Urban space is a social, historical, and multilayered phenomenon shaped through the continuous interaction of power, politics, and capital, and reproduced over time through structural transformations as well as everyday practices, lived experiences, and social discourses. Among these, women’s discourse plays a significant role in redefining public–private boundaries and reconstructing collective memory. Nevertheless, this discourse has received limited attention, particularly in analyses of historical urban spaces in Iranian cities. This study examines the discursive formations of women’s discourse in the process of reproducing the urban space of Lalezar Street in Tehran across different historical periods.

Lalezar Street, as a site of interaction and confrontation among social forces and a platform for women’s presence and action, provides an opportunity to analyze the reconfiguration of urban space from a gendered perspective. This research adopts a qualitative, discourse-oriented approach and employs inductive content analysis. The data are drawn from written, visual, and audio sources related to three major periods: the Qajar era, the Pahlavi era, and the Islamic Republic. The theoretical framework is based on the concepts of activism, agency, and spatial habitus to examine the mechanisms involved in the reproduction of urban space.

The findings indicate that women’s activism on Lalezar Street constitutes part of the historical process of urban space reproduction, shaped through a complex interaction with relations of power, politics, and capital. Across different periods, this activism has been represented through diverse discursive formations, including passive–symbolic presence, consumer-oriented presence, isolation, and participation, reflecting women’s shifting positions from spectators to spectacle and, at times, to active agents. Women’s everyday practices, patterns of presence and absence, and forms of participation have not only influenced the transformation of spatial meanings and public–private boundaries but have also contributed to the formation of collective memory and the spatial organization of Lalezar Street.