There is something in the human psyche that desires to create order from chaos. As a species we like our environments to reflect the present. This is why cities are organic, no one vision of the present exists. Today’s version will be one step on from yesterdays. Yesterdays buildings are still there though and the new stops being new very quickly. This means our cities can appear to function on the edge of controlled chaos, as if yesterday and today exist together in a jumble.
The human desire for control the leads to the madness of trying to build from scratch. New capital cities have been built from nothing before. Each time the planners probably think, this time it will be bigger, better, more organised, more orderly than everywhere else. It is almost as if we try to capture the future and quite literally set it in concrete. Remodelling and changing the organic, leaving and breathing present seems too difficult. If only we could start all over again, we think.
Le Corbusier once produced a plan for the remodelling of Paris, it involved the demolition of almost everything north of the Seine. Too difficult a concept, better to start from scratch. Trouble is it never quite works.
Brasilia and Canberra are the capitals of Brasil and Australia respectively and often described as ‘unloved’ in comparison with Rio and Sydney. Brasilia was constructed in the 70s in only three years, laid out, bizarrely, in the shape of a plane. It has the unique honour of being the largest city to not have existed at the beginning of the 20th Century. The city has been criticised as being antiseptic, brutally modernist and ‘culturally inappropriate’. This means that next to Rio a concrete jungle looks, well, like a concrete jungle. Canberra was a planned garden city for the Australian state administration and ended up being consistently voted the most boring city in the world.
Dubai is a city state built at speed on a desert of petro-dollars from almost nothing. The vision of a post oil economy based on tourism and finance has lost its sheen in recent years. Dubai is a mirage of a city where nothing is produced and everything, even the water, has to be imported.
Astana, we are assured by President Golden Hands, will be different. In 1997 he passed a decree officially moving Kazakhstan’s capital from Almaty to Akmola. The northern town of Akmola, also known as Tselinograd, can be translated as ‘white grave’. It was a small agricultural town with some minor industries that spent six months of the year at sub zero temperatures. The name was changed imaginatively to ‘Astana’ which literally means ‘capital’ in the Kazak language. Kazakhstans new petrodollars were ploughed into the construction of a new super-capital, in their billions.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Nazerbaev, graduate of the system and friend of those in power, had played his cards right and assumed power in his native Kazakhstan. He also found himself nominally in charge of the world’s 4th largest nuclear arsenal. He bought himself a huge chunk of positive international publicity by handing the weapons back to Russian. Project Sapphire saw the Americans cooperate to close down the sites, including Semipalatinsk. Less published was Nazerbaev’s deal with Yeltsin that the Kazaks would have sole control of their own natural resources, oil, gas and uranium principally. It was a deal worth billions.
Since then President golden-hands has pursued a policy of international relations which is often described as ‘unilateral’. In practice this appears to mean that the Kazaks play things as it suits them. International suitors for the Karshangan oil fields, a vast resource discovered in 2001, included the American, the Russians and the Chinese. The Chinese won but simply because they paid the most. What’s left after the regime have topped up their Swiss bank accounts is ploughed back into the building of Astana.
Having seen Semey and Malinovka it could be argued that some money should be redistributed more equitably but the Astana project is meant to symbolise the new Kazakhstan and be the capital of Eurasia.
Astana has an old town as such, now known as the right bank. It too has its fair share of new construction. The soviet style apartment blocks have been refaced with timber cladding and new towers of mirrored glass sit amongst them. The real change however has been the sprawling development on the left side of the river Ishim.
The Baiterek Tower is the golden centre piece, the postcard image. It’s flanked by two golden towers housing ministries and a new presidential palace lies behind it. New towers of dizzying height are known as the Northern lights and a huge bronze effort is locally called the cigarette lighter. In reality this is the Ministry of Transport. Numerous offices for banks and oil companies line the new Nurzhol Boulevard. It’s a strict geometry of fountains, marble and flower beds. When you are at the top of the tower you can see it rise out of the steppe from nothing. On the outskirts the city almost stops dead and the horizon stretches out empty into the distance. It is perhaps the oddest thing I have ever seen.
There are shiny and glitzy new bars, restaurants and cafes with terrifyingly expensive prices. The really odd thing is there is almost no one here. It feels empty. I walked the 2 kilometre stretch of new construction at about 1pm and the only other people had cameras like me. There is no metro linking the old and the new, it is like two separate worlds.
The offices of KazMangiGas (The all powerful hydrocarbons company) open the boulevard as if you need reminded where the funding comes from. It is like a Martian space. At night everything glows and sparkles with coloured lights but it’s still empty.
