Urban ‘utopias’: The Disney stigma and discourses of ‘false modernity’

Environment and Planning A 2012, volume 44, pages 2445 – 2462

doi:10.1068/a44647

Urban ‘utopias’: the Disney stigma and discourses of

‘false modernity’

Natalie Koch

Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA; e-mail: [email protected] Received 24 November 2011; in revised form 19 March 2012

Abstract. This paper examines the political implications of the practice of framing mega

urban development projects with the language of ‘utopia’ or ‘Disney’. Through a case

study of Kazakhstan’s new capital, Astana, I argue that the stigmatizing language of

‘utopia’ is a highly political bordering practice, defi ning the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘real.’

Coupled with ethnographic data from fi eldwork in Kazakhstan between 2009 and 2011,

I perform a textual analysis of English and German language press coverage of Astana,

and demonstrate how narratives of ‘false modernity’ and ‘utopia’ have become the

dominant way of reading and writing about the city. Although often critical of the project

as a sign of the President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s ‘megalomania,’ this coverage obscures

more complex geographies of power and state–society relations in the independent state.

Symptomatic of liberal (ie, top-down, one-dimensional) understandings of power, the

hegemonic discourse simultaneously reinscribes the state’s ‘coherence’ and erases the lived

realities and agencies of ordinary citizens, while obscuring the more complicated political–economic relations that condition and give rise to ‘spectacular’ urban development projects.

Keywords: Kazakhstan, capital city, utopia, modernity, textual analysis

Introduction “To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It’s a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fi ction writer’s creation. It’s a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Except it’s not quite so magical: it’s also like a battery-operated plastic toy, all whirring noises and fl ashing colours, of a kind sold by the city’s street vendors.” Moore (2010)

This description of Kazakhstan’s new capital city was recently published in a commentary in The Guardian, and it is characteristic of how many in the West have read and written about spectacular urban development projects in the ‘East’. Davis (2006), for example, paints a similarly fantastic picture of Dubai:

“The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco and Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly” (page 51).

Orientalist language saturates the descriptions of these ‘non-Western’ places, highlighting the ‘exotic’, ‘strange’, and ‘fantastic’ character of recent urban developments found across the Middle East and Asia. This Orientalism draws on the tropes of modernity, backwardness, and underdevelopment, exemplifi ed in Marshall Berman’s diagnosis:

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“The modernism of underdevelopment is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts. In order to be true to the life from which it springs, it is forced to be shrill, uncouth and inchoate. It turns in on itself and tortures itself into extravagant attempts to take on itself the whole burden of history. It whips itself into frenzies of self-loathing, and preserves itself only through vast reserves of self-irony. But the bizarre reality from which this modernism grows, and the unbearable pressures under which it moves and lives—social and political pressures as well as spiritual ones—infuse it with a desperate incandescence that Western modernism, so much more at home in the world, can rarely hope to match” (Berman, 1989, page 232).

From Dubai to Shanghai to Tokyo to Astana, the political language of ‘utopia’—fantasy and extravagance—is in full force in much Western writing about these cities. In the hegemonic interpretive frame, ‘underdevelopment’ is seen to propel Eastern ‘others’ to pursue extravagant, overwrought, desperate attempts to achieve an impossible modernity. The discursive frame, however, allows these (urban) spectacles only to be façades, covering up a lack of modernity ‘underneath’, as if “the public display of sheer size serves less to demonstrate its superiority than to confi rm the consciousness of its inferiority” (King, 1996, page 104). Through a case study of Astana, I demonstrate how this language pervades journalistic accounts of non-Western cities, and how it has come to defi ne the discursive fi eld in which these cities are subsequently experienced, interpreted, and written about by visitors (Said, 1978).

Elites engaged in these spectacular development projects—urban or otherwise—would never label their plans as ‘abstract idealism’, as the notion of utopia generally implies. In Kazakhstan’s “2030 Strategy”, which outlines the country’s plans for development in the independence era, we see that President Nursultan Nazarbayev is no exception:

“Sure enough all this is but a vision of the future, a model thereof, an ideal objective and a dream. Obviously many of you would just give a bitter chuckle, they would think it a sheer Utopia comparing this ideal picture with the present day reality when people are short of basic things. No, it is not so. My vision is quite attainable and the world experience supports feasibility of such plans” (Nazarbayev, 1997).

Nazarbayev, who has been in power since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, here refuses the ‘utopia’ label and argues for the concrete possibility of realizing progress in Kazakhstan. As synecdoche, Astana is a privileged site for enacting his vision of modernity. For him, “The modern Astana is Kazakhstan in miniature” (Nazarbayev, 2010, page 53), and a “city-dream (gorod-mechta)” (Nazarbayev, 2006, page 358). He is careful to underscore that its materiality is evidence of the attainability of future progress:

“Astana is a city-sign, a sign of dreams, incarnated in reality. … It was a dream. Now—it is a wondrous (chudesnyi ) city, the pride and heart of Kazakhstan” (pages 349–350).

Despite the President’s effort to highlight Astana’s ‘reality’, the city is consistently read and interpreted by Western observers as a ‘Potemkin village’ or ‘utopia.’ Labels for the city have proliferated in the Western press, in which it has become: ‘Nowheresville’ (Gessen, 2011), ‘the space station in the steppes’ (Moore, 2010), ‘the Jetson’s hometown’ (Kucera, 2011b), ‘Tomorrowland’ (Lancaster, 2012), ‘Aaarghmola’ (The Economist 1997), or ‘the Disneyland of the steppe’ (Niemczyk, 2010).

