Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

List of Maps, Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction: Pathways into the ‘City of the Future’

• Astana, Kazakhstan and the Global Lives of Modernist Urbanism
• Anthropology’s Space
• Space and Time
• Theorizing the City Anthropologically
• Fieldwork in the ‘City of the Future’

Chapter 1. Materializing the Future: Images and Practices

• Deconstruction, Reconstruction
• The Cityscape of the Future
• Becoming ‘Contemporary’
• The Roots of Disenchantment, and Its Limits

Chapter 2. Performing Urbanity: Migrants, the City and Collective Identification

• Identities beyond Representation
• Urbanity and Rurality in Kazakhstan
• Migration to Astana
• Migrants’ Stories
  • Kumano: A Pioneer Settles Down
  • Kirill and Gisele: Love on the Move
  • Bakytgul: Caught Up in Deferrals
  • Aynura: The Girl Who Played the Accordion
  • Madiyar: The Struggling Southerner
• Embodying Identity

Chapter 3. Tselinograd: The Past in the ‘City of the Future’

• Building Tselinograd
• Nostalgia and Spatial Intimacy
• Walking in Tselinograd
• Tselinograd’s Glory

Chapter 4. Celebration and the City: Belonging in Public Space

• What Is Public Space?
• The Setting: City Squares
• Public Holiday Celebrations
  • ...in Late-Soviet Tselinograd
  • ...in Astana
• Whose Celebration, Whose City?
• Public Space Reopened

Chapter 5. Fixing the Courtyard: Mundane Place-Making

• Shifting Frameworks
• Material Place-Making in the Dvor
• Digression: Things Make a Difference
• The KSK Takeover

Chapter 6. Playing with the City: ‘Encounter’ in Astana

• What is ‘Encounter’?
• Game Types
• ‘Encounter’ as Play
• Play or Politics: Carnival, Stiob and ‘Encounter’
• ‘Encounter’s Creativity'
• Creasing Space

Conclusion

References
Index