Enduring the Test of Time: Understanding Ancient Silk Roads Cities Through 'Urban Cosmopolitanism'

This research takes an ethnographic approach to the historical endurance of Silk Roads cities and their ways of life as they have witnessed the rise and fall of many empires, and brings this into dialogue with present-day concerns for urban sustainability in the face of climate change.
The project builds on my PhD which re-examined how Central Asia's oldest and longest-inhabited cities, Samarqand and Bukhara, were impacted by the Bolshevik Revolution and how these cities' cultural elites negotiated Soviet agendas. While the Soviet Union set out to persecute bourgeois intellectuals and demote old-guard cities for ideal socialist ones (Kassymbekova 2016), this project highlights how ancient Samarqandi-Bukharan city life and elites survived Soviet agendas and persecution by migrating, from
1920 on, to Dushanbe, a village of 3,000 inhabitants. Once there, these displaced urbanites collaborated with Soviet ideology to build a city that could house their centuries-old ways of life under socialism. Dushanbe quickly grew into the capital city of the newly-formed Tajik SSR and the only Soviet capital with no prior urban history. I conceptualise this mobility of people and ways of life from the two cities as a form of 'urban cosmopolitanism': a fluidity of place and urbanism across Silk Roads territories that makes a city's distinct, local characteristics accessible, mobile and transposable beyond its physical confines (Gould 2015; Zutshi 2015). This builds on the recognition that cities have informed the social and spatial geographies of people across the Islamic, Turkic and Persian worlds much more than nations, a concept only introduced in the past hundred years (Eickelman & Piscatori 1990). This mobility, adaptability and shape-shifting is strongly characteristic of the people and places of the Silk Roads (Marsden 2017) and what I term urban cosmopolitanism.
My two journal articles will address specific iterations of this social history and urban cosmopolitanism across Silk Roads territories. The two months of fieldwork will give me a chance to further interview families about this, get feedback from them and local scholars on my conceptualisation of urban cosmopolitanism, and audio-visually record evidence of it. I will also extend my findings into another aspect of urban endurance and longevity: sustainability. While cities grow in size and number around the world today, they are also in danger of dilapidation from climate change: rising sea levels and temperatures are already leading to major cities flooding, experiencing droughts and facing contamination of drinking water. In that process infrastructure and cultural sites are damaged: Venice, for instance, is struggling to rescue damaged artworks and books in recent historic floods. As investments and policies are implemented to develop resilient, adaptable cities to today's changing environment, this project will seek out common language, patterns and ideas between the threat cities face by political upheaval and by climate change.
Bukharan and Samarqandi migration to Dushanbe in the face of the Bolshevik Revolution is comparable to many recent urban-to-urban en masse migrations: Syrians urbanites fleeing to Turkish cities, Tehranis fleeing the 1979 Islamic Revolution to Los Angeles, Kabulis fleeing during the Soviet-Afghan War to Peshawar. Meanwhile, the climate crisis is affecting cities across the Silk Roads. On a recent visit to Bukhara, I was shown the physical evidence of rapid degradation this ancient city is experiencing due to rising temperatures, melting glaciers and pollution. Samarqand and Bukhara, both UNESCO Heritage Sites, are today under threat- a different threat to that they faced when the Red Army invaded them a hundred years ago. Both events, however, have and continue to threaten the endurance of these cities, materially and socially: Bukhara and Samarqand today experience flash flooding, destroying their stone foundations and their intangible heritage.