ABSTRACT

While walking through the Tsarist-era back streets of Kazakhstan’s new capital Astana, my Kazakh companion, a Soviet-era trained economist, pointed to a new row of bright, neo-classically inspired housing, and asked me, ‘Does this look right?’ (Figure 2.1). At first I was a bit taken aback, not sure how the question was being put or how to answer it. I asked in reply, ‘How do you mean?’ He responded by saying that since I was a Westerner and presumably had a better understanding of Western architecture, he wanted to know what I made of these structures that were supposed to be Western and modern. He simply had no experience with these new forms. Attempting to be polite, I answered rather uncertainly and unsatisfactorily that I thought they were quite attractive. However, this question – ‘Does this look right?’ – points to something that has emerged in the course of research here. It is one of the key problems in understanding the built environment of this steppic region which this chapter will address – an anxiety over materiality, appearances and surfaces and how progress and continuity is reckoned.2 Much has been made of building surfaces in the study of the built environment (Harvey 1989; Wigley 2001; Jenks and Kopf 1997; Venturi et al. 2000; Tshumi 1994), as have other areas of scholarship as regards surface (Pinney 2002; Stafford 1996). This is a particular problem for post-socialist cities experiencing intense reconstruction such as the new unified Berlin (Huyssen 2003) as well as for Astana where the legitimacy of built forms and forms of social life are actively thought through one another by its citizenry and outside observers.