How is it that this reading of Astana’s development has conformed so uniformly to this image of ‘utopian’ ‘falseness’? And what are the political implications of this script? After reviewing the literature on ‘utopia’ and representational practices, my goal in this paper is to explore how this narrative is constructed, through a close look at some readings and writings about Astana’s urban landscape. These representational practices are important because interactions with the city are not limited to actually visiting: the images and stories of the

Urban ‘utopias’: the Disney stigma and discourses of ‘false modernity’ 2447

city considered here are projected around the world and actively shape the imaginaries of Astana’s (and Kazakhstan’s) visitors and nonvisitors alike. Part of a larger ethnographic study of Astana conducted between 2009 and 2011, the data for this paper are drawn from textual analysis, participant observation, interviews, and a countrywide survey (n = 1233). Since the government of Kazakhstan had overwhelmingly directed its Astana advertisements and lobbying efforts to the ‘West’ (ie, Europe and the United States), I present a textual analysis of news reports from these places.(1) Concentrating on the coverage of two of Astana’s new buildings, designed by Norman Foster, I argue that the Western coverage systematically writes out the agency of Kazakhstanis, who are largely supportive of the nondemocratic regime. Although Kazakhstan’s elites are actively developing Astana as a symbol with two audiences in mind—domestic citizens and foreign visitors/observers—space limitations require that this paper be limited in scope to the foreign audience [and I discuss the domestic readings/writings elsewhere (Koch, 2012a; forthcoming; see also Laszczkowski, 2011a; 2011b].

The politics of utopia and the Disney stigma‘Utopia’ is a distinctly geographic concept but, with a few notable exceptions (eg, Harvey, 2000; Hetherington, 1997; Pinder, 2002; 2005), it has been broadly overlooked in academic geography. Stemming from Sir Thomas More’s novel, the term has taken on many meanings in contemporary rhetoric. A play on Greek roots for a place (topos), that is both happy (eu) and nonexistent (ou), the term is generally used to label some sort of idealistic planning project, with the connotation that it is doomed to failure. Yet many such projects were attempted in the early to mid-1900s, ranging from Le Corbusier’s Brasília to Ebenezer Howard’s ‘Garden Cities’ to Soviet master planning (Fishman, 1982). Pinder (2005, page 12) argues that there is now a widespread feeling in the West that grandiose, urban utopia projects “belong to a previous age, as remnants of hopeful but naive thought.” By locating these monumental and ‘utopian’ projects in a distant, perhaps premodern past—or sometimes an otherworldly future—the notion of ‘utopia’ often functions to defi ne the nonmodernity of their present. Thus, there is a danger “of simply countering utopianism with an equally generalising and inadequate dystopianism” (Bunnell, 2002, page 269). One of the most common tropes used to paint the picture of dystopianism is that of Disneyland, and it is not an exaggeration to argue that in the West “Disneyland and Disney World have shaped the perspective from which the real landscape is viewed” (Zukin, 1991, page 230).

The Disney stigma, which casts the city as a theme park, also has important implications for the people who live in and build these places. Like the fantastic landscapes described by Stewart (1984, page 60), they are “domesticated by fantasy rather than by lumberjacks, carpenters, architects, and cleaning ladies, those workers who have ‘really’ been its causality.” People in this theme-park imaginary are effectively depoliticized and demodernized—or perhaps not even seen as ‘real’. Jameson (2004, page 39) elaborates:

“The citizens of utopia are grasped as a statistical population; there are no individuals any longer, let alone any existential ‘lived experience’.”

Much less are the citizens of utopia seen as political agents complicit in its construction—either through their actual labor or their mere indifference. As I argue in this paper, by focusing on elite projects and political behavior and deploying the narrative of ‘utopia’, the Western media coverage is also complicit in this pattern of silence.

Gramsci (2008, pages 172–175) explores the politics of utopia in his discussion of how both reaction and conservation are equally political acts of will, aimed at enacting “what ought to be”. Why, he asks, should one person’s will be considered ‘utopian’, but not the

(1) For this same reason, I do not consider the Russian press: the public relations campaign simply does not target Russian leaders or the Russian public.

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will of another who merely wants to conserve what exists, and “prevent the creation of organisation of new forces which would disturb and transform the traditional equilibrium?” (page 174). He continues: “The attribute ‘utopian’ does not apply to political will in general, but to specifi c wills which are incapable of relating means to end, and hence are not even wills, but idle whims, dreams, longings, etc” (page 175). From this perspective, the ‘utopia’ label is a political strategy to designate what the speaker deems achievable or not. It is a bordering practice, implicated in constructing the deeply political boundary between the ‘imaginary’ (‘what ought to be’) and the ‘real’ (‘effective reality’).

This point is also found in Foucault’s work on regimes of truth (eg, Foucault, 1970; 1972).(2) For him, “Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or errors, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false” (Foucault, 2008, page 20). His notion of ‘transactional realities’ (réalités de transaction) covers the illusory interplay between the real and imagined by developing a distinction between immediate realities (ie, concrete objects) and more abstract, ‘transactional’ realities (eg, civil society, madness, sexuality) that form part of a governmental technology insofar as they are born at the interface of governors and governed (page 297). Transactional realities arise when certain sets of practices are joined with a regime of truth, making something that does not exist “nonetheless become something, something however that continues not to exist” (page 19).

