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.
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'
Chapter 1. Materializing the Future: Images and Practices
Chapter 2. Performing Urbanity: Migrants, the City and Collective Identification
Chapter 3. Tselinograd: The Past in the 'City of the Future'
Chapter 4. Celebration and the City: Belonging in Public Space
Chapter 5. Fixing the Courtyard: Mundane Place-Making
Chapter 6. Playing with the City: 'Encounter' in Astana
Conclusion
References
Index