Book · July 020 citations reads 1,675 13 authors

 
‘This shows how easily it is to obscure the true owners of a project - the beneficial owners - using 
companies registered abroad. The project certainly raises many red flags: the source of the funds is 
unclear, and a 19-year-old is unlikely to be the true beneficial owner of the company responsible for 
the Tashkent City shopping centre project.
356
  
 
 
Gardens Residence apartments. Photo: by author 
 
Whilst the residential buildings remain empty in the Boulevard section of Dream City, the real estate 
agency Dream City Development claims that 80 per cent of the apartments in the Boulevard section 
have been sold. According to the agency, 70 per cent percent of the buyers are Tashkenters and 10 
per cent of them are foreign acquisitions. The other 20 per cent is available for purchase.
357
 Although 
there is a lack of social infrastructure in the new project, this does not seem to deter prospective 
buyers. It appears that the nouveau riche in ‘Tashkent City’ will not feel the need for schools or 
medical centres in the immediate vicinity. The abundance of shopping avenues, offices and hotels 
                                                           
355
 Kristian Lasslett, Uzbekistan Ltd: private-public interests clash in flagship project, openDemocracy, January 2019,  
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uzbekistan-ltd/ 
356
 OpenDemocracy Investigations, Phantom foreign investors for an open new Uzbekistan, openDemocracy, December 2018, 
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/tashkent-city-project-uzbekistan-phantom-foreign-investors/ 
357
Dream City, A conversation with an agent of ‘Dream City Development’, February 2020.  

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Spotlight on Uzbekistan 
90 
 
will be sufficient. It is anticipated that the apartments are purchased as investments and those who 
acquire them have no plans to live in the area. 
 
Alexey Ulko, a writer on Arts and Culture uses the term ‘new bureaucracies’ for people who have 
appeared in the government and government-affiliated commercial structures. In his opinion, these 
urban projects are not designed to address public needs rather focused towards meeting the needs 
of these new elite who aim to climb the social ladder:   
 
‘Old bureaucracies lived in impregnable castles, stagnant and stiff, surrounded by old loyal servants 
and faded portraits of glorious ancestors. New bureaucracies are more like financial pyramids 
sucking in more and more new people. You cannot run such an enterprise in a bleak Soviet-built 
barrack isolated from the rest of the world by an ugly concrete wall. What you need is an urban area 
with tall, shiny, expensive-looking and spacious offices for thousands of people to work in and many 
more thousands craving to: glitzy temples of conspicuous consumption.’
358
 
 
The current government is employing a strategy of ‘Destroy and Build’, a quick fix to realise their 
current plan of buying off land, destroying old areas and building new in the city. The outfall from 
the demolition is not only one of practical complications but of psychological distress and resistance.