The city sits on fifteen metres of loose sediment.
Tashkent stands on alluvial deposits up to fifteen metres thick, in a tectonically active zone. That ground is why the city has water, trees and canals in the middle of Central Asia — and also why an earthquake in 1966 left more than three hundred thousand people homeless. Everything here comes from the same source.
01 The ground decides
Alluvium is fertile, permeable ground, good for growing and easy to channel. But soft, deep soil amplifies seismic waves rather than dissipating them, and the city sits, moreover, in a tectonically active zone subject to frequent tremors and occasional earthquakes. The two facts are inseparable.
The scale of the place: 455 metres of elevation, 631.29 square kilometres of municipal area, some 25 kilometres long by 30 wide, and 3,164,030 inhabitants as of 1 October 2025. It is by a wide margin the most populous city in Central Asia.
02 Where the water comes from
Tashkent lies at the confluence of the Chirchiq river with several of its tributaries, on a well-watered plain. But the water you see inside the city is not the river's: it is a system of open canals that cross it end to end and have been working for centuries.
That network is what allows a city of three million to have dense tree cover at a latitude where August brings two millimetres of rain. Without the canals there would be no trees, and without the trees a Tashkent summer would be simply uninhabitable.
03 26 April 1966
On 26 April 1966, an earthquake shook the city. Some 78,000 poorly engineered homes were destroyed — mostly adobe in the old city — and more than 300,000 people were left homeless. The combination of heavy traditional construction and a subsoil of soft sediment was exactly the worst possible one.
What went up afterwards was conceived from the earthquake outwards: low, separated blocks, wide streets, a great deal of open space between buildings. It is not an aesthetic; it is a structural decision. When you walk the city and feel that everything is too spread out, that is why.
04 A city of trees
Seen from above, Tashkent is greener than it is grey. The tree cover follows the avenues and the canals, and in summer it forms a continuous roof over much of the central street network. It is the most useful infrastructure the city has and the least visible as such.
The city's name, incidentally, has nothing to do with water or trees: it comes from the Turkic tash, "stone", and the Persian kent, "city". Stone. Though there are earlier etymologies linking it to the ancient place name Chach, also documented in Chinese sources.
05 How to walk it
Do not look for a compact old town: barely any remains. What there is is a city of separated pieces, and the way to stitch them together is the metro, which is also one of the things most worth seeing here. It was designed, precisely, to withstand what happened in 1966.
And walk by following the water. The Anhor canal crosses the city and has stretches with a tree-lined walk on both sides: it is the pleasantest way to move between districts and, incidentally, the one that best explains why the city is where it is.
One demographic note that helps make sense of what you will hear on the street: according to 2021 figures, 84.4% of the population is Uzbek, 4.9% Tajik, 2.4% Kazakh, 2.2% Karakalpak and 2.1% Russian. You will hear Uzbek and Russian in unequal measure, and sometimes in the same conversation.
