The Post-Soviet Outlier: Tbilisi in the Context of Spectacular Capitals

Tbilisi, the “Mother of Cities”, has a history that spans over a millennium. Since the independence of Georgia from the Soviet Union, the city has gone through significant changes in its urbanscape. These changes, however, are far less “spectacular” than in other capitals of the post-Soviet space, namely Ashgabat, Astana and Baku. Their respective countries all share a similar history in the last 150 years: imperial colonies of the Russian Empire, Soviet republics, then independent states facing a harsh economic and political transition, followed by years of fast economic growth. If their histories are so similar, then why are the urban outcomes so different in their capitals? Using concepts from urban studies, such as spectacular urbanism, urban boosterism and growth machine coalitions, and others from history and political science, such as place-memory and nation-building, some hypotheses are analyzed using comparative historical analysis (CHA) and process-tracing. It is found that the obvious answers regarding differences in political regimes (autocracy v. democracy) and economic structures (resource-rich v. resource-poor) are not enough to explain why spectacular urbanism happens in Ashgabat, Astana and Baku, but not in Tbilisi. Rather, nation-building efforts in these republics, and how they are translated into the urban environment, may provide a better explanation.