Abstract:

Academic and popular work on Afghanistan’s capital often characterizes political-economic relations in the city as dysfunctional. But in these characterizations of Kabul, important questions about what has or is being done to develop the city within what appears an arrested developmental context remain underexamined. ‘Kabul New City’ represents one such example of an urban development project wherein forgone conclusions about its apparent failure and barren landscape belies a deeper story. This paper reflects on efforts by the US-backed national government of Afghanistan to construct a new urban center for the country on the outskirts of the current capital as a means of jumpstarting a productive national economy and post-war transition, beginning officially in 2010. While these initial dreams of creating the “city of the century” and hundreds of thousands of new jobs and housing units were not realized, I argue that dismissals of Kabul New City as merely emblematic of broader institutional failures in Afghanistan fall short of understanding all that occurred in the distance between the project’s dreams and reality, and what it may yet achieve. The story of Kabul New City is still unfolding as the Taliban now lead the project, actively seeking to attract the same investors that were once allied to their erstwhile enemy. To grasp what lessons the ups and downs of Kabul New City hold for a post-war transition in Afghanistan’s capital, I argue that we ought to attend to the labor of urban dreams— that is, the activities, struggles, and genuine aspirations of those who labored for this project—which hitherto does not feature in explanations and analyses of this place. Though yielding few material results, this labor was real, and accounting for it as such allows us to see where that labor, and ultimately, urban dreams, were curtailed as they collided with the realities of how state power operated under U.S. occupation and imperialism. Drawing from strategic plans and reports collected as well as interviews with former and present government employees, local and foreign investors, and project consultants, this paper contributes to critical scholarship on urban development in Afghanistan and literature in geography and urban studies concerning new cities of the Global South and post-conflict transitions.