"Ghalibaf's work as mayor is beyond criticism," says Mahnaz, referring to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, first elected mayor of the Iranian capital in 2005.

He officially began his third term this past week after receiving the Interior Ministry's official mandate. On 8 September, he was reelected by the Tehran City Council, winning a 16–14 vote over Mohsen Hashemi Rafsanjani, former head of the Tehran subway system and son of ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

"The fact that he was reelected is great," Mahnaz, a resident of northern California. "This place is even better than San Francisco."

Mahnaz is waiting in line at one of the many banks that surround Tehran's Enghelab Square. Given her unorthodox hejab, it's no surprise when she says that she has lived abroad for most of her life. She has returned to spend some time with relatives.

"I enjoy Tehran very much", she says. "The murals, the flower beds, the relative cleanliness of most of the city. And no praise is high enough for the metro [system]."

While Mahnaz spends most of her time in the capital's well-to-do northern section, things are different in the southwestern district of Navab. Here, during the administration of Gholam Hossein Karbaschi, Tehran's mayor for most of the 1990s, the traditional urban landscape was radically altered by the construction of thousands of apartment units in uniformly designed arrays of brown mid-rises.

"Ghalibaf has taken care of uptown quite well, but this area still has problems with the sewers, with side streets pockmarked by potholes", according to Mohammad Reza, the 48-year-old manager of a bread store in the neighbourhood. "They haven't even done a park. He has not touched the streets. In my view, he has only taken care of uptown."

Abuzar, a true Tehran "southie", works as a peddler in and around Rahahan Square, near the city's main railroad station. "Put a picture of the current square next to one from ten years ago", he says. "I'll give you my bicycle if you find even a bit of difference. The ants who crawled about here ten years ago are still around. We've not seen anything change. Of course, we hear [Ghalibaf] has erected overpasses and has planted trees way up there somewhere. But I can tell you that we've had no sight of him."

Nazali, 25, has mixed feelings about Ghalibaf. "I don't dislike what's happening citywide", she says. "I don't know. They say he has only taken care of uptown, but in my view he has looked after all areas – some less, some more, of course. South Tehran to me means Khorasan Avenue and the like, those places are not bad from what I've seen." Specifically, she says, "I like the Sadr expressway."

The Sadr, just over three miles long, runs between east and west Tehran. It was transformed into a two-tiered roadway in a massive project for which Ghalibaf was widely hailed in the Iranian media. A Farda News online report on the project's final construction phase was greeted with comments such as "Long live Tehran's master builder, the humble accomplisher, Dr Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf" and "May the eyes of the envious and extremist burst in jealousy. Truthfully, Tehranis don't deserve all this service you've provided them, a fighting man in hundreds of thousands."

Ali Reza works at a trading enterprise on Mirdamad Avenue near the heart of the city. Though he acknowledges that Ghalibaf has some impressive achievements to his name, he suggests that the former Revolutionary Guard air force commander enjoys special advantages. "He's in a society where things get resolved and fixed only through extra-legal connections, actions, and orders, so Ghalibaf is a godsend," he charges, chuckling. "And, of course, when the management of large residential and commercial building construction is in the hands of active or retired military and security personnel, things proceed even more smoothly."

It may just be too soon to judge the effect of the last eight years of development in Tehran, suggests Amir, a city planning expert. "Ghalibaf's mayorship ushered in many alterations that, above all, have been visually appealing. Since the first days at his desk he embarked on a jihad-style of management which noticeably increased the volume of development projects. Their continual execution over many years produced major changes to the image of this grey metropolis."

He says the mayor's development push started out relatively small: paving sidewalks in stone, replacing concrete curbs with similarly cut stone, designing and building metallic bus stops in modern colours. "These projects were all evidence of his effort to raise the city's appearance to levels like those he saw during his trips overseas", he says. Aesthetically, while the work that was done often had little relationship with local traditions, in Amir's opinion it was successful in making everyday street life in the teeming city a bit more pleasant.

"As things progressed, larger urban projects appeared on the agenda," he continues. "The Navab project, with all its practical advantages, divided a neighbourhood that had to be reconnected with elevated passages. The Abbasabad neighbourhood has been rezoned wholesale. Recently, the Sadr expressway has become double-decked, and the Niayesh underground tunnel has reduced the travel time between far ends of the city."

While the scale of development under Ghalibaf has been remarkable, Amir is of the view that "what matters in city planning, beyond the project counts and their specific magnitude, is their payback, practicality, and endurance over time.

"The multi-level addition to the Sadr expressway has not opened yet, and it isn't clear what the magnitude of this second level, with all that has been spent on it, will be in reducing the traffic load along Tehran's east-west axis. The full positive and negative impact of the Navab project on neighbouring areas is still not clear, and most of the repaved stone sidewalks have not gone through enough winters and summers to let us judge their durability."

An environmental expert, who requested the anonymity even with respect to his first name, credits the mayor with only superficial changes. "On the face of it, Ghalibaf, in terms of planting trees, has beautified the city." More crucially, however, "the thing that he and his group didn't believe in was the protection of the urban environment in a sustainable manner. Witness the felling of 18,000 trees in the Lavizan forest in 2005, over 6,000 in the Sorkhehessar forest, and similar numbers in the Khargooshdarreh forest and the destruction of all six rivers in Tehran, and the conversion of the gorge rivers in Kann, Farrahzad, and Daarabad into concrete [canals]."

He focuses in particular on the loss of many of the trees that famously lined Vali Asr Street, Tehran's longest boulevard, running from the city's poorer south to the wealthy Tajrish district at the foot of the Alborz Mountains in the north. "The principal reason for the death of the plane trees of Vali Asr Street was the repaving of the sidewalks. For a whole year, they turned the feeding streams and the sidewalks upside down. The tree roots were exposed, without protection or moisture."

Along with the disruption of residents' lives during the construction period, he continues, "We're now witnessing the results. At the time, we warned that the trees would dry up, but no one listened. Now over 60 percent of the plane trees on Vali Asr are stricken and weak, and more than once a bunch of them have been removed in the middle of the night. Similar events have occurred in other parts of the city." A series of highway projects, he claims, "have sacrificed many trees for the city administration's goals."

Security concerns, he argues, have largely shaped the Ghalibaf administration's approach to urban planning. He describes the mayor's management style as "militaristic and tactical. Crash and burn and let the bulldozers loose."

"Trees had no place in his urban planning – from the start, the goal was to eliminate trees and replace them with grass. Dense foliage, curtailing visibility, was perceived...as a security issue, to the point that they emptied entire parks and urban oases of trees. Look at Vanak Square.

"A militaristic person sees every area as a battlefield or a proving ground. Look at all the metal fences in the centre of streets – they break the connections between the two sides. The city has become like a cage. They have erected barriers all over, a meter or a meter-and-a-half high, even on the smallest side streets, not for beautification or control of pedestrian and [motor] traffic, but exclusively for security purposes."