Urban greenery: on the maintenance and functionality spectrum in Aqtau, Kazakhstan
Events
The Research Centre for Social and Cultural Anthropology, in collaboration with the Doctoral Programme in Anthropology, invites you to its 2026-2027 seminar series. The first lecture will be held on 13 October 2026, at 17:00 Tbilisi time, online, in English.
October 13, 2026 at 5pm Tbilisi time, online, in English.
Zoom link https://iliauni-edu-ge.zoom.us/j/84247296394?pwd=tW9hv4uM0WvRhegquHUa1QmcHNJE1N.1
Daria Volkova, PhD
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Institute for European Urban Studies
Urban greenery: on the maintenance and functionality spectrum in Aqtau, Kazakhstan
What functions do we attribute to urban nature, and how is it maintained? This paper will be centered on these questions and set in Aqtau. Aqtau was founded in 1964 and developed around oil and gas extraction and uranium mining. As a frontier city, it was planned “from scratch” and developed as a whole, from buildings to infrastructure. Urban greenery was treated as an integral part of this infrastructure and developed by the Mangystau Experimental Botanical Garden Institute. Flowers, trees, and bushes were collected from different places and brought to Aqtau’s soil as potential future settlers that would transform the city’s arid conditions alongside humans.
This research builds upon several data sources collected in 2022–2025. First, it draws on an ethnographic enquiry of those who maintain urban greenery from different perspectives:
residents who care for their land plots, maintenance workers, ecological activists, researchers at the Botanical Garden Institute, and the municipality. Second, it looks at the archival data of the Institute: reports and instructions on proper maintenance practices, i.e., watering schedule, pruning and planting recommendations.
Continuing the strand of research on the functionality of things (Domínguez Rubio et. al
2025), this paper asks: what is a (dys)functional urban nature? who has an ability, a right, a privilege to define the limits and contours of functionality? when it is not possible to maintain it, and how does greenery itself change the assumptions about functionality and intervene in maintenance? In Aqtau, the design of urban greenery implies an infrastructural approach: karagach trees and rose bushes are expected to bloom and thrive on a land foreign to them.
This case is an amplified story of the aftermath of modernity experiments, but one that allow to ask an overarching question of what urban nature is and what we want from it.
Daria Volkova is a postdoctoral researcher at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. She holds a doctorate in urban studies from the Bauhaus University Weimar. Geographically, her researcher is focused on the Caspian Sea region. In her thesis, she focused on intersections between housing infrastructure, urban policies, and maintenance and repair in Aqtau. Together with Simone de Boer, she is co-editing a themed issue in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (under revision), and explores the questions of resource scarcity, abundance, and sufficiencies in the post-socialist space. Her current project is financed by the DFG and titled “Fluctuating water, fluctuating futures: Uncertainties and preparations for more-than-human water futures in Caspian Sea shoreline settlements” in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
2026