The spatiality of encounters: Contesting planning decisions in Tehran

Abstract How do urban activists and the state organise their encounters under constrained conditions for dissent? What spatialities do these encounters involve, and how do they mediate power relations? This paper examines these questions, focusing on eight instances of contestation in Tehran's middle‐class neighbourhoods, centred on resistance to top‐down urban planning and governance. Drawing on Deleuzian thought, particularly his interpretation of Spinoza's concept of encounter, the paper focuses on the spatiality of encounter as a critical site of analysis. It argues that space mediates and conditions the fragmented encounters between residents and the state by reconfiguring their power to act. The spatialities of these encounters, in turn, reflect and reproduce both the political character of urban governance and the forms of resistance it provokes.