Foucault’s project is not about showing these realities to be an ‘error’ or ‘illusion’, but consists of showing how particular regimes of truth condition a transactional reality and how a set of practices “marks it out in reality” (2008, page 19). He argues that “what enables us to make reality intelligible is simply showing that it was possible” (page 34). Foucault is here continuing Gramsci’s reasoning above about utopia, because showing what is possible is a decidedly political act, which is ultimately predicated on a binary between the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘real’. Recognizing that this binary is implicated in the “effectiveness of modern forms of domination” (Mitchell, 1990, page 559), scholars of developmental improvement schemes (eg, Ferguson, 1990; Foucault, 1975; Li, 2005; 2007) therefore challenge us to look less at intent and more at outcome: for “power is more or less effi cient, totalizing, or dominating not in its intentions, but in its outcomes” (Nealon, 2008, page 100, original emphasis).

We are thus advised to ask, what do these schemes do? Accordingly, in this paper, I do not examine the ‘motives’ of actors commenting on the Astana development agenda, but instead I ask, what is the effect of their discursive acts? This question is the crux of a practice-centered analytic (Veyne, 1997), and crucially subverts the role of the scholar as an expert ‘unveiler’ of people’s ‘hidden’ motives. Notably, this approach treats speech acts in the same fashion as material practices, enjoining us to interrogate “texts and people at the level of what they are saying” (Veyne, 1997, page 156, original emphasis), without even suspecting “that there could be any other level” (page 177). From this perspective, representational practices are not just ‘about’ Astana, but help to constitute the city (as object) and the ‘state’ (as author) as transactional realities.

As I demonstrate in this paper, representational practices also factor into a political economy of the built landscape (see also Koch, 2010). Astana’s copious new architectural megaprojects, like Dubai’s US $1.5 billion Burj Khalifa tower that now stands almost completely empty, exemplify the fact that certain individuals and companies will still enrich themselves through working with ‘utopian’ or ‘megalomaniac’ visions: no matter how utopian (2) While Foucault (1986) more explicitly addresses the issue of ‘utopia’ through his preliminary notion of ‘heterotopia’, I do not fi nd this concept to be of much use, following Harvey’s (2000, page 185) apt observation that “What appears at fi rst sight as so open by virtue of its multiplicity suddenly appears either as banal (an eclectic mess of heterogeneous and different spaces within which anything ‘different’— however defi ned—might go on).”


and how megalomaniac they are. These elite actors are complicit in producing a particular representational order, which works to obscure the uneven political economic relations that are the condition of its possibility. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens may understand themselves to stand ‘outside’ the Burj or the Khan Shatyry, and read them as symbols of modernity or national greatness but, in so doing, they subjectify themselves (eg, as ‘modern’ consumers in a capitalist economy or citizens of an independent state) and participate in the very same depoliticizing representational order.

And yet, ordinary Kazakhstanis do not see Astana as a utopian dreamland—especially not its residents, for whom it has become ‘their’ city. It is something they have made their own, many with great pride. For Astana’s residents, it is part of their life and their lives are ‘real’. In many ways, their behaviors are just as important (and just as political) as those performances of statecraft in which President Nazarbayev stars as the leading actor. They are not just cogs in a depoliticized simulacrum or fantasyland. Under Nazarbayev’s guiding hand, Astana’s built landscape not only refl ects new conceptions and functions of representation in the independent state, but the city’s image has also crucially constituted this new order as a reality for many people. The city does not just guide their movements and serve as some external framework. Visitors and residents alike perform the daily practices of shopping, driving, working, resting, playing, learning, dining, etc—and these practices are what constitute the city. But these practices are also part of how they are constituted as citizens, subjects of the new ostensibly coherent, and benevolent/paternal state and residents of the central node of the new territorial state. Rather than being relegated to some abstract higher realm apart from the material, these practices are precisely what constitutes the city, the state, and their subjectivity as a material and lived experience. Although this paper cannot explore these practices in great detail, given the focus on elite and Western representational practices, I draw on ethnographic data where it can help to contextualize the signifi cance and political implications of these hegemonic readings and writings of Astana.

New representational concerns in KazakhstanIn Colonising Egypt, Mitchell (1988, page 29) describes how, prior to being subjected to the Orientalist and European colonial gaze, the Middle East had not been organized ‘representationally’, that is, it was not seen as something to be divided up and contained through fi xed divisions of inside and outside (page 44). The urban landscape in Kazakhstan has long been organized representationally in the manner that Mitchell suggests (Alexander and Buchli, 2007; Crews, 2003; Stronski, 2010) but, upon gaining independence in 1991, the tactics of representationally organizing space were transformed dramatically. Now engaged with the capitalist economy, they have been carefully crafted for performing a new, market-oriented identity for a global community. The Nazarbayev regime has relentlessly pursued a strategy of putting Kazakhstan ‘on the map’, through a variety of schemes, amounting to what is referred to as the state’s ‘imidzh proyekt’ (‘image project’). In this effort, the regime has established a particular economy of representation, designed to ‘brand’ Kazakhstan as a ‘reformed’, ‘modern’, and ‘engaged’ new country, ideal for investment.

