Special Issue Urbanities, Vol. 7 · No 2 · November 2017 The Dreams and Nightmares of City Development © 2017 Urbanities Re-interpreting National Ideology in the Contemporary Urban Space of Astana. Nelly Bekus (University of Exeter, U.K.)
[email protected] and Kulshat Medeuova (Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan)
[email protected] This article analyses the way in which the Soviet legacy has been combined with practices of public representation of national ideology in the space of the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Astana. It examines how cultural and political elites exploit various archaic elements of the traditional imagery of the nation in the context of modern state-building. Referring to various examples in cityscape the article aims to show how the national ideology handles tradition not as a coherent corpus of ‘inheritance’, but as a reservoir of potential symbols, which can be used creatively for the fashioning of a national image of the capital city both in the international and in the domestic arena. Keywords: Ideology, urban space, symbols, capital city. Introduction With the advent of the post-socialist transformation in newly established post-socialist countries, cities became essential ‘arenas’ for socio-political and economic change. At the same time, their changing landscapes have played an important role in modifying people’s living environment, as regards both the ideological management of symbolic space and the shifting patterns of daily routine. We shall analyse the way in which the Soviet legacy has been combined with practices of public representation of the national ideology in the space of the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Astana.