Urban Poverty and Media Representation (Content Analysis of Hamshahri Newspaper as a Media of Urban Management)

Authors

1 Social Researcher, Allameh Tabatabae’i University, Tehran, Iran

2 Tehran Urban Planning & Research Center, Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jrd.2025.388001.668894

Abstract

The Tehran Municipality’s overarching documents have directly and indirectly addressed and emphasized the issue of urban poverty and its reduction. The central motif of these documents is the concept of urban justice, which is rooted in fundamental beliefs. The inquiry posed by this research is as follows: In accordance with the aforementioned objectives, how has the Hamshahri media, which serves as the media outlet for urban management, depicted urban poverty and the efforts to address it? The research’s conceptual framework is predicated on the nine dimensions of urban poverty as viewed by Mitlin and Satterthwaite.
This research uses a qualitative research method and the deductive qualitative content analysis technique to examine all issues of Hamshahri newspaper (August 2021 to November 2024) related to the topics of urban poverty and the urban poor.
The findings suggest that the urban management media have depicted a variety of poverty-related aspects. In accordance with its mission, it can be asserted that this media outlet has endeavored to reflect the dimensions of urban poverty and the measures taken by the Tehran Municipality to address them. In this regard, the categories of inadequate provision of public urban infrastructure and inadequate housing have received the most representation, while the categories of insufficient legal support and the voicelessness of the poor have collectively received the least representation.
Consequently, the physical and visible aspects of urban poverty have received more attention than the less visible aspects, such as legal support and voicelessness. Furthermore, the media’s emphasis is on the poverty of urban facilities and infrastructure rather than on impoverished urban communities. The reports are more news-oriented than analytical, and the lived experience of the urban poor is not represented in the context of economic and social crises.

Keywords

References

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