'City of the Future'
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'City of the Future'

Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana

Mateusz Laszczkowski

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eBook - ePub

'City of the Future'

Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana

Mateusz Laszczkowski

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About This Book

Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city's longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9781785332579

Chapter 1

Materializing the Future

Images and Practices

On 6 July 2009, at ten in the morning, the bright sun was high above Astana.1 Despite the scorching heat, large crowds had gathered to watch the show ‘Astana: The Music of Life’, a highlight of the three-day-long central pageantry of Astana Day – a national holiday that had been added to the official calendar the year before to celebrate the anniversary of Astana’s capital status.2 The broad, monumental stage was decorated with large silhouettes of a selection of the city’s most recognizable new buildings. Each of those was initially in pieces: the bottom half on one side of the stage, the top half on the other. In the forefront, there were colossal mythical winged horses. In the background, scaffolding supported a giant image of two ancient Turkic warriors and a shanyrak symbol3 such as in the city’s emblem. People were taking their seats.
When it was announced that President Nazarbaev was approaching, the audience stood up to watch and to welcome him with an ovation. Then, the show began with the sound of bells tolling. Young men and women wearing neat and clean construction workers’ outfits started appearing on the stage. Their number grew steadily until they were as many as a hundred. They danced a lively modern dance while the great silhouettes began moving, each half towards its counterpart, so that the buildings were becoming whole. The music was loud and aggressive, uplifting and triumphant, an industrial warrior dance incorporating the sounds of construction work. Flashing plumes of sparks and smoke spurted out intermittently from tubes mounted high on the scaffolding. This lasted for some time. In a culminating moment, the poster with the warriors slid down to reveal a different background: a giant green map of Astana, with the city’s emblem on top and big red letters reading, in Kazakh, ‘Happy Birthday, Astana!’ (Tughan kuningmen, Astana! ). Behind this theatrical representation of construction works, actual buildings in mid construction – with scaffoldings and cranes – could be seen (Figure 1.1).
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Figure 1.1 ‘Astana: The Music of Life’, 6 July 2009 (photo: M. Laszczkowski)
As soon as the ‘building work’ on the stage was complete, all the dancer-workers stood in rows at the back, and the president stepped up to a rostrum. He spoke first in Kazakh and then in Russian. He said Astana Day was already well established as a ‘true holiday’ for ‘the entire nation’, celebrated ‘in all corners of Kazakhstan’. The president emphasized Astana’s economic role: he spoke about nationwide progress stimulated by the development of the capital, about the jobs it created and about Astana’s rapidly rising share of Kazakhstan’s GNP. He underscored that Astana was the ‘centre of Kazakhstan, of Central Asia and of all Eurasia’. Nazarbaev argued that the Kazakhstanis had ‘accomplished the impossible’: built ‘a new city in the steppe’ in just a decade. Hence, he concluded, they were ready to face any challenge and Kazakhstan’s future was ‘even brighter’ than the present. Finally, the president wished Astana and the entire country well-being, prosperity and further development.
The show took place in a recently created monumental area. The stage was placed in front of the pyramid-shaped Palace of Peace and Reconciliation (Figure 1.2), which sits in a riverside park amid a carefully arranged landscape of gentle green hillocks, fountains and streams, and against an impressive vista of the bright, architecturally eclectic government quarter across the river.4 The stands for the audience were arranged at the foot of another recent landmark, the Monument to the Kazakh Land, officially inaugurated on Astana Day 2008 – a white marble obelisk reaching 91 metres (for 1991, the year of Kazakhstan’s independence), topped by a golden eagle-like bird (Samruk) spreading its wings. Behind that monument, there was the deep blue glass trapezoid of the Palace of Independence with a lattice of white pipes on the facade, reminiscent of the support structure of a yurt – the traditional dwelling of Central Asia’s pastoral nomads. Nazarbaev said he found it ‘deeply symbolic’ that the event was taking place amid these buildings, which, according to him, reflected eternal key values for the Kazakhs: first, ‘the land, which had always been hospitable to more than a hundred nationalities’; second, independence; and third, ‘peace and accord amid the population’. Although the Palace of Independence had been ceremoniously opened in December 2008, half a year later construction work was still in progress both there and at the neighbouring, similarly coloured, crater-shaped futuristic Palace of Creativity. As of summer 2009, this area was flanked with top-end apartment estates under construction. Although envisioned as Astana’s future centre, currently it occupied a rather peripheral location along the southern margin of the city. Just several years ago this used to be a suburban dacha area, and garden plots, some of them abandoned, doomed to be cleared for further development, still lay near the palaces before they gave in to untamed grasslands. Thus, the venue for the Astana Day show had an exciting feel of newness, a ‘first furrow’ not just of nation-state monumentality but also, and crucially, of a new architectural modernity, an unfolding skyscraper civilization on the borderland between the city and the steppe.
