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ASTANA — Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev says Astana is “an important center of our geopolitical region,” while Russian urbanist and blogger Ilya Varlamov calls it “an awful city, unadapted to [human] life.”
But for close to 1.5 million people — mostly originating from other parts of Kazakhstan — the country’s capital, Astana, is home.
So why do they come to a monolithic city that was largely created just 30 years ago? And could they ever see themselves leaving it?
No To Nur-Sultan
Astana has many different…
