The violence of spectacle: Statist schemes to green the desert and constructing Astana and Ashgabat as urban oases

Social and Cultural Geography

Volumn 16, Issue 6, 2015, Pages 675-697

  Koch, Natalie ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

capital city; desert greening; Kazakhstan; spectacle; Turkmenistan; urban greening

Indexed keywords

DEVELOPMENT PROJECT; GARDEN CITY; GREENSPACE; OASIS; SUSTAINABILITY; URBAN DEVELOPMENT; URBAN PLANNING;

AHAL; ASHGABAT [AHAL]; ASTANA; CENTRAL ASIA; KAZAKHSTAN; TURKMENISTAN;

EID: 84930930754     PISSN: 14649365     EISSN: 14701197     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2014.1001431     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. Adams, L. (2010). The spectacular state: Culture and national identity in Uzbekistan. Durham: Duke University Press.
2. Adas, M. (1989). Machines as the measure of men: Science, technology, and ideologies of western dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
3. Adas, M. (2006). Dominance by design: Technological imperatives and America's civilizing mission. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
4. Agnew, J. (1998). The impossible capital: Monumental Rome under liberal and fascist regimes, 1870–1943, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 80, 229–240.
5. Akorda. (2014). Astana – The capital of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Official Site of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.akorda.kz/en/category/astana.
6. Alexander, C. (2009). Waste under socialism and after: A case study from Almaty. In H. West & P. Raman (Eds.), Enduring socialism: Explorations of revolution and transformation, restoration and continuation (pp. 148–168). New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
7. Annayev, D. (2013). Turkmenistan faces chronic water shortage (26 April). Central Asia Online. Retrieved May 29, 2014, from http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/caii/features/main/2013/04/26/feature-01.
8. Bissenova, A. (2013). The master plan of Astana: Between the ‘art of government’ and the ‘art of being global’. In M. Reeves, J. Rasanayagam, & J. Beyer (Eds.), Ethnographies of the state in central Asia: Performing politics (pp. 127–148). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
9. Blinnikov, M., Shanin, A., Sobolev, N., & Volkova, L. (2006). Gated communities of the Moscow green belt: Newly segregated landscapes and the suburban Russian environment. GeoJournal, 66, 65–81.
10. B News. (2013). Kazakhstan's expenditures to reproduction of forests exceed $3 million in 2012 (29 October). B News.kz. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.bnews.kz/en/news/post/167440/.
11. Brain, S. (2011). Song of the forest: Russian forestry and stalinist environmentalism, 1905–1953. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
12. Buchli, V. (2007). Astana: Materiality and the city. In C. Alexander, V. Buchli, & C. Humphrey (Eds.), Urban life in post-Soviet Asia (pp. 40–69). London: University College London Press.
13. Cooke, C. (1978). Russian responses to the garden city idea. The Architectural Review, 163, 353–363.
14. Cracraft, J., & Rowland, D. (2003). Architectures of Russian identity: 1500 to the present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
15. Danzer, A. (2009). Battlefields of ethnic symbols: Public space and post-soviet identity formation from a minority perspective. Europe-Asia Studies, 61, 1557–1577.
16. DeHaan, H. (2013). Stalinist city planning: Professionals, performance, and power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
17. Denison, M. (2009). The art of the impossible: Political symbolism, and the creation of national identity and collective memory in post-Soviet Turkmenistan. Europe-Asia Studies, 61, 1167–1187.
18. Duncan, J., & Duncan, N. (2004). Landscapes of privilege: The politics of the aesthetic in an American suburb. New York, NY: Routledge.
19. EurasiaNet. (2013a). The slow fading of Turkmenistan's former god (4 January). EurasiaNet. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66337.
20. EurasiaNet. (2013b). Turkmenistan attempts quixotic greening of the desert (12 March). EurasiaNet. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66675.
21. Evered, K. (2014). Draining an Anatolian desert: Overcoming water, wetlands, and malaria in early republican Ankara. Cultural Geographies, 21, 475–496.
22. Evered, K., & Evered, E. (2012). State, peasant, mosquito: The biopolitics of public health education and malaria in early republican Turkey. Political Geography, 31, 311–323.
23. Farish, M., & Lackenbauer, P. (2009). High modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik. Journal of Historical Geography, 35, 517–544.
24. Floryan, M. (1996). Gardens of the tsars: A study of the aesthetics, semantics, and uses of the late 18th century Russian gardens. Sagaponack: Saga press.
25. Forest, B., & Forest, P. (2012). Engineering the North American waterscape: The high modernist mapping of continental water transfer projects. Political Geography, 31, 167–183.
26. Forest, B., & Johnson, J. (2002). Unraveling the threads of history: Soviet-era monuments and post-soviet national identity in Moscow. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 524–547.
27. Forest, B., & Johnson, J. (2011). Monumental politics: Regime type and public memory in post-communist states. Post-Soviet Affairs, 27, 269–288.
28. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6, 167–191.