It is undoubtedly impressive, but it just doesn’t feel like a city. Perhaps Astana needs to grow into itself, but for now it seems like a film set with no actors.
The human desire for control the leads to the madness of trying to build from scratch. New capital cities have been built from nothing before. Each time the planners probably think, this time it will be bigger, better, more organised, more orderly than everywhere else. It is almost as if we try to capture the future and quite literally set it in concrete. Remodelling and changing the organic, leaving and breathing present seems too difficult. If only we could start all over again, we think.
Le Corbusier once produced a plan for the remodelling of Paris, it involved the demolition of almost everything north of the Seine. Too difficult a concept, better to start from scratch. Trouble is it never quite works.
Brasilia and Canberra are the capitals of Brasil and Australia respectively and often described as ‘unloved’ in comparison with Rio and Sydney. Brasilia was constructed in the 70s in only three years, laid out, bizarrely, in the shape of a plane. It has the unique honour of being the largest city to not have existed at the beginning of the 20th Century. The city has been criticised as being antiseptic, brutally modernist and ‘culturally inappropriate’. This means that next to Rio a concrete jungle looks, well, like a concrete jungle. Canberra was a planned garden city for the Australian state administration and ended up being consistently voted the most boring city in the world.
Dubai is a city state built at speed on a desert of petro-dollars from almost nothing. The vision of a post oil economy based on tourism and finance has lost its sheen in recent years. Dubai is a mirage of a city where nothing is produced and everything, even the water, has to be imported.
Astana, we are assured by President Golden Hands, will be different. In 1997 he passed a decree officially moving Kazakhstan’s capital from Almaty to Akmola. The northern town of Akmola, also known as Tselinograd, can be translated as ‘white grave’. It was a small agricultural town with some minor industries that spent six months of the year at sub zero temperatures. The name was changed imaginatively to ‘Astana’ which literally means ‘capital’ in the Kazak language. Kazakhstans new petrodollars were ploughed into the construction of a new super-capital, in their billions.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Nazerbaev, graduate of the system and friend of those in power, had played his cards right and assumed power in his native Kazakhstan. He also found himself nominally in charge of the world’s 4th largest nuclear arsenal. He bought himself a huge chunk of positive international publicity by handing the weapons back to Russian. Project Sapphire saw the Americans cooperate to close down the sites, including Semipalatinsk. Less published was Nazerbaev’s deal with Yeltsin that the Kazaks would have sole control of their own natural resources, oil, gas and uranium principally. It was a deal worth billions.
Since then President golden-hands has pursued a policy of international relations which is often described as ‘unilateral’. In practice this appears to mean that the Kazaks play things as it suits them. International suitors for the Karshangan oil fields, a vast resource discovered in 2001, included the American, the Russians and the Chinese. The Chinese won but simply because they paid the most. What’s left after the regime have topped up their Swiss bank accounts is ploughed back into the building of Astana.
Having seen Semey and Malinovka it could be argued that some money should be redistributed more equitably but the Astana project is meant to symbolise the new Kazakhstan and be the capital of Eurasia.
Astana has an old town as such, now known as the right bank. It too has its fair share of new construction. The soviet style apartment blocks have been refaced with timber cladding and new towers of mirrored glass sit amongst them. The real change however has been the sprawling development on the left side of the river Ishim.
The Baiterek Tower is the golden centre piece, the postcard image. It’s flanked by two golden towers housing ministries and a new presidential palace lies behind it. New towers of dizzying height are known as the Northern lights and a huge bronze effort is locally called the cigarette lighter. In reality this is the Ministry of Transport. Numerous offices for banks and oil companies line the new Nurzhol Boulevard. It’s a strict geometry of fountains, marble and flower beds. When you are at the top of the tower you can see it rise out of the steppe from nothing. On the outskirts the city almost stops dead and the horizon stretches out empty into the distance. It is perhaps the oddest thing I have ever seen.
There are shiny and glitzy new bars, restaurants and cafes with terrifyingly expensive prices. The really odd thing is there is almost no one here. It feels empty. I walked the 2 kilometre stretch of new construction at about 1pm and the only other people had cameras like me. There is no metro linking the old and the new, it is like two separate worlds.
The offices of KazMangiGas (The all powerful hydrocarbons company) open the boulevard as if you need reminded where the funding comes from. It is like a Martian space. At night everything glows and sparkles with coloured lights but it’s still empty.
It is undoubtedly impressive, but it just doesn’t feel like a city. Perhaps Astana needs to grow into itself, but for now it seems like a film set with no actors.