The city of Turkistan has seen tremendous transformations over the past several years. From a small modest provincial city in southern Kazakhstan, it became a developing regional center home to over 200 thousand people. Over the past ten years, its population has increased by nearly 50%, which made it one of the fastest-growing major cities in the country and also one of the top cities in terms of attracting public and private investments. Thus, the total amount of investments Turkistan has received in the last four-year period is approaching 1.5 trillion tenges ($3.24 billion) [Bureau of Statistics, 2022]. The investments are being made as part of major projects in a wide range of industries that are meant to increase the economic development and touristic attractiveness of the city as well as of the region. The public initiative to invest in Turkistan was primarily launched after 2018 when Turkistan became the administrative center of the South Kazakhstan region, which also changed its name to Turkistan region. Being a fairly mid-sized city in the context of Kazakhstan, Turkistan hosts one of the country’s biggest and high-ranking universities – Khoja Akhmet Yassawi International Kazakh-Turkish University (Akhmet Yassawi University), which also has played an important role in the development of the city. In fact, the significance of the university in the development of the city along with its size relative to the city population give reasons to consider Turkistan as one of the very few university towns in Kazakhstan.
Towns are referred to as “university towns” or “college towns” if their university population comprises a significant share of the town’s total population. University towns can be classified into two types. The first type usually includes old European towns and cities that are hundreds of years old and usually existed before the Industrial Revolution. Well-known university towns such as Oxford, Cambridge, Ghent, Bologna, Heidelberg, Salamanca, and others can be grouped into this particular type of university town. The second category of university towns typically includes university towns mainly built in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries [Li et al. 2014]. Since these universities in the U.S. were founded before large-scale suburban growth, the universities in these early settlements eventually became the core of urban growth. A significant share of these American university towns was embedded in the initial academic profile of the settlement. In Europe on the other hand, university towns were not initially designed to be so and universities there simply have coexisted there as an essentially important part of the urban environment for countries. This practice of concentrating academic and educational resources in particular small and mid-sized cities has proved to be efficient in many ways and has been replicated in different parts of the world in recent times.
Nowadays, university towns function not only as centers of higher education and science, but also as the core of political, cultural, and social dynamics throughout the world. It should be mentioned though that the term “university town” is not precise and is rather descriptive. There are no commonly accepted exact thresholds that would serve to distinguish a university town from other towns and cities. In some cases, only 10% or less of the population of a town might be associated with universities and colleges, and in other cases, this share might stand above 50%. Usually, a higher percentage of students and university workers tends to be higher in smaller towns, while in larger cities the share of the population related to the university is often more diluted. In most cases, however, these percentages range between 10% and 30%. For instance, in the UK the average share of the university population in college towns is around 21% [UniRank, 2022].
Currently, the Kazakh city of Turkistan has a university population of nearly 12 thousand people of which a bulk (over 11 thousand) are students and staff of the Akhmet Yassawi University. Hence, the university population of Turkistan makes up nearly 5.5% of its current total population of 218,331 people [Citypopulation.de, 2022a], which makes it a bit difficult to classify the city as a university town. However, several important points should be taken into consideration.
First of all, it should be noted here that the mere foundation of the Akhmet Yassawi University in 1991 as the first international university opened in the newly independent post-Soviet Kazakhstan was an unusual event. This decision came as part of an agreement between Kazakhstan and Türkiye. The university was established to get international recognition and become one of the most prominent centers of science and education among Turkic-speaking countries. This event by itself was somewhat extraordinary because it took place during a severe transition crisis in Kazakhstan. Moreover, it was a fairly challenging decision to establish a brand-new university in a town with a population of around 80 thousand people such as Turkistan in the early 1990s. So in the early years of its existence, the ratio of the university population to the total population of Turkistan was higher than it is now. Hence, besides the overall acute economic situation, like all towns of that size at that time, Turkistan had insufficient urban infrastructure for sustaining a fully functional big international university. Therefore, the new university in a small town of Turkistan stood in stark contrast with most other universities in Kazakhstan that were concentrated in large cities.
An important point to be mentioned here is that Kazakhstan has inherited the urban hierarchy system of the USSR in which important functions, including research and education, were concentrated in capitals and major administrative centers. In general, Soviet universities and research centers were predominantly concentrated in large cities, and major educational facilities located in small towns and outside urban areas were rare exceptions. This spatial planning method has not changed very much since then and is largely being replicated nowadays in former Soviet countries. For instance, the two largest cities of Almaty and Astana today account for almost half of all organizations of higher and postgraduate education [Ministry of Science and Education, 2022]. There are also other small towns and mid-sized cities in Kazakhstan that could potentially be considered university towns by several parameters. In total, there are 11 towns with a population of fewer than 250 thousand people that host at least one university or college [Ministry of Science and Education, 2022]. However, only a few of them were founded after the collapse of the USSR and the proportion of the university population in most cases is too low for them to be fully considered university towns.
