BUILT OUT OF A GRASSY PLAIN IN JUST 20 YEARS, THE NEW
CENTRE OF THIS KAZAKHSTANI CITY IS A PECULIAR TRIBUTE
TO A DICTATOR’S WILLPOWER AND A LONG OIL BOOM.WORDS • DAVID WALKERA CITY BUILT ON OIL
Though parts of Astana have been privately
developed, the Kazakhstan Government has poured
an estimated US$10–30 billion into the city, paying
for everything from architects’ fees to civil servants’
apartment subsidies. As any software city-builder
knows, that requires extensive resources. The money
mostly flows from the country’s exports of oil,
especially since 2004 when the oil price began
a decade-long boom.
The boom has now ended, and some critics would
prefer this still-poor nation had invested the money
elsewhere. The average Kazakhstani earns about
one-seventh of the income of the average Australian.NURSULTAN
THE SURVIVORNazarbayev came to power under communist
rule and went right on running the place when
the Soviet Union crumbled. His 97.7 per cent vote at
the last election speaks of Kazakhstan’s, um,
embryonic democracy. He declared 6 July ‘Astana
Day’ and a national holiday; it’s also his birthday.
The presidential palace is the focus of the city centre.
Yet, he has neatly managed the pressures of the
greater powers around Kazakhstan, created
a peacefully multi-ethnic and multi-religious state,
and maintained an apparently genuine popularity.WHY A NEW CAPITAL?
Astana ranks with Washington, St Petersburg, Canberra,
Ankara and Brasilia as national capitals where empty fields
became city centres. Though sources disagree, Nazarbayev’s
decision to move the capital from the southern border city of
Almaty seems to have been in part a bid to keep the heavily
Russian northern territories away from a Crimea-style
secession. If so, the bid succeeded. It also let Nazarbayev
burnish his image as father of this huge country.A
stana may just be the world’s strangest city. Like the
metropolises created in a game of SimCity, it is made
out of buildings that rise suddenly out of flat grasslands.
And the population has appeared seemingly out of nowhere to
fill those buildings.
Astana began in 1830 as the town of Akmoly, and became
first Akmolinsk, then Tselinograd, then Akmola. At one time, it was
best known as the nearest town to a notorious Soviet women’s
gulag. Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s leader since its 1991
independence from the old Soviet Union, designated it in 1994
as Kazakhstan’s national capital and conferred its present name in- ‘Astana’ translates rather prosaically as ‘the capital’.
City in focus | INVEST