Capital Cities, Politics, and Urban Life in Central Asia, 1955–2017

The 20th century was a period of rapid urbanization and city growth throughout the world. Central Asia was not an exception: between 1897 and the early 21st century, the urban population in the region grew by more than 20 times. The majority of citizens in the two largest Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, lived in cities by 2018. For this reason, the ways in which cities are constructed and transformed, along with matters pertaining to urban life and the conditions that enabled the migration to cities, are important, if not central, issues to take into account when studying Central Asian societies.¹ The four books discussed in this review contribute to this field by considering urban architecture and design as well as the life of the inhabitants of the biggest and most populated cities in (post-)Soviet Central Asia since the 1950s: Tashkent, Almaty, and Astana.

Of the three cities, Tashkent is the oldest. In the distant past, it belonged to various ancient and medieval states on the territory of what is currently Uzbekistan. After the Russian conquest, Tashkent was the governor-general's seat and, from 1930 to 1991, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. The earthquake in 1966 became a dramatic point in Tashkent's history as it destroyed the old city center and left more than 200,000 people homeless. The reconstruction of 1966–70 became an all-Union effort that transformed Tashkent into an exemplary modernist city.

Almaty (Vernyi, Alma-Ata since 1921) and Astana (Akmolinsk, Tselinograd since 1961, Nur-Sultan since 2019) were founded as fortresses by the Russian military in the mid-19th century. Almaty became the capital city of Kazakhstan in 1927. Astana underwent a major transformation when it was made the administrative center of Kazakhstan's Virgin Lands Campaign (Tselina) in the late 1950s. A major difference between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan consisted in the fact that while Tashkent remained Uzbekistan's capital after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan chose to relocate its seat of government from Almaty to Astana in the late 1990s. The post-Soviet "capital" development in the two countries thus took different paths. In Uzbekistan, the territory of the "old" capital city became the substratum on which a new material and symbolic layer would be laid. In Kazakhstan, the very fact of relocation created opportunities for developing new languages of representation in Astana, without a radical transformation of the existing urban landscape in Almaty.

Although the four books discussed in this review approach Almaty, Tashkent, and Astana from different perspectives, they share a way of looking at urban issues in each city. First, they approach the construction of Tashkent, Almaty, and Astana and the way states in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are governed as an interrelated process. Second, they are attentive to the experience urbanites have had and use these experiences as a point of departure when examining the projects of architects and politicians. Third, they scrutinize the cases of Astana, Almaty, and Tashkent through the prism of theories and frameworks that go beyond Central Asia and by doing so put the three cities on the global scholarly map.

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Philipp Meuser has authored several books on modernist architecture.² His regional interests are very broad, ranging from postwar Germany to Astana to Pyongyang. Among these various contributions, the book on Tashkent stands out thanks to its quality and detail. As the title of the...