29. Gardner, A. (2014). How the city grows: Urban growth and challenges to sustainable development in Doha, Qatar. In P. Sillitoe (Ed.), Sustainable development: An appraisal focusing on the Gulf region (pp. 343–366). New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
30. Geertz, C. (1980). Negara: The theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
31. Giese, E. (1979). Transformation of Islamic cities in Soviet Middle Asia into socialist cities. In R. French & F. Hamilton (Eds.), The socialist city: Spatial structure and urban policy (pp. 145–166). New York, NY: Wiley.
32. Gritsai, O., & van der Wusten, H. (2000). Moscow and St. Petersburg, a sequence of capitals, a tale of two cities. GeoJournal, 51, 33–45.
33. Hamm, M. (1976). The city in Russian history. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
34. Hecht, G. (1998). The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. Cambridge: MIT Press.
35. Howard, E. (1945). Garden cities of tomorrow. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
36. Jones, T. C. (2010). Desert Kingdom: How oil and water forged modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
37. Josephson, P. (2002). Industrialized nature: Brute force technology and the transformation of the natural world. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books.
38. Josephson, P. (2013). An environmental history of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
39. Kazakh TV. (2013). ‘Green Belt’ to become tourist area (28 June). Kazakh TV. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.kazakh-tv.kz/en/view/news_kazakhstan/page_19249_%E2%80%98green-belt%E2%80%99-to-become-tourist-area.
40. Koch, N. (2012). Urban ‘utopias’: The Disney stigma and discourses of ‘false modernity’. Environment and Planning A, 44, 2445–2462.
41. Koch, N. (2013a). Technologizing complacency: Spectacle, structural violence, and ‘living normally’ in a resource-rich state. Political Geography, 37, A1–A2.
42. Koch, N. (2013b). The ‘heart’ of Eurasia? Kazakhstan's centrally located capital city. Central Asian Survey, 32, 134–147.
43. Koch, N. (2013c). Why not a world city? Astana, Ankara, and geopolitical scripts in urban networks. Urban Geography, 34, 109–130.
44. Koch, N. (2014). ‘Building glass refrigerators in the desert’: Discourses of urban sustainability and nation-building in Qatar. Urban Geography, 35, 1118–1139.
45. Kong, L., & Yeoh, B. (1997). The construction of national identity through the production of ritual and spectacle: An analysis of National Day parades in Singapore. Political Geography, 16, 213–239.
46. Kopp, A. (1970). Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1935. New York, NY: G. Braziller.
47. Köppen, B. (2013). The production of a new Eurasian capital on the Kazakh steppe: Architecture, urban design, and identity in Astana. Nationalities Papers, 41, 590–605.
48. Kotkin, S. (1995). Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as a civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press.
49. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
50. Laszczkowski, M. (2011a). Building the future: Construction, temporality, and politics in Astana. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 60, 77–92.
51. Laszczkowski, M. (2011b). Superplace: Global connections and local politics at the Mega Mall, Astana. Etnofoor, 23, 85–104.
52. Laszczkowski, M. (2013). State building(s): Built forms, materiality, and the state in Astana. In M. Reeves, J. Rasanayagam, & J. Beyer (Eds.), Ethnographies of the state in central Asia: Performing politics (pp. 149–172). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
53. Mämmedow, A., & A¸yrmämmedow, N. (2013). A¸gabat – Ginnessiň rekordlar kitabynda [Ashgabat – in the guinness book of records]. Ashgabat: Türkmen döwlet ne¸irý at gullugy.
54. Meuser, P. (2010). Astana, Almaty, and Aktau: Architectural experiments in the steppes of Kazakhstan. In A. Kliems & M. Dmitrieva (Eds.), The post socialist city: Continuity and change in urban space and imagery (pp. 230–247). Berlin: Jovis Verlag.
55. Miliùtin, N. (1974). Sotsgorod: The problem of building socialist cities. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
56. Ministry of Environment and Water Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan (MEWR). (2012). Green zone around Astana city is its new brand: Nazarbayev. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.eco.gov.kz/new2012/en/2013/06/3126-34/.
57. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia (MOFA). (2014). Saudi ambassador to Turkmenistan participates in ‘afforestation festival’ (16 March). Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.mofa.gov.sa/sites/mofaen/ServicesAndInformation/news/MinistryNews/Pages/ArticleID2014316123053254.aspx.
58. Molle, F. (2008). Why enough is never enough: The societal determinants of river basin closure. International Journal of Water Resources Development, 24, 217–226.
59. Molle, F., & Floch, P. (2008). The ‘desert bloom’ syndrome: Politics, ideology, and irrigation development in the northeast of Thailand. Working Paper. Chiang Mai: Mekong Program on Water, Environment and Resilience, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, International Water Management Institute.
60. Molle, F., Mollinga, P., & Wester, P. (2009). Hydraulic bureaucracies and the hydraulic mission: Flows of water, flows of power. Water Alternatives, 2, 328–349.
