Stories: Astana
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In the End Is the Beginning: Kazakhstan After Nazarbayev
Kazakhstan has everything going for it: enormous natural resources from oil and gas to gold, uranium and rare earth metals; a young, multi-lingual population; and thousands of young foreign trained graduates, who return home every year under President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Bolashak scholarship program. But behind Nazarbayev’s strong leadership are weak institutions, a puppet parliament, fettered...
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Astana: A City Built for Giants
Astana simply means “capital.” In 1997, the recently-independent country of Kazakhstan moved its government here. Flush with new oil wealth, Kazakhstan has built an EPCOT city of sorts on the empty Central Asian steppe. With a jumble of international styles and knock-offs of historic buildings, the city embodies the aspirations of a post-Soviet people searching for a new...
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Astana: A City Built for Giants
Astana simply means “capital.” In 1997, the recently-independent country of Kazakhstan moved its government here. Flush with new oil wealth, Kazakhstan has built an EPCOT city of sorts on the empty Central Asian steppe. With a jumble of international styles and knock-offs of historic buildings, the city embodies the aspirations of a post-Soviet people searching for a new...
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Castles in the Steppe: Who Benefits from Kazakhstan’s Gleaming New Buildings?
As the government of Kazakhstan continues to pour money into development of its capital, Astana, in preparation for the 2017 Expo, or world's fair, concerns remain about whether the lavish city is a valuable investment in Kazakhstan's future--or simply a very expensive pet project for the president of a country plagued by social and environmental crises. According...