Speaker
Description
In 2022 the city of Samarkand was the first, and so far, the only one in Uzbekistan to be included into the Green Cities Development program of the EBRD. The first loan-package of 49 million $ is planned for the purchase of 100 battery-busses and for construction of the necessary infrastructure and is framed in terms of reducing the carbon emissions and raising environmental resilience of the city. The first six electric Busses form a Chinese company Yutong arrived in May 2023 and drive since then on a newly established route as harbingers of the looming urban transport modernity, clearly standing out from the rest of the old vehicles.
As investment in the PT fleet renovation and corresponding infrastructure is long overdue, Uzbek administration proves to be successful in deploying the sustainability rhetoric to raise funds for transport and various other infrastructure development projects which are currently burgeoning all over the country. At the same time existing older infrastructures, which require investment into the maintenance and appear less glossy like for example a second-hand tram-system installed in 2017 in Samarkand, remain neglected.
Taking the example of the recent development in public transport system in Samarkand, the paper will discuss the challenges associated with implementation of the e-bus infrastructure and will argue that the global developmental funding programs along with climate change prevention and decarbonisation vocabulary provide Uzbek administration with a welcome excuse and incentive time and again to embark on new infrastructure projects, instead of maintaining the existing ones.
Biography
Mariya Petrova is a doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for regional Geography (IfL) in the project Contentious Mobilities: rethinking mobility transitions through a decolonial lens”. Her PhD project explores the ongoing changes and reforms in public transport and mobility infrastructures in todays Uzbekistan. She studies strategies and coping mechanisms that different actors develop on various levels of the system and strives to understand the implications of an authoritarian political context for the way public transport and mobility infrastructures are organized, planned and implemented. Prior to this she conducted research on the history of building and housing in Soviet Uzbekistan.