This tactic of ‘place branding’ (Govers and Go, 2009) frequently privileges cities and, as elsewhere around the world, Nazarbayev’s favored site for this performance is the new capital city, Astana. Operating on the basis of a ‘synecdochic imaginary’, in which the part (the city) is supposed to stand for the whole (the country), this urban strategy to brand a place and to invite speculative capital is especially visible in the recent swelling of mega-urban development projects throughout Asia. Sometimes framed in the language of ‘world cities’ (and sometimes not, as in the case of Astana), the phenomenon is strongly tied to global changes in the nature of the capitalist economy and knowledge production, amply explored in the urban studies literature on ‘urban interreferencing’ and policy transfers

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(eg, Bagaeen, 2007; Barthel, 2010; Bunnell and Das, 2010; McCann, 2010; McCann and Ward, 2011; Robinson, 2002; 2011; Roy and Ong, 2011; Sklair, 2005).

Although already a concern, this goal of putting Kazakhstan ‘on the map’ intensifi ed when British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen happened to select Kazakhstan as the ‘obscure’ homeland of his fi ctional television character, Borat. Eventually making a highly successful fi lm based on the character, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefi t Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), Cohen portrayed the country as a backward and intolerant place, which set Kazakhstan’s government into a frenzy (Saunders, 2007; 2008; Schatz, 2008). Since the ‘Borat scandal’, the government has poured millions of dollars into a ‘multivector’ public relations (PR) campaign, justifi ed on the basis of rectifying the shame the Borat episode brought to the country’s citizens. Some speculate that the PR campaign is just an element of Nazarbayev’s self-aggrandizement and pursuit of international accolades, while others see it as a mere continuation of the ‘great power’ mentality inherited from Soviet times. Scholars have also suggested that the state’s “multilateralism in the extreme” (Schatz, 2006, page 271) is part of the state-building and nation-building process, absent any other viable sources of legitimacy (eg, economic performance, a majority ethnic community) in the early years of independence. Whatever the reasons, the regime’s imidzh proyekt has lent credibility to its capital city development scheme, with Astana featuring centrally in efforts to improve Kazakhstan’s international image. Based on the results of a countrywide survey I administered in Fall 2010, Kazakhstan’s citizens seem to think it is working (see fi gures 1 and 2).(3)

While the international imidzh proyekt is undeniably a nation-building project to be “broadcast inward to domestic audiences” (Schatz, 2006, page 270), so too is it intended to be ‘read’ by foreign observers, and thus to factor into global politics. However, the dominant themes in Western readings of the country do not readily conform with the regime’s message of being a ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ country, made possible by President Nazarbayev’s ‘enlightened’ leadership. Tending to focus on the Astana development project, commentators have instead consistently read and represented the city as a ‘utopian fantasy’, symptomatic of Nazarbayev’s megalomania and of pretensions to a ‘false’ modernity.

(3) The survey I developed for the larger study was administered by a professional fi rm, CESSI-Kazakhstan, from September to October 2010. CESSI interviewers conducted doorstep interviews with individuals over the age of 18 years in all 16 of Kazakhstan’s regions, to achieve a countrywide representative sample of 1233.

No14%(176)

Don’t know5%(61)

Yes81%(996)

Figure 1. Has Astana and Kazakhstan’s international image improved (n = 1233).


Stigmatizing the city: reading and representing AstanaThis section presents the results of my textual analysis of Western media coverage of Astana, which includes reports from the German-language and English-language (US and British) press. In addition to the main issue of language accessibility, there are two specifi c reasons for including German-language coverage. First, Kazakhstan was once home to a substantial minority of people with German heritage. Through generous immigration policies in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s disintegration (Diener, 2006), the German government invited these people to immigrate and they did so on a massive scale.(4) The spatially diffuse presence of this minority in Germany has not only heightened popular awareness of Kazakhstan, but it has also been instrumental in building and sustaining a network of personal and economic relationships across the two places. Kazakhstan does not have this sort of a relationship with any other Western state on such a broad and personal scale, which is why we might expect the media coverage there to be somewhat exceptional. Second, the German-language press is generally less sensational as compared with, for example, the US media. Since the idea of ‘utopia’ could easily slot into sensationalist reporting, it is important to consider media sources that are not generally known for this style.

I reviewed approximately forty articles, dating back to 1997 when Astana became the capital.(5) Table 1 illustrates the main themes found in the survey. Overall, the German-language articles were characterized by less orientalizing language, and tended to give a fuller image of the city beyond the Kazakhstan offi cials’ equation of Astana with its new administrative center, the ‘Left Bank’. They also tended to concentrate more on the city as a symbol of Nazarbayev’s megalomania than did the English-language press—though this was also an important theme there. The German articles highlighted the major social and spatial divisions that characterize Astana, namely among the Right–Left bank and wealthy newcomers–poorer locals—whereas these divides were scarcely mentioned in the English-language press. For the most part, however, the overall gist of the reports was quite similar in both languages.

(4) Nearly a million ethnic Germans resided in Kazakhstan according to the 1989 Census, but this number dropped to about 178 000 according to the 2009 Census (ASRK, 2010), with most relocating to Germany.(5) Regarding the specifi c sources, in the German press, I focus on the news magazine Der Spiegel and its online news site, Spiegel Online. I also reviewed articles from various local papers, such as the Kölner–Stadtanzeiger, which tend to run stories from larger, countrywide, press agencies. In the English-language press, I focused on The New York Times. The Economist, the BBC’s online news site, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and various other magazines, such as The New Yorker.

Figure 2. Justifi cations of those who answered “yes” to the question, “Has Astana improved Kazakhstan’s international image?”: “What specifi cally has improved the international image?” (n = 935).

