The production of a new Eurasian capital on the Kazakh steppe: Architecture, urban design, and identity in Astana

Abstract

In December 1997, the Republic of Kazakhstan officially proclaimed that the city of Astana would be its new capital. The decision to transfer the seat of government from the city of Almaty in the south to the more centrally located Astana was connected to the process of nation building in a multi-ethnic society where the titular nation represents little more than half of the population. Efforts to transform the rather remote regional center, Akmola (later renamed Astana) into a modern capital city have been underway since the late 1990s. One important component of this transformation is the idea of building a "metabolic" and sustainable "Eurasian" city. As the symbolic center of the whole country, this new capital would function as a showpiece of Kazakh culture and identity. The city would also become a symbol of economic prosperity and the regime's geopolitical vision. While the government's intensions are expressed rather openly, it remains unclear to what extent these politically verbalized leitmotivs are actually being realized through contemporary architecture and structure. This article offers a critical assessment of what has been achieved to date and argues that the production of the new Kazakhstani capital has often failed to translate rhetoric into reality.

The Post-Soviet City as a Communal Apartment: Spatialized Belonging in Ulan-Ude

“…Cities today have become prime sites for negotiating belonging as well as claiming space and representation. These processes have been especially pertinent in post-Soviet Eurasia, where across the continent, the rethinking of identity has taken various spatial and discoursive forms in the urban space, often digging through layers of history and forging affective bonds through placemaking (Cummings 2013; Köppen 2013; Wanner 2016). Such claim-making and its legitimation takes place in the context of preexisting, historically and politically shaped frameworks of inclusivity and, in diverse areas, cosmopolitanism.…”

The violence of spectacle: Statist schemes to green the desert and constructing Astana and Ashgabat as urban oases

“…But even though these projects, like capital city development schemes more generally, revolve around elite economic and political interests, they are also ideological insofar as they draw upon and materialize nationalist discourses (Koch, 2013c). The academic work on capital cities has clearly made this connection with nationalism (e.g., Vale, 1992), and it has, in fact, been an important focus of the literature on Ashgabat (Denison, 2009;Š ír, 2008) 2 and Astana (Bissenova, 2013;Buchli, 2007;Danzer, 2009;Köppen, 2013;Laszczkowski, 2011aLaszczkowski, , 2011bLaszczkowski, , 2013Meuser, 2010;Yacher, 2011).…”

Quality of Urban Space in The Eurasian Context

“…Within the above mentioned theoretical framework, many scholars specifically focused on the Kazakh case, highlighting in particular patterns of urban evolution in post-soviet time with reference to major cities as Astana and Almaty [12,13,14,15,16,17], or focusing on specific aspects as, for example, access to housing [17] and health care [18], personal security and crime [19], daily life, social relations and conditions [20,21,22,23], social configuration [24], economy [25,26,27] and environment [28,29,30], communications and infrastructures. Though encompassing crucial topics, still a few works [31] tackled the problems of urban asymmetries as a limit for sustainable, long term city's development.…”