Tashkent: Jul 24 - Aug 3

Tashkent

How to Build a Central Asian Capital

Aim: To create a city-shaped mausoleum for common sense.

What You'll Need:

• monoculture dollars
• concrete
• funny hats

Steps:

1. Find a nice quiet spot, away from First World oversight or expectations.
2. Lay a centre of concentric roads and ordered grids. Fill with manicured parks, jingoistic memorials, and Neoclassical behemoths of the overblown, intimidation-minded sort you can only get away with in a country where people guard their laughter.
3. Surround with drab housing blocks randomly capped with triumphant tile mosaics. Sprawl until you think you’ve spread far enough, then double that distance until mountains, desert or neighbouring countries intervene. Add a sprinkle of dead air bazaars and silent mosques.
4. Link with a variety of transport: supplant buses, faded trams and stuffed marshuktras with taxidrivers who’d struggle to find their way across a bridge, lay a spaced-out metro of (unlit) chandeliered stations rated to withstand nuclear attack and timecapsule carriages whose flat blue and brown colour scheme didn’t survive the 80s.
5. Place policemen every 50 m. Give them stone faces and epaulettes. Place women in scuffling pairs and Adidas-clad men in slouch-limbed groups. Wilt all under a too-hot sun.
6. Make money a game: print only one low-value note, peg your devalued currency to official rates only two-thirds of the blackmarket offer, then empty, hide and neglect the upkeep of your half-dozen ATMs.
7. Find a scapegoat and persecute as required.

Good luck! Your capital will be ready when it resembles a real city in all ways but dignity, aethetics and efficiency.

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