Spectacles

Transport center

Education

International conferences

Urban landscape

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700

Rank 1

Rank 2

Rank 3

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Since table 1 cannot adequately convey how these themes come out in the coverage, the remainder of this section illustrates them through an in-depth focus on the two Foster & Partners buildings in Astana, the Palace of Peace and Accord (fi gure 3; hereafter the ‘Pyramid’ for brevity and as it is popularly known in Astana) and the Khan Shatyry (fi gure 4). This description is supplemented with data from my own research and interviews in Astana, so as to contextualize the picture presented by the press. I have selected these two structures because they have received the most attention in the Western press, primarily due to Norman Foster’s involvement. Furthermore, as Astana Master Plan director Amanzhol Chikanayev explained to me in July 2011, involving prestigious foreign architects in these projects was a conscious strategy to attract international attention. The Pyramid was completed in 2006 at the cost of US $58 million—a sum dwarfed by the US $400 million price tag (perhaps higher) of the Khan Shatyry, opened in summer 2010. These two buildings are supposed to serve as the end points of an East–West axis framing the new administrative center on the Left Bank: the Khan Shatyry, meaning the ‘Khan’s tent’, is the Western node, and the Pyramid is the Eastern node.

The Palace of Peace and Accord (Pyramid)The Pyramid is generally introduced in the press coverage as a ‘religiously neutral’ (Coish, 2008) symbolic structure, intended to host the triennial Congress of World Religious Leaders (for more, see Koch, 2010). Most authors note that it was specially commissioned by President Nazarbayev and that the pyramid shape was his idea (eg, Gessen, 2011; Moore, 2010; Steen, 2008), although Pearman (2005) suggests that the shape was chosen by Norman Foster. However, in my 2011 interview with Astana master planner Chikanayev he revealed that the idea of the pyramid actually came from a Kazakh architect, who submitted it to the fi rst design competition in 2002. The elite decision makers liked the idea, but they did not want a Kazakh to win the competition because they did not feel that a local would bring

Table 1. Main themes found in the Western media coverage of Astana.

Theme Count in Englishpress (n = 21)

Count in German press (n = 10)

Describing Astana’s inhospitable environment, bad weather, barrenness of the steppe

16 4

Characterizing the city as strange, utopian, fantastic, and futuristic

13 5

Naming the architects involved in construction and planning

12 4

Connecting the city to Nazarbayev’s megalomania 12 6Connecting the city’s development with Kazakhstan’s oil wealth

10 4

Characterizing the city as somehow false, just a façade, a Potemkin village

9 2

Noting the unpopularity of the decision to move the capital

7 2

Naming historical precedence of grand capital city projects

7 2

Contrasting Astana with Almaty 7 2Noting the rushed speed of the city’s development 5 1Mentioning criticism of the project 4 2Mentioning the Borat scandal, or just the fi lm itself 4 3Describing the social and spatial divisions in the city 0 4


the international prestige and attention that they desired from the project. The pyramid idea was retained, and the competition was held several more times, with the aim of attracting a world-famous designer. Only after a fourth competition did Norman Foster enter and assume the pyramid project, which he redesigned from the original Kazakh architect’s entry. This story, recounted by Chikanayev, is not common knowledge, but it is nonetheless telling that the news stories showed almost no deviation from the offi cial narratives that construct Nazarbayev and Foster as the central players: the reports are subtly complicit in confi rming the authority and coherence of both ‘individuals’ (whose work and public personas are in truth the product of an extensive team effort).

While nearly all the articles mention Norman Foster or Foster & Partners, none detail the role of other companies involved in the construction (although this is typical of writing about architectural projects, with the convention being to attribute one lead architect with essentially all the credit for the project; see McNeill, 2005; 2009). Pearman (2005) briefl y mentions the involvement of the Turkish companies Sembol Construction and Tabanlıoğ lu Architecture and Consulting, but does not explain their role. As it turns out, Foster & Partners was the lead designer, but sent ‘information packages’ for Tabanlıoğ lu to implement, while Sembol had a ‘design and build’ contract, which gave them wide liberty in the construction details and fi nishes—a liberty that was apparently taken because they made many changes that were considerably different from the intent of Foster & Partners and Tabanlıoğ lu. Many of these changes were probably the result of the hurried pace of construction due to a deadline imposed by Nazarbayev: at the fi rst Congress of World Religious Leaders in 2003

Figure 3. The Palace of Peace and Accord (the ‘Pyramid’), cultural events venue, originally the World Religions Conference Centre (28 791 m2, 62 m high). Completed in 2006 by Foster & Partners, Tabanlıoğ lu Architecture, Buro Happold (Mike Cook), Anne Minors Consulting (acoustics), Sembol Construction. Cost: US $58 million, funded by the Republic of Kazakhstan (image source: author).

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he promised to have a new palace ready for the second congress in 2006. The frenzied pace was often mentioned in the press, for example: “It was, like much else here, built in a rush” (Myers, 2006). Gessen (2011) points out how Nazarbayev even ‘sent the Army’ to speed the construction, and Pearman (2005) and Steen (2008) both quote Foster on his shock about the proposed timeline:

“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” (quoted in Steen, 2008).

The media coverage suggests that there was a highly unusual power dynamic at work in the relationship between the client (Nazarbayev) and the architect (Foster)—and that indeed the entire undertaking was strange:

“But nothing [Foster] has done to date compares with this latest job. Because nobody asks for buildings like this. Unless you happen to be President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan” (Pearman, 2005).

