KZBlog

Two articles came out last week about Astana. Both focus on the Palace of World Peace and Unity—the new pyramid designed by Lord Foster, a well-known British architect. The pyramid was designed to host the second World Congress for Religious Tolerance, a conference of religious figures and political leaders which attempts to bring together religious leaders to solve problems and contribute to world peace—a noble enough goal. The first conference is preserved architecturally at the top of Bayterek tower where a wooden panel features a half-globe surrounded by the signatures of religious figures from almost every religious tradition you can think of—a representative of the Vatican, the World Jewish Conference, the Shinto association, various Muslim groups. This year’s conference will be remembered for the pyramid, and sadly, the pyramid gets more international press than the conference itself. Many argue that the conference is really nothing more than a press stunt, with no substantial thought behind it, just a hope that Kazakhstan and the President will be famous for making this great effort toward world peace by inviting all the religious leaders to speak in one place. To be fair, it is not a bad idea. On the other hand, after the first conference Nazarbayev allegedly invited Palestine and Israel to come to Astana; what his plan was to solve this bloody and deeply held conflict was not made clear. There was just the hope that peace would happen here and Kazakhstan would be famous!

These are the two sides of most of the massive projects in Kazakhstan: on the one hand, they are generally well intentioned, even quite noble. On the other hand, the form seems to get more attention than the content and the mechanisms are never really clear, so the whole thing comes off as more of a press stunt than anything else.

The articles on the Astana pyramid each highlight a side of the largest project of them all, Astana itself. On the one hand, one goal of Astana is an attempt to unite the nation behind a symbol that does not hinge on ethnicity or religion. Uzbekistan turns to Timurlane. Turkmenbashi turns to Turkmen culture (as he himself dictates it to be). A new nation, a new capital is something Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Southern Kazakhs, aksakals, young bureaucrats on the make—they can all get behind Astana.

On the other hand, the level of control the President holds over the new capital, the moving of the capital from Almaty to Astana and then the sudden move from the right bank to the left bank of Astana smack of indecision, of lack of planning. And more than one person has noted that by starting anew in the virgin lands of the steppes (ha, ha, ha), Nazarbayev can make the capital exactly the way he wants (and he is!), securing his place in history, his legacy. It comes off as a bit megalomaniac (although who wouldn’t do something of the same, in his shoes?)

The first article from the New York Times is more or less complimentary (and has some awesome photos!), oohing and ahhing over the new pyramid and describing the new left bank of the capital.

This provincial city with an unremarkable history and an ever shifting identity — it was originally called Akmola, then Akmolinsk, then Tselinograd, or Virgin Lands City, after Khrushchev’s plan to turn the region into fields of grain — has become one of the world’s busiest construction sites. Already more than $7 billion has been invested, with untold billions more planned.
Under a new plan, the city is projected to grow significantly by 2030 to a million inhabitants — compared with almost 600,000 now, already double what it was a decade ago — and spread over tens of thousands of acres. The central axis will eventually link the remains of a medieval settlement, Bozok, to a new university: “an Oxford or Harvard of Central Asia,” as Mr. Ashykbayev described it.
The man who is, by title at least, the city’s chief architect, Shokhan Mataibekov, described the Astana of 2030 as a symbiosis of urbanity and nature. As for the nature, the plan calls for planting 185,000 acres of trees, creating vast tracts of parks and forests in an otherwise barren landscape.

It does have a key quote, emphasizing the President’s role:

none have sprung up quite like Astana, from the ambition to create not only a national capital but also a national identity shaped almost exclusively by a single man: the country’s president since its inception, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev.

“The chief architect is really the president himself,” Yerzhan N. Ashykbayev, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at the ministry’s new building, which opened in April 2005. “Every project, every building is approved by him.”

Balancing this praise for the new capital, is the article from Reuters which emphasizes the chaotic way that Astana is being built. In an interview with Lord Foster, he says:

“It was quite challenging,” he told Reuters by telephone from Foster and Partners in London. “Typically you would be thinking six to eight years for such a cultural project.”
“If somebody says, “Hey, there’s this congress meeting point/public space/university/exhibition space and we need it in two years”, you know, that makes your pulse quicken and slightly takes your breath away,” he said.

Those of us who work for the government know that ridiculous deadlines are just par for the course, but one does wonder how much quality can be expected for this new capital and symbol of the nation, if one rushes it too much. And indeed, an architecture critic who visited the site of the esteemed Palace of Peace said:

Pearman, who visited the site during construction, described it as the scariest he had seen in terms of safety, but added that Western architects faced the choice of working with local conditions or not working at all in countries like Kazakhstan.

And may I say, that I have yet to see a single elevator for construction sites. One of the entry-level construction jobs is carrying bags of cement and concrete upstairs. Soviet buildings were all 5- or 9- stories but these new towers are big! Since a lot of the workers are from South Kazakhstan, or immigrants from Turkey and Uzbekistan, they don’t always have healthcare (which typically is tied to a specific polyclinic or hospital). While salaries aren’t bad for construction work—better than civil service on the whole—it isn’t necessarily enough to get the best treatment in the capital city, where prices are obviously higher than in Shymkent or Bukhara.

So one wonders how the government expects to create a wonder of the world without using time-tried techniques for quality preservation. Nor does the centralized planning seem like a strategy for success. Paris or Prague were maybe centrally planned centuries ago, or in certain neighborhoods, but surely the beauty and character comes from history and from chance, a conglomeration of styles and ideas. As the same critic from the Reuters article puts it:

“The city doesn’t at the moment feel like a friendly place, it feels very much like an administrative centre,” he said. “One craves a little corner cafe or something like that. But it’s early days.”