Astana has been the capital since 1997, and almost everything you see came after.
The capital moved here from Almaty in 1997, and what was here was a provincial city in the middle of a plain with no relief and no trees. Today there are 1.6 million people across 810 square kilometres, and around them a forest belt planted from nothing: some 100,000 hectares and more than nine and a half million trees.
01 What was here before
The starting point matters. Before 1997 the country's capital was Almaty, in the southeast at the foot of the mountains. What stood here was a mid-sized provincial city in the middle of the steppe, on a plain at 347 metres of altitude, with no relief to shelter it and no forest for hundreds of kilometres around.
Today the municipality has 1,622,245 inhabitants across 810.2 square kilometres, and it is the country's second city. That is, in less than three decades it has multiplied its population and built anew practically everything you see from the river southwards.
02 Building where there is nothing
Raising a capital on an empty plain has one obvious advantage and a lot of less visible problems. The advantage is that there is nothing pre-existing to negotiate with: no old town to respect, no plot pattern, no topography forcing an avenue to bend. You can draw straight and wide, and that is how it is drawn.
The problems are of another order. On a plain with no relief there are no quarries nearby, no forest for timber, no natural shelter from the wind and no firm bank on which to rest the city. The riverside that today orders the whole centre did not exist as such: it had to be manufactured, truckload by truckload, filling and consolidating the edge of the water.
03 A forest planted by hand
And here is the least photographed and probably the most ambitious work of all. Since 1997 a forest belt has been planted around the city on ground that never had trees. Its area is around 100,000 hectares, of which some 15,000 lie inside the municipal boundary, and in them grow more than nine and a half million trees and around one million eight hundred thousand shrubs.
This is not landscaping: it is infrastructure. The rows were oriented according to the prevailing winds so that they work as windbreaks, and the stated aim includes checking dust storms and snow blizzards as well as improving the air. On an open plain, a belt of trees does the job a mountain range does elsewhere.
04 Two cities side by side
The urban consequence of all this is that two cities live here without fully mixing. North of the river is the earlier city, of five-storey block quarters and a conventional layout; to the south, the new capital, of broad avenues, free-standing buildings and a completely different scale.
It is worth walking both and not only the one in the photographs. The comparison is what gives the whole its meaning: you see what was kept, what was ignored and what scale was chosen when there was no obligation to continue anything. Few cities offer that contrast with both terms so close to hand.
05 What Astana leaves you with
It should be said frankly: it is not a comfortable city to visit. The distances are long, the layout is designed for the car, there is little street fabric and the climate works against you half the year. Anyone coming for spontaneous urban atmosphere will mostly find open space.
What it leaves is something else, and it is rare: the chance to see an entire capital as a project still under way, with its decisions on show and without the varnish centuries provide. Here you can point at the edge of a river and say it was manufactured, or look at a tree and know which decade it was planted in. Almost nowhere else can you do that.
