Astana, Kazakhstan’s Heyday is yet to Come, so What Should it Learn from a Nineteenth Century City?

The following post comes courtesy of Global Site Plans' The Grid. CNU and Global Site Plans recently teamed up to syndicate Grid content, as its contingent of writers presents a view on the opportunities and issues of urbanization all across the world. CNU will carry select posts from the Grid direct on the CNU Salons.

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Most of Astana’s residents live in high-rise apartments, like those pictured above.

Astana, Kazakhstan. In Cities of Tomorrow, Sir Peter Hall writes, “Stockholm in 1950 still looked and felt like a small city: a metropolitan area, including suburbs, of only about one million people, in which a 20-minute walk from the center would bring a visitor to greenery…” Replace “Stockholm in 1950” with “Astana in 2013,” and this description remains apt.

When projected to swell from one to two million residents, what did Stockholm do?The 1952 General Plan for Stockholm proposed “new suburban satellites, each for 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants, strung like beads along the lines of a new subway system.” Astana, like Stockholm sixty years before it, is projected to swell in coming decades.

Suburban residential developments characterized by oversized homes on small lots have begun to dot the periphery. Advertisements for these communities, as for those emerging in the U.S. in the 1950s, promise “harmony with nature” in halcyon neighborhoods, safe and salubrious environments in which to raise children. Small lots notwithstanding, these are desirable places to live for many of Astana’s current apartment-dwellers.

Now back to Stockholm – like Stockholm in 1952, Astana must determine how the city’s new suburbanites will be linked to the city itself, as well as what form the city’s suburbs should take.

Astana’s akim (mayor) announced that Astana will construct a light-rail tram line prior to 2017, when the city hosts Expo 2017, to shuttle the projected 6-7 million attendees (Astana’s population is less than one million) to the exhibition sites and throughout the city. According to French firm Alstom, the tram could include three lines, 42 stops, and 50 cars. Astana’s akim further stated that the city will establish arapid bus system prior to the exposition.

Under Astana’s current system, its buses do not have devoted lanes.

The national and city government aim to make Astana a “twenty-first century city.”Accounting for the transit needs of the city’s new suburbanites while drafting and implementing the Expo 2017 transit plan will best serve the city’s long-term development goals. As the former mayor of Bogota, Enrique Penalosa, opined, “A developed country is not one where the poor own cars, but one where the rich ride public transit.”

How well does public transit serve suburbanites where you live? Comment here or on Twitter! Share with friends on Facebook!

To read the original post, written by Sunny Menozzi, visit Global Site Plans.