The people of Kazakhstan have been delighted by their new capital, which is a showpiece achievement

A lot of eyebrows arched sceptically when, in the mid-1990s, Kazakhstan’s government decided to move its capital from cosmopolitan Almaty – still the country’s commercial centre and an increasingly vibrant and captivating place – to a small, northern town deep in the Central Asian steppe. With an annual average temperature of 1º Celsius and a forbidding yearly low approaching minus 35º, Astana is one of the world’s coldest capitals. The choice of location on the flat, semi-arid desert plain that dominates Kazakhstan’s topography was made because of a desire for the nation’s capital to be more central. The new capital received its official blessing in 1997.

However, a relocation that had once looked quixotic has now lifted eyebrows for an entirely different reason: Astana is perhaps the most unlikely success story in modern urban history. Once the home of the Soviet Union’s space programme – and a considerable portion of its nuclear arsenal – Kazakhstan, and Astana in particular, is now finding fame for more urbane reasons.

While still a work in progress, Astana has delighted Kazakhstan’s citizens with its modern, futuristic architecture. New skyscrapers compete with iconic structures like the giant glass and steel pyramid and the presidential residence to fuse an emerging Kazakhstani identity – rooted in place and history, yet multi-cultural and forward-looking. Astana’s international airport was designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, and the city is twinned with Moscow, Riga, Amman, Gdansk, Warsaw, Seoul and Tbilisi.

And while hard-headed reasons informed the president’s decision to create Astana (the advantageous geopolitical location of the city; a large private sector and great potential for entrepreneurial development; the furthering of political and social stability in the region; and the availability of free land for further urban development), his vision of a new capital as a symbol for Kazakhstan’s new direction into the future always has been the most compelling.

The underlying architectural vision is widely attributed directly to the president. Yerzhan Ashykbayev, the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has been quoted in newspapers saying "Every project, every building is approved by him."

Astana is a sincere attempt to build a new city which will represent the new face and image of a modern, economically stable and prosperous, democratically viable and multiethinic Kazakhstan that is looking to the future.

Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, Astana

‘The scale of what is happening in Astana incredible’

A new capital in an ambitious, proud, newly independent country is tailor-made for an architect’s most important work. Indeed, leading architects from around the world have turned Astana into a laboratory for audacious design. None is leaving as big a fingerprint as Norman Foster, whose firm Foster + Partners is behind two of Astana’s signature projects. Lord Foster's fame is rooted in his iconic open floor structures and his environmentalist design principles. But in Astana, Foster has taken a turn to the fantastical. He has built a giant glass pyramid housing a convention hall and an opera theatre - it is more spacious than London's St. Paul's Cathedral - and is currently constructing a truly exorbitant structure: a transparent tent the size of ten football stadiums called the Khan Shatyry that will contain shopping malls, an indoor beach and a navigable river, water tanks for dolphins, cobbled streets, and the largest amusement park in the world.