Moore (2010) similarly suggests that when Nazarbayev asked for the pyramid-shaped palace, it “may be the fi rst and only time a client has told the mighty Foster what a building should look like, and been obeyed.”

We can already discern a trend that runs through much of the media coverage: that the Pyramid, and indeed the entire Astana project, is a one-man show. Steen (2008), for example, titles his article “Kazakh President’s ‘backyard’ pyramid”, and quotes Hugh Pearman, editor of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ monthly RIBA Journal, as saying “It’s an unbelievable

Figure 4. The Khan Shatyry, shopping and entertainment complex (100 000 m2, 150 m high). Completed in July 2010 by Foster & Partners, Buro Happold (Mike Cook), Vector Foiltec (climate shell), Sembol Construction. Cost: US $400 million, funded by the Khan Shatyry Consortium (image source: author).


folly, in the sense that it’s a grand monument by one man to himself.” In the Western press Nazarbayev is overwhelmingly portrayed as a megalomania, who is “only faintly acquainted with the rigours of the democratic process” (MacInnes, 2008). Others have described the Pyramid more as part of a broader effort to ‘ornament’ (‘schmücken’) the new capital (eg, Hoelzgen, 2006; Moore, 2010), and as just another sign of Astana’s ‘unnatural’ or ‘inorganic’ development on the steppe (Gessen, 2011; Myers, 2006; Niemczyk, 2010; Steen, 2008):

“ It is not subtle, but little is here in Astana, a new capital rising self-consciously out of the treeless steppe of Central Asia” (Myers, 2006).

Similarly, Steen (2008) writes of how the Pyramid “juts out into the barren plain behind President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s palace”, and asks, “Sounds odd? Astana, a Brasilia of the steppe, is like that.”

Nazarbayev’s goal of making a statement about Kazakhstan’s interethnic and interfaith harmony through this architectural project is consistently read and written about as symbolic of his megalomania, Kazakhstan’s lack of modernity and democracy, and the strangeness of the entire Astana project. So, while the Western press tends to frame the Pyramid as symbolic, it is not exactly the symbolism that Kazakhstan’s elites had in mind. Instead, Astana becomes a utopia, which the press systematically unveils as false. This practice of ‘unmasking’ hovers over the issue of eccentricity and abnormality, but rarely goes much further into how this politics factors into people’s lived realities. One exception is found in a BBC article:

“But beyond the walls of the spectacular pyramid, there are concerns that the Kazakh government, although more tolerant than others in Central Asia, has recently itself moved to restrict religious freedoms. Muslim groups that are outside state control and non-traditional groups like Hare Khrisna have complained about offi cial harassment. This is one of the reasons why critics have questioned whether the Congress was as much aimed at serving President Nazarbayev’s goal of promoting his country, as it was designed to promote world peace” (Antelava, 2006b).Nazarbayev’s harmony rhetoric, as Antelava points out, directly obscures offi cial

restrictions placed on religious freedom (most recently in September 2011—see Najibullah, 2011) and an overwhelming lack of tolerance for religious diversity by the general population and elites alike. Proselytizing is strictly forbidden and Christian missionaries, for example, tend to resort to unconventional means of reaching out to people (eg, a Protestant woman in Astana owns a café/bookstore, where religious conversations can be overheard and religious books found on the shelves, but all of which is carefully controlled so as to limit grounds for offi cial harassment). There is also signifi cant intolerance for overt displays of Muslim religiosity. The following experience I had in summer 2011, for example, is typical: when traveling to Astana from a nearby town, I was seated next to a Kazakh woman reading the newspaper. When she arrived at an article about religion in Kazakhstan, she pointed to the accompanying picture of a veiled Muslim woman and proceeded to tell me how awful it was that there were ‘such’ people in Kazakhstan—implying conservative Muslims who dress to refl ect their beliefs, as opposed to most Kazakhs, who consider themselves Muslim but do not wear ‘Muslim attire’. This was not an isolated occurrence: women who veil in Kazakhstan are deeply stigmatized and openly degraded, primarily by other women, who see veiling as a ‘foreign’ and ‘extremist’ practice.

While I am not interested in a project of ‘unmasking’ some ‘more real’ social existence, these ethnographic data push us to ask questions about the effect of offi cial discourses of religious tolerance in spite of practices of intolerance. In this case, although the blind spots and silences factor into a complex set of domestic politics, I am more concerned in this paper with how this rhetoric is reproduced in the foreign press. Judging by the failure of the Western media to scrutinize the issue of religious intolerance—instead concentrating

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on the eccentricity of the Pyramid project—the Nazarbayev regime’s representational practices seem to be effective in limiting political discussion about this issue. But the coverage also refl ects certain biases within the Western press with respect to the ‘East’—a certain fi xation with nondemocratic regimes and dictators. While the issue of illiberal politics is an important issue, the overall effect is to inscribe an orientalizing vision of Astana as ‘false’ and ‘strange’, while still excluding from sight the realities of the ordinary people—whether it is their fear of persecution, individual intolerance, or, more commonly, their mere political indifference.

