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Through the story of a seven-year-old pothole in Zanjan, this text reflects how neglected urban spaces become living metaphors for systemic marginalization, forgotten promises, and the everyday experience of life on the periphery. |
On the street leading to Gavazang in Zanjan, beneath a streetlight that is always off, there exists a seven-year-old pothole. I have passed by it countless times, and every time a car has fallen into it, I’ve told myself I will remember it this time. But just as much as I forget it, the pothole seems unwilling to forget me. Like something that is neither erased nor resolved, it has carved out a place for itself between remaining and vanishing; like a fragment of reality that, every time you pass by, insists on reminding you of its presence—uninvited and unannounced. Potholes like this exist all over the city.
At first, I thought, like all potholes, one day it would be filled. Perhaps on a rainy day when it’s full of water, or because an official happens to pass by, and asphalt will be laid over it. But years went by, and the pothole remained. Until I came to realize that this pothole is not just a pothole; it is a metaphor. A metaphor for something deeper: a wound in a city that has forgotten how to heal, a sign of a way of life where forgetting has become institutionalized. The city’s seven-year-old pothole is not a simple defect in the asphalt; it is a cavity in the system of priorities, in the budget lines, in the memory of power—and above all, a fissure in our hope.
Zanjan is a city that, in official administrative divisions, is called a provincial capital, yet in daily life feels more like a silent, distant township. Nothing in this city is ever complete—not the sidewalks, not the parks, not the streets, not the monuments, and not even the promises. Its squares are empty of ideas, and its speed bumps are so numerous and non-standard that it feels as if the city is at war with its people.
It is in these absences and deficiencies that the seven-year-old pothole suddenly leaps out of the street and enters our lives; enters our memory and our understanding of what it means to be neglected. It becomes a metaphor for all the things that should have been repaired but never were. Like projects with ribbons cut but no endings, like dark and treeless parks, and like government offices whose stairways have never once understood people with disabilities.
We live in a geography where being marginalized and forgotten is not an accident but a rule. In such a geography, old potholes function exactly like memory—alive, painful, insistent. Paperless documents of all that has been ignored here for years.
The margin is not just a geographical coordinate; it is a condition, a psychological state. A place where every simple possibility turns into a long-standing demand. A place where saying “we don’t have a recreational space” sounds like a luxury complaint. A place where having pedestrian bridges with working elevators, or standard parking lots, are dreams that seem never meant to belong here. They must belong somewhere else—somewhere more central, somewhere more “of the self.”
Space and its fixtures are by no means neutral; they reflect existing power relations. Within this framework, potholes do not build our geography, they map out our neglect. On this basis, discrimination can be traced from the pothole in Zanjan to the very heart of the center, up there, to the decision-making rooms where no chair has ever been set for those consigned to the margins.
This omission is a soft form of violence. A continuous and systematic violence that ultimately dries up one’s desire to be better. The human mind, through repetition, compromises. Wounds turn into décor, and at that exact moment, forgetting becomes complete. Today, we pass by potholes, sometimes fall into them, grumble for a few seconds—and then move on from inequalities, from being left behind, from the bitter sense of marginalization, from discrimination—without a moment’s pause. Like a passerby brushing a hand against the cracks of a ruined house before moving on, never once considering its collapse. Many of us don’t even have the names of our city officials memorized.
The seven-year-old pothole of Zanjan is not a mere defect; it is a sign. A sign that there are cities in this geography that have never had a share of what is rightfully theirs. Their share has been claimed by cities whose people know nothing of potholes. Zanjan is one of these cities that has never been included in the text. A city that always remained an outsider; always the margin, always the Other.
Strange as it may sound, sometimes I think that if one day the pothole on Gavazang Street in Zanjan, beneath that forever-dark streetlight, were to be filled, something inside me would be emptied. Not only because I would no longer feel its jolt beneath my feet, but because that pothole and others like it have come to represent for me the years of suffering at the margins. Those potholes are the diary of neglect and silence of a city, and every time I pass by them, I reread them anew.