The Greenest city on earth
I came across an interesting article on one of the local news websites the other day. It was a Op-Ed comment on the current state of a particular aspect life in the capital city, the Bishkek.
The city received the name in February 1991. Before that it has been called Frunze after the Revolutionary General of the Red Army who had masterminded the Bolshevik dominance of Central Asia during the Civil War following the 1917 Revolution and who had been born in the city to a Moldovian Doctor and his wife. I didn’t know this but, apparently, in Moldovian the word Frunze means “Green Leaf”.
Many guide books still refer to the epithet that used to be given to the city that it was considered to be the “Greenest City on Earth”. This wasn’t anything to do Mikhail Frunze, but referred to the fact that the early Russian settlers had undertaken much tree planting in the fledgling settlement, creating tree lined avenues (such as Prospects Erkindik and Chui and the Avenue of the Young Guards, Molodaya Gvardia), parks (such as: Oak Park and Panfilov park in the city center, Attaturk Park and Elm Grove further out), and even an arbetorium. Just on Prospect Erkindik there were poplar, elm, oak, birch, and apple. The arbetoreum which now forms part of the Botanical Gardens is home to over 2000 specimens of trees and shrubs. In the back yard of our building alone, I counted 78 trees and shrubs.
These trees provided shade and a welcome breeze in the heat of the Central Asian summer and the local population used to like nothing more than to “gulaiyet” – strolling under their boughs just passing the time and shooting the breeze.
In the days of the Soviet Union, it was estimated that there were about 100 square meters of greenery for every citizen living in the city, compared to a recommended figure of just 24 square meters, but the equivalent figure today is said to be just 6.4 square meters.
Part of the reason behind the deterioration of this statistic is purely mathematical and arises out of “urban drift” and the rapid growth of the city’s population. As the population has grown, the denominator in the ratio is larger, thus making the overall result smaller.
In addition, however, we have lost a lot of trees and parkland as a result of the extensive building work that has taken place in the city and the suburbs. Whereas a “Green Zone” used to circle the city in Soviet times, much of it has now replaced by new settlements that have risen up around the suburbs. To the North and East, in fact, most of the trees have disappeared although some sections still exist on the south outskirts. The head of the Bishkek Zelenostroi municipal authority, which is responsible for maintaining the city’s parks and reserves, cites as a particular example the case of the Ala Archa Reservoir. ”There used to be 200 hectares of trees,” he stated, adding that a third of it had now been lost.
If the construction of new settlements is affecting the Green Zone surrounding the city provides housing for some of Bishkek’s rising population, (many of them building their own homes – sometimes illegally, without the necessary permissions ), then some of the city’s parks are the sites of building plots for many of Kyrgyzstan’s rich and elite.
A few years ago, for example, a major scandal erupted over the amount of construction that had been permitted in one of Bishkek’s largest parks, Attaturk Park. About 120 new houses had been built, taking over some 11 hectares of parkland. It’s estimated that about 13,000 trees, of the original 20,000, have been lost – leaving just 7,000 in the park. The then President, Kurmanbek Bakiev, used a visit to the park to express his outrage that officials had given permission to build housing there park and demanded an investigation. A year later a list of the owners of the new properties was published, and it read like a Kyrgyz Who’s Who. It was decidedd that it would not be feasible to demolish all of the buildings and so each owner would pay a “fine” of USD20,000, and they would be required to plant 15000 trees to replace the “one and a half thousand” that had been felled in order to make space for the construction.
There are other examples of areas of the city where open land, where tree cover and shrubs have been grubbed up. Apparently, Zelenstroi even complain that they are not always informed when plots of land, (the maintenance of which they are technically responsible for), are scheduled for development. They also complain that they don’t have official maps delimiting what areas are designated as parkland, and comment that some of the park boundaries seem to be under threat.
Personally, I find this hard to understand. There are rules about what citizens can or can’t do with trees and shrubs. I know because, over the years, we have had to ask for permission to deal with at least two which we considered were in a dangerous condition. As I understand it, the rules basically say that you can plant what you like, but you need to get permission to fell a tree or grub up a shrub. We weren’t allowed to fell the trees, only to prune them. In one case we were told that we could only remove the dead branches, even though some of the “living branches” looked as if they could separate from the parent tree trunk in the very next storm.
Anyway, all of this somewhat depressing news is not to say that the city will soon be bereft of all it’s greenery. There are still plenty of trees left, particularly in the main areas where people promenade in the city centre, but it does mean that we in Bishkek need to keep a “watching brief” on the situation
Bishkek