This apathy is pervasive among Kazakhstanis and, as one informant told me, “We [Kazakhs] are all pofi gisty.” (This is a play on Russian euphemistic curse word, fi ga. The sentence is probably best translated to English as ‘No one gives a shit’). But this indifference, which generally translates into silence, is itself a political subjectivity, which is precisely what constitutes, sustains, and reproduces the entire system as a fi eld of power relations. State-based actors, consciously or not (the point being moot), draw on these quotidian performances of indifference and silence to support their positions in the hierarchy of power relations (Koch, 2012b). But by ignoring these quotidian realities, and dwelling on the odd and megalomaniac character of the entire Astana project (which the Pyramid is presented as symbolizing), the ‘utopia’ script followed in the press coverage “never tempts us for one minute to try to imagine ourselves in their place, to project the utopian individual with concrete existential density, even though we already know the details of his or her daily life” (Jameson, 2004, page 39).

The Khan ShatyryThe utopian or theme-park theme is unavoidable in the second case I consider, however. The Khan Shatyry entertainment complex is primarily a large shopping mall, but it has several theme-park elements, such as a roller coaster and a handful of other adrenaline-inducing amusements. In simply describing the complex, the Western press necessarily comments on these attractions, as well as the indoor beach with sand and tropical plants imported from the Maldives. Foster & Partners was also commissioned for the project, reportedly because Nazarbayev was so pleased with the Pyramid (Antelava, 2006a; Coish, 2008; Der Spiegel 2007; Gessen, 2011; Myers, 2006). Inscribing a rather colonial vision of Astana, the authors describe the city as a ‘testing ground,’ with both the Pyramid and the Khan Shatyry giving Foster a chance to experiment (Steen, 2008) and opportunistically get a share of “Astana’s oil-money fuelled architectural extravaganza” (Antelava, 2006a). The structure itself is supposed to look like a traditional Kazakh tent, “bent as though blown by the harsh winds that are notorious here” (Myers, 2006). It is enveloped in a special ethylene tetrafl uoroethylene polymer (ETFE), which gives the effect of translucence (from the outside this is really only noticeable at night, but during the day it lets in sunlight). Follath and Neef (2010, page 130) describe it as an embodiment of the superlative, which is actually its intent: to be the world’s largest ‘tent’.

A common theme in coverage about the Astana project in general, the ‘extreme’ is underscored with reference to Astana’s steppe location. Indeed, this notion of the ‘extreme’ was part of the original conception of the Khan Shatyry: it was to be an ‘oasis’ for the residents of Astana, who could go there during the during the harsh winter months and enjoy a ‘summery indoor climate’ (Antelava, 2006a; Coish, 2008; Follath and Neef, 2010, page 130; Hoelzgen, 2006; Moore, 2010). As with nearly every article written on Astana, the descriptions of the Khan Shatyry consistently cite the weather extremes (ranging from −40 Celsius to 40 Celsius). Like elsewhere, this harsh climate is regularly used to explain the early resistance of elites to the capital change (see table 1). Follath and Neef (2010, page 130) even suggest that the Khan Shatyry has been understood as a way to silence the last of these critics. I again heard this narrative about needing to appease critics in my July 2011 interview with Astana master planner Chikanayev, who used it to rationalize a new megaproject which is also supposed to carry Norman Foster’s name: the Indoor City (see fi gure 5).


As with the Pyramid, the press coverage consistently underscores the outlandishness and profl igacy of the Khan Shatyry, often mentioning its astounding price tag. However, none of the articles mentions the source of the funding. Although the identity of the investors has remained private as far as journalists are concerned, it was easy to discover that the project was funded by the ‘Khan Shatyry Consortium’. And although it is not clear precisely who was involved in the project, the participation of certain companies (specifi cally, Sembol Construction) suggests that the project is tied to the regime’s widespread money-laundering schemes in Astana (LeVine, 2007, page 322; Schatz, 2004, page 126). So, instead of even hinting at this highly political question, the media reports deploy the script of utopia, which “emerges at the moment of the suspension of the political” (Jameson, 2004, page 43). Gessen (2011), for example, claims that the ETFE coating makes the tent look, at certain times of the day, “like a terrible sea creature risen from the steppe”, while Hoelzgen (2006) caricatures it as an upside-down Swiss Alpine horn.

The Khan Shatyry has also been read and written about as a symbol of Nazarbayev’s mega-lomania (Größenwahn) (eg, Follath and Neef, 2010, page 130; Gessen, 2011; Niemczyk, 2010), but perhaps slightly less so than the Pyramid. Nonetheless, it is portrayed as his brainchild and part of his vision for a monumental East–West axis defi ning the city’s new administrative center (eg, Follath and Zand, 2009, page 106; Myers, 2006; Niemczyk, 2010). Other supporting evidence for the President’s megalomania is drawn from the fact that the building was opened on 5 July, during the 2010 Astana Day celebrations. For the capital’s tenth anniversary in July 2008, the government established ‘Astana Day’ as a national holiday, which coincides with Nazarbayev’s birthday on 6 July. The Western press has consistently read the grandiose spectacles held during the holiday not as celebrations of the capital city’s ‘birthday’ (as in the offi cial version), but as a birthday party for Nazarbayev himself (eg, BBC, 2011; Follath and Neef, 2010, page 130; Orange, 2011; Saidazimova, 2008; The Economist 2008; The New York Times 2008; 2011).

Figure 5. Model of the Indoor City, a project currently in the design phase, as presented at the Astana Master Plan in July 2011 (image source: author).

