Almaty outdoor. Photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0: Marco Fieber. Some rights reserved.
There are certain cliches about the architecture and urbanism of Central Asia. Of course, there are the historic cities of the Silk Road, mostly in Uzbekistan – the minarets and domes of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, long explored by Travellers to the Orient. But when it comes to anything later, the image is of an empty desert or steppe where despotic rulers have imposed a turbo-capitalist dystopia, best suited for Instagram accounts and photo-heavy travelogues. Here, the emblematic cities are Ashgabat and Astana, one transformed and one entirely new capital defined by grandiose axes around surreal, oversized monuments, frequently to the “Oriental Despots”. The World Expo in Astana last year conformed to type – one journalist was banned for referring to the central sphere where the event was held as a “Death Star”.
