Ph.D. Candidate Samira Fathi has contributed an essay to a new series of translations on PLATFORM. In “Promenading in Isfahan’s Chaharbaghs," written in Persian and English, Samira explores the role of the chaharbagh, or tree-lined public promenade, in the spatial urban experience of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Isfahan, Iran. Contemporary accounts reveal the impact of this promenade on the lived experience of Isfahanis and its role in the vitality of the city. Fathi finds that the promenade was a bustling, vibrant public space that acted as a direct link between social and religious zones of the city. A key reference point was the architectural patronage of Sadr-i Isfahani, who, as a patron and later the city’s governor in the early 1800s, restored Isfahan’s urban prosperity by creating more chaharbaghs and weaving the practice of promenading into the experience of the city. Understanding the legacy of Isfahan’s shared public spaces is important, Fathi suggests, for they later served as inspiration for the subsequent urban planning of cities in modern Iran. Read the Persian translation here.