholamreza Kazemian Shirvan, Iran’s Deputy Minister of Roads and Urban Development for Urban Planning and Architecture, told Euronews in an interview at the forum.
“Our priority is certainly to carry out reconstruction efforts as quickly as possible so that the people who were affected can return to their homes and resume their normal lives,” Kazemian said.
Tehran Municipality said around 51,000 housing units were damaged in the capital alone during the conflict — approximately 40,000 of which sustained minor damage, with reconstruction files reportedly closed for around 85% of those cases.
The Ministry of Roads and Urban Development’s first official assessment, published at the end of March, said that around 45,000 residential and non-residential units across the country sustained damage that did not require demolition, while nearly 1,000 units were so severely damaged that they required complete demolition and reconstruction.
Euronews could not independently verify the overall scale of the damage due to multiple and contradictory figures from official bodies, non-governmental institutions and eyewitnesses.
The war, which began on 28 February following joint US and Israeli strikes on Iran, caused the heaviest structural damage in the provinces of Kermanshah, West Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Ilam and East Azerbaijan.
The ministry said the nationwide damage from the 40-day strikes prior to the ceasefire was nearly four times the level recorded after a shorter 12-day conflict in June 2025.
Urban pressures
Kazemian also outlined Iran’s broader urban pressures which predate the war. Iran is among the world’s most urbanised countries, with a population of around 90 million of whom some 70 million live in cities.
Tehran’s metropolitan population exceeds 15 million. Rapid rural-to-urban migration has left many villages depopulated while concentrating pressure on urban infrastructure.
“We face challenges in areas such as water resources, climate change, and land subsidence,” Kazemian said.
“Necessary planning has been carried out for all of these issues, and we have identified ways to address and manage these challenges — whether in the field of earthquakes, land subsidence, or water shortages, which are among our main challenges.”
Iran is also one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, with Tehran and several major cities sitting on active fault lines — a risk that compounds the housing shortage and complicates reconstruction planning.
A subsidised housing programme launched under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, known as Mehr Housing, aimed to provide affordable homes for low-income Iranians but has failed to resolve the crisis, particularly given persistent inflation and a rapidly growing young population.
WUF13, the 13th session of the World Urban Forum, runs in Baku from 17 to 22 May under the theme “Housing the world: Safe and resilient cities and communities.”
The forum, organised by UN-Habitat every two years, is expected to produce the Baku Call to Action — an outcome document supporting the UN’s New Urban Agenda.