Abstract:

This paper compares two types of sites in Central Eurasia, built decades apart, under different political and economic systems, and directed towards different visions of the future. It compares Soviet industrial monotowns in the Altai mountains, built to mine and process ore, and new smart cities currently being built in independent Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to support the development of IT startups. I will use these sites to explore the crucial role that the relationship between the “core” and “periphery” plays in the functioning of globe spanning systems of production and distribution. Building on ethnographic field visits to these sites, this paper explores the specific insights that these Central Eurasian sites have to offer in broader conversations about the role of infrastructure in constituting social formations.

I will argue that these sites, despite being understood as peripheral, are actually central to the financial and technological systems into which they are integrated. The Soviet monotowns were built as a crucial part of a vast productive chain crossing the borders of the constitutive Soviet republics. The smart cities are being built with funds, expertise, and construction capacity provided in part through the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, itself a project of periphery making. Both of these types of sites are temporally displaced, not currently fully inhabited or used in the manners for which they were designed: the mining towns were abandoned during the changing economic conditions that emerged during liberalization, while the tech startups and new residents that the smart cities are being built as a home for have not yet taken up residence. They are, respectively, the product of past visions of futurity, and current plans not yet realized.

My paper is inspired by the ongoing discussion of the way that new urban formations act as both locales in which to invest surplus capital, and engines of financial growth (Harvey, 2008, Sassen 2018). It expands on existing treatments of the afterlives of monotowns in Central Eurasia (Adambussinova 2023, Bozhoko 2017, Omarova et. al 2019, Junussova and Beimisheva 2020), and explorations on Central Eurasian smart cities (Buchoud 2022, Muñoz and Bolivar 2021). It enters dialogue with work that situates infrastructure as a field of dispossession (Anand 2012), a modular mechanism of extraction (Appel 2012), a site of displaced temporalities (Gupta 2012) as an arena of multiple contending subjectivities (Howe & Boyer 2015).