How Astana could lead the world

    Commentary by Darius Sanai
    Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan, has to be one of the most other-worldly cities I have visited. You fly in on a super-modern Air Astana Boeing 767 with a business class to match that of Lufthansa or BA. The drive down the six-lane highway from the airport to the city centre takes 15 minutes, during which time open grassland gives way to a cityscape of glass towers and cantilevered pinnacles, a kind of full-scale contemporary architecture park.
    Lord Foster and the Japanese avant-garde supremo Kisho Kurokawa are among those responsible for the look of the city, whose freewheeling shapes represent either the future of Eurasia - Astana is halfway between Moscow and Beijing - or one of the fantastic planets the crew of the starship Enterpriseis beamed down to periodically.
    Canyon-like streets lined with skycrapers bending, sloping and stretching in all directions make you feel like you've arrived in a centre of power and culture. You quickly forget that just a couple of kilometres away the open steppe stretches away for literally thousands of kilometres. The food is simply amazing: I had northern Italian and Korean meals to match anything in New York, with wine lists pinpointing the best vintage of the best Super Tuscans. Ornellaia 1997? Certainly sir, would that be a bottle, magnum or jeroboam?
    It feels like someone has been making a supreme effort to create a cosmopolis in this faraway land - the driving force being the country's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev - and it's hard to leave Astana without wondering what will happen next.
    So it is interesting to see that Astana has been picked to host what is, for a country like Kazakhstan, a major global event, the global Expo in 2017. Expo is like a giant industrial festival - the first being London's World Fair in 1851 for which the Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park.
    Kazakhstan is a major producer of oil and gas, and the theme, "Future Energy", reflects a preoccupation of a number of rapidly developing countries whose economies have been more or less dependent on natural resources.
    Like Abu Dhabi and Qatar, Kazakhstan is planning for a future world without fossil fuels and its most enlightened policy makers are busy making links with green and future industrial thinkers around the world: environmental activists and oil and gas dependent economies are united by a need to develop alternative energy sources, and are taking a lead in an area in which both the West and China and Japan are failing to provide a coherent strategic pathway.
    The Expo in 2017 could be one of those events that pass the world by, like some of its predecessors. Equally it could be an opportunity for a country that has remained stable in 20 potentially turbulent post-Soviet years to take a lead, not just in demonstrating what can be done, but in branding itself as a leader in what will be the most pressing policy matter of all for the generation after ours.
    Astana in Kazakhstan as a beacon for future global policy? That may sound like a tall order now.
    But when you're in Astana, strolling past Lord Foster's massive, pyramid-shaped Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a tribute to all the world's religions in a country that has remained peacefully, multiculturally Muslim for two decades while others nearby have exploded, you wonder if it might just be possible, GQ wrote.