2458 N Koch

Regarding the opening of the Khan Shatyry, Follath and Neef (2010, page 130) exclaimed: “What a birthday present!” Despite not being quite fi nished, the complex was opened for Nazarbayev’s 70th birthday, which is considered an important life milestone among Kazakhs. The opening ceremony was a true spectacle: Andrea Bocelli, a famous operatic singer, gave a concert, and guests included President Medvedev of Russia, President Yanukovych of Ukraine, President Gü l of Turkey, President Lukashenko of Belarus, President Sargsyan of Armenia, President Rahmon of Tajikistan, President Otunbayeva of Kyrgyzstan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and the King Abdullah II of Jordan (Kucera, 2011a; Orange, 2010). That they were not in town for this event but, rather, for a Eurasian Economic Community summit meeting, did not diminish the prestige the stately guests added to the opening. However, read as it was, as a birthday party for Nazarbayev, the megalomaniac trope was easily deployed. Gessen also fi ts this into a broader picture of politics in the region, and Nazarbayev’s self-attributed image of being an international-unity builder:

“The Presidents of many countries, including countries that hate one another, came to the opening ceremony, last July 5th. It was a fi tting present for Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who turned seventy the next day, and who had constructed this entire city, ex nihilo, in the middle of the Kazakh steppe” (2011, page 97).

The inaccuracy of the ‘ex nihilo’ image aside, the overall effect of this sort of coverage is one that emphasizes the ruling regime’s hegemony and removes ordinary Kazakhstanis from sight. In this removal, we are left with a fantastic landscape, depopulated and depoliticized. Or, if populated and politicized, then characterized by a one-dimensional power of the external state bearing down on unassuming and victimized citizens. Both versions erase their active participation in (or silent observation of) the Khan Shatyry’s construction, the pleasure they have found inside (or from which they have been excluded through exorbitant prices), and their uniform admiration for the look of the structure (Koch, 2012a)—in short, all the practices surrounding the structure, which constitute them as subjects. Their gratitude (or mere silence) to the Nazarbayev regime for bringing the project to fruition is part of what inscribes the authority of the ‘state’ and naturalizes power relations. But all these practices, these emotions, these lived realities of Astana residents, are systematically written out of the media coverage on the Khan Shatyry (as with the coverage on the Astana project in general), which tends to focus on its megalomaniac and fantastic sources of inspiration.

ConclusionThis paper began with the argument that the act of labeling something ‘utopian’ is a political bordering practice which refl ects more on the speaker’s vision of the possible and the impossible, the real and the false. ‘Modernity’, like utopia, often functions as a political pronouncement dividing the ‘real’ from the ‘false’. Yet, locating modernity is ultimately about performing a certain contemporary desire, regardless of whether others deem it ‘utopian’ or not. The practices constituting this performance can never belong to some abstract, ‘other’ realm of ‘representations’—for there is no such realm (Mitchell, 1988). There cannot be some ‘real’ modernity ‘underneath’ the representations. Nonetheless, the actors and authors I have considered here are all engaged as subjects of a certain ‘representational economy’, which depends on the idea that the urban form’s ‘exterior’ actually refl ects some ‘interior’ social reality. Following Mitchell (1988), I argue that this ‘exterior’ (for example, of the Khan Shatyry) is not just an abstraction, but a materiality factoring into concrete political, economic, and quotidian practices. Nazarbayev may describe it as a symbol, the Western media may read and write it as a different symbol, and citizens may see it as yet another symbol. But the fact is that, despite all this, real people labored to build it, hundreds of


millions of dollars changed hands, and, since it opened, thousands of people have visited it to acquire goods and experiences alike.

Yet the discourses I have explored in this paper systematically write out these materialities when they employ the stigmatizing language of ‘utopia’, ‘fantasy’, and ‘Disney’. Perhaps more (or differently) worrisome than the prevalence of these Orientalizing scripts in the popular media is the fact that they often creep into academic writings. As we saw in the introduction, Davis (2006) and Berman (1989) are especially culpable, but these narratives also pervade much recent urban studies work on mega-urban development projects. In their fascinating study of artifi cial islands, for example, Jackson and della Dora (2009) begin to address important questions about the political economic interests that condition these spectacular projects, noting how “The artifi ciality of the artifi cial island works to hide the technical preconditions of the island experience to promote the dream space as space” (page 2100). But, throughout, the authors lapse into the very same Orientalizing language of fantasy, in which the islands “territorialise, in new ways, commodity fantasies and reinforce hegemonies by literally enscribing the earth fantastique” (page 2099) and “offer a hypermodern, technically hybrid space as an avatar for contemporary Edenic longing” (page 2100). This is not to say that all scholars are guilty of this, and there are indeed some excellent and embodied accounts of these urban development projects, such as Mohammed and Sidaway’s (2012) work on South Asian migrant workers in Abu Dhabi, as well as numerous careful studies of the political economic relations that give rise to the ‘spectacular’ (eg, Acuto, 2010 on Dubai; Mitchell, 2007 on Cairo; Simpson, 2008 on Macao). While an important lesson to be drawn from my analysis of Western press coverage of Astana is that the language of utopia is not neutral, so too should we be aware of how this language is employed in our own scholarship of these complex new urban developments around the world.

Acknowledgements. I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback, though all remaining faults are my own. This material is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 1003836. This research was also supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a NSF Nordic Research Opportunity grant, an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunity Grant, and a US State Department Title VIII Grant for work at the University of Illinois Summer Research Laboratory on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Any opinions, fi ndings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily refl ect the views of the National Science Foundation, or any other granting organization.

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