ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the Central Asian palimpsest, both as a space to read the stratified layering in the spatial crystallisation of power and as a place semanticised through original spatial signs. Thus, the chapter is intended to provide evidence of the historically contextualised association between systems of signs and modes of spatial production. Today's Astana, approached on a longue durée, reveals the unfolding of history in three well-defined phases, in which urban planning and architecture served the needs and expressed the hegemonic values of the Russian territorialist expansion (1718–1917), the Soviet infrastructural development (1922–1991) and the Kazakh national self-determination (1992–). Concurrently, the urban form mutated from a point to a line and, finally, to a radial shape.