61. Nazarbayev, N. (2005a). Presidential address: ‘Kazakhstan on the road to accelerated economic, social and political modernization’ (18 February). Official Site of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Retrieved March 1, 2011, from http://www.akorda.kz/en/speeches/addresses_of_the_president_of_kazakhstan/february_2005.
62. Nazarbayev, N. (2005b). Presentation of the book ‘In the heart of Eurasia.’ Official Site of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Retrieved March 11, 2011, from http://www.akorda.kz/en/speeches/summit_conference_sittings_meetings/presentation_of_the_book_in_the_heart_of_eurasia_.
63. Nazarbayev, N. (2006). Kazakhstanskii put' [The Kazakhstan way]. Karaganda: Stacey International.
64. Nazarbayev, N. (2010). Future Vision, Interview with K Magazine, published for The Republic of Kazakhstan by Condé Nast. K 1 48–53.
65. Nazpary, J. (2002). Post-Soviet chaos: Violence and dispossession in Kazakhstan. London: Pluto Press.
66. Nelson, I. (2013). The allure and privileging of danger over everyday practice in field research. Area, 45, 419–425.
67. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
68. Ouis, P. (2002). ‘Greening the emirates’: The modern construction of nature in the United Arab Emirates. Cultural Geographies, 9, 334–347.
69. Petrone, K. (2000). Life has become more joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
70. Peyrouse, S. (2012). Turkmenistan: Strategies of power, dilemmas of development. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe.
71. Rezun, M. (1996). Science, technology, and ecopolitics in the USSR. Westport: Praeger.
72. Ryklin, M. (2003). ‘The best in the world’: The discourse of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s. In E. Dobrenko & E. Naiman (Eds.), The landscape of Stalinism: The art and ideology of Soviet space (pp. 261–266). Seattle: University of Washington Press.
73. Sadykov, M. (2013). Turkmenistan: Schools to Scrap Late President's Holy Book (2 August). EurasiaNet. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.eurasianet.org/node/67336.
74. Satayeva, A. (2011). Nazarbayev flew over Astana green belt (13 June). Tengri News. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://en.tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/Nazarbayev-flew-over-Astana-green-belt-2435/.
75. Schönle, A. (2007). The ruler in the garden: Politics and landscape design in imperial Russia. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
76. Scott, J. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
77. Shapiro, J. (2001). Mao's war against nature: Politics and environment in revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
78. Shioya, A. (2014). Povorot and the Khanate of Khiva: A new canal and the birth of ethnic conflict in the Khorazm oasis, 1870s–1890s. Central Asian Survey, 33, 232–245.
79. Šír, J. (2008). Cult of personality in monumental art and architecture: The case of post-Soviet Turkmenistan. Acta Slavica Japonica, 25, 203–220.
80. Sowers, J. (2011). Remapping the nation, critiquing the state: Environmental narratives and desert land reclamation in Egypt. In D. Davis & E. Burke (Eds.), Environmental imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (pp. 158–191). Athens: Ohio University Press.
81. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. (2003). The social life of the state in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
82. State News Agency of Turkmenistan (Türkmen döwlet habarlar agenligi) (TDH). (2014). President of Turkmenistan participates in the national planting campaign (15 March). Retrieved May 14, 2014, from http://www.turkmenistan.gov.tm/_eng/?id = 3320 (accessed 14 May 2014).
83. Stites, R. (1989). Revolutionary dreams: Utopian vision and experimental life in the Russian revolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
84. Stronski, P. (2010). Tashkent: Forging a Soviet city, 1930–1966. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
85. Täze oba. (2014). Turkmenistan – flowering garden, Motherland – blooming flower. (S. Horák, trans.). Ashgabat: Esaslandyryiysy-Türkmenistanyń oba Hojalyk Ministrligi.
86. Ter-Ghazaryan, D. (2010). Re-imagining Yerevan in the Post-Soviet era: Urban symbolism and narratives of the nation in the landscape of Armenia's capital (PhD dissertation). Department of International Relations, Florida International University.
87. Ter-Ghazaryan, D. (2013). ‘Civilizing the city center’: Symbolic spaces and narratives of the nation in Yerevan's post-Soviet landscape. Nationalities Papers, 41, 570–589.
88. Till, K. (1999). Staging the past: Landscape designs, cultural identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin's Neue Wache. Ecumene, 6, 251–283.
89. Vale, L. (1992). Architecture, Power, and National Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
90. Veyne, P. (1990). Bread and circuses: Historical sociology and political pluralism. London: Penguin Press.
91. Veyne, P. (1997). Foucault revolutionizes history. In A. Davidson (Ed.), Foucault and his interlocutors (pp. 146–182). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
92. Yacher, L. (2011). Astana, Kazakhstan: Megadream, megacity, megadestiny? In S. D. Brunn (Ed.), Engineering earth: The impacts of megaengineering projects (pp. 1001–1020). New York, NY: Springer.
93. Zerubavel, Y. (2009). Conquest of the desert and the settlement ethos. In A. Hare & G. Kressel (Eds.), The desert experience in Israel: Communities, arts, science, and education in the Negev (pp. 33–44). Lanham: University Press of America.