Besides the inherited urban hierarchy system of cities, positioning universities in major cities in Kazakhstan has more advantages than disadvantages. After the collapse of the USSR, the urban system of Kazakhstan as well as of other former Soviet countries has seen drastic transformations when large cities grew rapidly accumulating large segments of the service sector, which began to gain importance in the new market economy. Smaller towns that relied on heavy industries, on the other hand, went into decline as the industries they hosted became uncompetitive in the market economy system. As a result, the vast majority of small towns in Kazakhstan have seen significant depopulation. The establishment of a new university in small towns in Kazakhstan requires good quality infrastructure, intellectual resources, and other conditions which are usually scarce there.
However, it should be mentioned that Turkistan has a unique historical significance and is known to be the “Spiritual Capital of the Turkic World”, which played a key role in establishing the Akhmet Yassawi University. As the name of the city suggests, throughout centuries the city has been the capital of the Kazakh Khanate and is believed to be the historical center of the larger area where Turkic peoples originated from. Another important factor to mention is that the Türkiye has played an important role not only in jointly establishing the university but in numerous other aspects of the recent development of the city. In this context, building university towns is one of the most valuable experiences brought in by Türkiye. For instance, Türkiye has 45 university towns with a population of under 250 thousand people. The average share of the university population in these university towns is 20.9%. More interesting, many of these universities were founded in the last 20-30 years, which means that university towns are also utilized as a strong factor of urban and regional development in Türkiye [Studyinturkey.gov.tr, 2023; Citypopulation.de, 2022].
One of the most important factors necessary for the development of university towns is connectivity, which is also a great challenge for remote towns in Kazakhstan. For instance, the availability of an airport with international routes in the town or in relative proximity to the town is an absolute necessity in modern days. This factor makes only areas close to major cities to be suitable for modern university towns. A more costly way of overcoming this challenge would be to build a new airport in the university town, as was done in Turkistan in 2020. However, the construction of new university towns and the concentration of academic resources in small towns has proved to be an efficient practice as it allows to increase productivity from research activity. Other benefits of university towns include less congestion in large cities, affordable housing for students and staff, shorter commuting, etc.
In longer-term perspectives, the construction of new university towns in Kazakhstan could become an essentially important part of a reorganization of its urban system that would reflect a shift from overconcentration of scientific activities in a few centers towards a more balanced and more efficient model of spatial planning. The case of Turkistan could be viewed as a rather successful example of converting a small provincial town into a modern university town, which paved the way for an accelerated urban development process, that strengthened with the relocation of the regional administration to Turkistan and empowered with being the Spiritual Capital of the Turkic World. From the geographical standpoint, it can also be interpreted as a successful partial extrapolation of Türkiye’s practice of organizing of urban system and using universities as pulling factors in small towns. As a result, the establishment of the Akhmet Yassawi University throughout the years has become a core igniting factor of the development of education and urban development that were allowed to increase the attractiveness of the region to receive more inflow of people and investments which boosts the development pace of Turkistan.
References
Agency for Strategic planning and reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2022). Bureau of statistics. Retrieved from https://stat.gov.kz/official/industry/161/statistic/6. Accessed on 29.12.2022.
Citypopulation.de (2022a). Population Statistics in Maps and Charts. Retrieved from https://citypopulation.de/en/kazakhstan/cities/. Accessed on 31.12.2022.
Citypopulation.de (2022b). Population Statistics in Maps and Charts. Retrieved from https://citypopulation.de/en/turkey/. Accessed on 31.12.2022.
Li, Zhigang, Xun Li and Lei Wang (2014). Speculative urbanism and the making of university towns in China: A case of Guangzhou University Town. Habitat International 44 (2014): 422-431.
Ministry of Science and Education (2022). List of organizations of higher and postgraduate education in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Retrieved from https://enic-kazakhstan.edu.kz/ru/reference_information/universities. Accessed on 02.01.2023.
Studyinturkey.gov.tr (2023). University list. Retrieved from https://www.studyinturkey.gov.tr/StudyInTurkey/Universities. Accessed on 05.01.2023.
Note: The views expressed in this blog are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the Institute’s editorial policy