Mateusz Laszczkowski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, at the University of Warsaw, Poland. In 2007-2012 he conducted his doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany.

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

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.