ABSTRACT
Founded as a Russian Imperial fortress in 1854 and serving as the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and of independent Kazakhstan until 1997, Almaty today still acts as the major financial, economic, and cultural metropolis of the country. However, post-Soviet urban restructuring has led to the redistribution of administrative and socio-economic roles between the country's major cities. In the context of these changes, this chapter traces the transformation of Almaty since independence, drawing particular attention towards the processes of urban-level innovations: top-down spatial reorderings and the underlying modernisation agendas. The chapter employs a critical theory angle on unequal spatial development, as well as sustainability, and transportation studies, and argues that peripheralisation tendencies also play out on the level of urban knowledge production. It studies examples of relief-based urban development, reforms of the public transport system, and the positioning of the city at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, by drawing upon the authors’ research in the region, database analyses, and a review of scholarly publications on the subject.