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Figure 1.2 Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, ‘the Pyramid’ (photo: M. Laszczkowski)
This chapter draws both on the excitement and the uncertainty of that moment, taking up the themes of construction and its representation to begin exploring the social and political effects of building work and the built environment in Astana. As the show suggests, Astana was constructed as a ‘real-and-imagined’ place (Soja 1996) through a process in which actual building work intertwined with ‘construction’ in a more metaphorical but not less important sense of the work of images and performances, discourse and imagination. As though one of Italo Calvino’s (1978) Invisible Cities, Astana seemed to have a double nature: imagined and material reality mirrored, pervaded, supported and determined one another. Unlike in Calvino’s case, though, this was not a matter of poetic metaphor; rather, the ‘two Astanas’ were aspects of a single social reality, complex and ridden with implicit contradictions.
As indicated in the introduction, from the viewpoint of government ideology, the construction works in Astana were tantamount to state-building, mobilizing citizens around an elite-defined imagery of progress. Astana was to be an exemplary capital. It was also to become a ‘rational and critical utopia’ (Holston 1989: 85) – a model for the transformation of the country and its citizens, a harbinger of ‘modernity’ and a ‘locomotive’ to drive Kazakhstan into the desired future and away from present conditions and past burdens.5 But what the show as described above obliterates is the role of spectators as crucial and wilful performers. Just as a theatrical performance would make no sense without viewers, so the performance of statehood requires active involvement of the citizen public (cf. Navaro-Yashin 2002; Reeves, Rasanayagam and Beyer 2014)’, and so the construction of Astana depended on the wilful involvement of hundreds of thousands of individual residents and incomers. More generally, as Marshall Berman (1988) shows, ‘modernity’ is not just a project of rulers. Rather, the condition of modernity implies that ‘everyone’ becomes a ‘developer’ who struggles with shifting conditions to make oneself at home in the maelstrom of social and material transformation and lend particular qualities to one’s self and one’s environment. The work of crafting alternative social ‘worlds’ consists of everyday situated practices.
For these reasons, to follow how Astana was constructed as an environment at once material and imagined, in which to work out new visions of social order and agentive personhood, requires shifting between several sets of lenses: describing the new architectural landscape; analysing official discourse and visual representations; and following personal narratives by migrants who moved to Astana hoping to partake in the city’s development. On Astana Day, the bleachers were filled with a thousand spectators who had come to participate in the celebration of the construction of Astana and all that it stood for, and further thousands swarmed behind the perimeter fence the police had put up around the venue. Every day, individuals arriving to Astana from all corners of Kazakhstan strove and desired to make themselves and their own environment meaningfully and satisfyingly modern. State-orchestrated building work and imaginational construction of Astana entangled in complex, mutually conditioning ways with their quotidian agency. This chapter charts how individual actors engaged with the process of material development of the city, its various images and constructions of the past and the future. The building boom and the growth of the city offered them possibilities for employment, a career and personal improvement – in short, the realization of a desired future in the present. As I outline in the next section, construction seemed to offer a way out of the incapacitating state of disorder that had ensued in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet, as the rest of the chapter demonstrates, the material realities of actually living in Astana were often much more ambiguous. Although the show just described suggests the ‘city of the future’ miraculously materialized within the time span of a well-choreographed dance, the personal narratives that follow show how in the everyday experience of individual residents the building of the future was rather a protracted, contingent and far from simply linear process marked with a variety of improvised rhythms.

