In 1997, President Nursultan Nazarbayev embarked on one of the most ambitious speculative design projects ever realized. With the fall of the USSR, Nazarbayev had the dream to create a new Kazakh economy, society, and culture. Impressively massive goals, but how to accomplish them? Nazarbayev's solution was to use speculative design and design fiction to create a new highly-futuristic capital: Astana. Astana was built using highly futuristic architectures to create spaces that citizens could actively walk through and thus understand and themselves realize Nazarbayev's vision of the country. And through this process, further increase the trust of the populace in his leadership. This talk will examine the histories, politics, design fictions, and mythologies President Nazarbayev's Astana embodies as perhaps the most ambitious speculative design project ever implemented.
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