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Café and “ Café-going” in contemporary Iranian culture is tied up to the french intellectualism and its descendants in Tehran and big cities of Iran in the ’40s and ’50s. Cafés were places of thought and growing urban rationality specially in establishing the modern ideology and new political ideas. The recent decade is a new era in the history of Café in Iran. The changes that took place because of two decades of prohibitions, connected Cafés to other entertainment spaces. The new generation tends to avoid the public eye and gather in places where is hard to see and they made Café sub-culture different from the last generation.
They are full of symbols that cannot be shown in other public spaces because of socio-cultural situations. Therefore the main population of Café-goers is young people seeking a public-private space to express and to fulfill their social, cultural, and artistic demands as the new generation of Iran. It makes Café an alternative to the controlled urban spaces, and it gets everyday further from the first intellectual places into the entertainment spaces.