A member of the presidential guard at Azerbaijan’s presidential palace in Baku, 2017. Photo CC-by-2.0: CJCS / Flickr. Some rights reserved.
The inventiveness of Baku’s urban planners when it comes to designing fences is inexhaustible. These barriers, designed to keep guests away from the less elegant side of life in Azerbaijan’s capital city, will make an impression on even the most demanding visitor. Fences block the view on the road connecting Baku’s Heydar Aliyev airport (named after the country’s former president) to the city centre, which Heydar’s son, the current president, is feverishly trying to turn into a second Dubai. In downtown Baku, which is lavishly decorated with tonnes of expensive marble and granite, pseudo-neoclassical facades take on the role of these fences in order to hide the ugly old Soviet-era apartment blocks.
The regime is persistent in trying to hide anything that might complicate its image of Azerbaijan as a developed and prospering country — from locals, tourists and probably themselves. “If you tore down all the fences, you’d have enough metal to build two more cities,” I once heard a Baku resident remark. This sentiment reminded me that Azerbaijan’s facades are not merely built from stone, but from discourses, ideologies and institutions too. These ornamentations are also designed to conjure up the image of a modern democratic society.