Deconstruction, Reconstruction

To most residents of Kazakhstan, as of most other parts of the former Soviet Union, the early and mid 1990s were a time of decay, atrophy, deprivation, rapid disappearance of vital safeguards and the questioning or outright abolition of values previously taken for granted (Bridger and Pine 1998; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Humphrey 2002b; McMann 2007; Alexander 2009a, 2009b). Still today, a common way of referring to the post-perestroika period is ‘when everything was collapsing/tumbling down/falling into ruin’ (‘kogda vse valilos’ / rushilos”). In Tselinograd, as today’s Astana used to be known in the late-Soviet period, a number of large industrial establishments (such as the TselinSel’Mash, an agricultural-machinery producer renowned throughout the Soviet Union) were shut down and split up. Similarly, rural and urban enterprises, often the sole basis of a town’s or a region’s subsistence, collapsed across the former USSR. This affected the majority of the urban population because entire living quarters had been managed by those enterprises. Former employees of the factories and of many related establishments – including teachers, nurses and accountants, especially women – took to petty bazaar trading. Rural inhabitants found themselves backed into even tighter corners (Yessenova 2003). Virtually all of my informants old enough to have been professionally active in the late 1980s and early 1990s recall those events with dread or grief.
Previously, under the Soviet order, people, things and meanings had been knitted together by networks of fixed relations, generally familiar to the citizens. ‘The state’ found ubiquitous material presence in infrastructures, utility networks, workplaces, kindergartens, schools and hospitals, and even family housing with adjacent playgrounds (Alexander 2004, 2007a; Collier 2004, 2010; Humphrey 2005). The presence and functioning of the Soviet state was also manifested in the performance of fundamental, everyday forms of social relations that those material forms enabled and mediated. Functioning material connections in the built environment epitomized social connection. Associated with this was a teleology according to which society was developing towards communism as a version of modernity (cf. Hoffmann 2000). Such development entailed a sequence of progressive transformations of the material environment as well as of citizens’ subjectivity. While neither the citizens nor the ideologues themselves necessarily believed in it on any fundamental personal level, the narrative provided a conceptual framework with which to go about social life (Yurchak 2006). Social reality was riddled with contradictions (ibid.), yet it was relatively known and navigable.
In the wake of perestroika and the subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union, those vital relationships among people, things and ideas were reshuffled. The Soviet state was abolished and its new incarnation, the independent republic, long seemed highly uncertain. To this day, many former Soviet citizens, while not necessarily ‘nostalgic’ about the Soviet reality – too aware of its many dark sides – recall the foregone time as one when there at least used to be some order and sense of purpose. Afterwards, as one of my neighbours in Astana – a chain-smoking, choleric retired operator of heavy construction vehicles – would frequently grumble, post-Soviet Kazakhstan seemed a total ‘mess’ (bardak). Another elderly informant succinctly summarized the change that had occurred, playing on the root meaning of the Russian word ‘perestroika’, derived from the verb ‘to build’ (stroit’): ‘Everything’s been taken apart, with this … rasstroikastroika … [deconstruction … construction …]. Something was divided, where’s it gone? Now there’s nothing, nothing. Where have things gone? Who took them away? … Nothing’s left’. Social order was undermined and – much as James Ferguson (1999) describes for Africa – ‘modernity’, in the sense of that future state of advancement always almost at hand, seemed cancelled.
While the narrative of ‘post-Soviet chaos’ (Nazpary 2002), or ‘bardak’, is a familiar one, and the role of ‘mess’ or disorder as the conceptual precondition of order has often been highlighted by scholars for colonial, socialist and post-socialist contexts (Mitchell 1988: 80–82; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003: 136–37; Alexander 2009b; Weszkalnys 2010: 68–88), the words of the gentleman just quoted additionally point to the salience of construction as a key metaphor in Soviet and post-Soviet thinking about social order – and to that metaphor’s inherent ambiguity (see Pelkmans 2003). Construction is a particularly convenient, even compelling, figure for the social processes of transforming reality by creating stable and coherent forms out of multiple elements – as much for social scientists (as in ‘social construction of reality’) as for real-life actors on the ground. In the Soviet Union, the Party and the citizens were ever ‘building socialism’ – at least so the official ideology had it (Kotkin 1995; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003: 110–39). Finally, Gorbachev’s attempt to ‘reconstruct’ (perestroit’) the system inadvertently led to its ‘chaotic’ deconstruction. Yet, as the spectacle described above suggests, in Astana the construction metaphor was to make a spectacular comeback. It was in the context of the mid 1990s economic collapse and social atrophy that President Nazarbaev announced his wish to relocate Kazakhstan’s capital to Aqmola. Initially met with confusion and disbelief, the idea of constructing a new capital, however, responded to many citizens’ desire for renewed ordering.6
Let us look at the story of post-Soviet destruction, the subsequent Kazakhstani capital relocation and the construction boom in Astana from the point of view of the biographic experience of individual participants. Sasha and Olga are construction engineers. They were in their forties and had been living in Astana for about ten years when I met them there in 2008. They were originally from Temirtau, a town in central Kazakhstan, approximately 200 k...

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