Despite their modern physical form, the main urban centers of Iran have been unable to realize the pattern of civic presence assumed in mainstream urban-planning literature. This study constructs the conceptual framework of the “Geometry of Presence” around three dimensions, Power, Sacred, and Life and their distinct spatial orientations (vertical, central, and horizontal). It seeks to understand a neglected dimension of the inconsistency between the modern physical form of Iranian urban centers and historical patterns of presence, through a qualitative comparative genealogy of urban centrality in Iranian and Western civilizations, from antiquity to the modern era. The findings indicate that in the Western tradition, the horizontal orientation of the Geometry of Life persisted as a resilient component of urban centrality and was almost never excluded from the city center. In the Iranian tradition, by contrast, the urban center remained relatively under the influence of the vertical-central orientations associated with Power and Sacred, while the horizontality of Life generally did not extend beyond the neighborhood scale. During Iran’s modernization, the introduction of master plans and a predominantly horizontal spatial orientation sought to bring these two trajectories together. Yet the modern physical form could not transform the historically and culturally embedded patterns through which presence had been organized. The study proposes four strategies for bringing the three orientations into a new, civilizationally rooted urban order; recognizing the capacities of the Iranian Geometry of Presence, designing intermediary and transitional spaces, acknowledging and guiding the principle of hierarchy, and ritualization instead of institutionalization.