I first visited Astana back in 2008 (here and here). After a year in Almaty, I finally ventured north to look for the ‘real Kazakhstan’ in the capital. Since then I have returned several times, and finally had the chance to spend a few nights on the Left Bank proper. The Left Bank is the completely new part of the city across the river Ishym from the Soviet-era part of town (which still forms the bulk of Astana). The Left Bank is the Astana I spurned as ‘artificial’ and incomplete, calling it like a ‘movie set’. In 2008, I wanted to look past this perceived ‘inauthenticity’ and instead for what I thought was more authentic; rejecting the notion that ‘plastic grandness of the Left Bank’ could be Kazakhstan. So when I traveled to older parts of the city, I noted with approval, “the neighborhood here was distinctly Kazakh. The dust of life that’s apparent everywhere in this dry country. I even saw kvass being sold on the street.”
Why was I cynical? Urbanists, and myself in the past, prioritize architecture and ‘space’ (whatever the hell that actually means) as the determinant of a city’s character. The Left Bank’s new, alien character felt out of place and disjointed. The obvious mistake of the urbanists’ viewpoint is its privilege of space and the material over the inhabitants themselves in creating the character of a place. In my defense, in 2008 the people I looked for were not really there; and, if they were, I couldn’t spend enough time in Astana to make an evaluation on this level.
To paint a more complete picture of how Astana is developing, one must look at all kinds of ‘locality’, not just ones I, an outsider, thought more authentic. To better define local I will borrow Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s definition: local is something ‘self-creating’. Using this we must look at both who these new Astana citizens are, and what they are doing, making and saying.
