Touristification and urban division: the case of Samarkand
In 2024, I visited Uzbekistan, becoming myself part of the new wave of tourism that has intensified in the country especially after the UNESCO recognitions obtained in various stages since the early 2000s. As often happens in such processes, international heritage designation did not simply certify the importance of the sites—it triggered material and political transformations, accelerating restorations, infrastructural investments, and the construction of a national image meant to circulate within the global cultural marketplace.
From Tashkent to Bukhara, Khiva and to the emblematic Samarkand, an extensive restoration program has brought back form and color to madrasas, mausoleums, minarets, and entire architectural complexes. In Samarkand, however, this “rebirth” is not merely aesthetic: it has become the driving force behind a profound reconfiguration of urban hierarchies, with consequences that go far beyond heritage conservation and deeply affect the daily lives of residents.
It is in this city that a more complex process becomes visible: the reorganization of urban space for the exclusive benefit of tourism, with everything this entails in terms of forced displacements, demolitions, and the creation of a dual city—one half displayed, the other actively concealed.
The orientalist image of Samarkand and its reconstruction
The Western imagination of the Silk Road is powerful and layered: perfectly symmetrical madrasas, turquoise domes, bustling bazaars, carpets, golden light: an East frozen in time. This narrative is not harmless. As Edward Said illustrated, orientalism produces images that become more “real” than reality itself, images to which countries often end up conforming, especially when their economies rely on heritage valorization.
Samarkand is no exception.
Many of the sites we consider “ancient” today are, in fact, modern reconstructions, the result of massive restoration campaigns initiated during the Soviet period after earthquakes and decades of neglect. Until about fifty years ago, many madrasas survived only as precarious skeletons. The Soviet intervention—often criticized for its excessive stylization—literally recreated the very image of Samarkand that we now sell and consume.
Restoration preserved essential monuments, but it also helped construct a specific representation of heritage: coherent, polished, photogenic, and consistent with external expectations.
And, as often happens when heritage becomes spectacle, new tensions, contradictions, and power relations emerge regarding who is allowed to live in, inhabit, and use historic centers.
The urban transformation of Samarkand: a canalized city
One of the most significant effects of Samarkand’s touristification has been the redesign of the entire city center with a single purpose: creating a linear, unmistakable path along which visitors can find all the sites deemed “touristic.”
This kind of planning, however, has come at a very high social cost:
residential neighborhoods demolished, families relocated, physical barriers erected to hide the living, but less aestheticized, parts of the city.
Along the main streets, tall metal walls now stand, painted and integrated into the visual landscape so as to be almost imperceptible. They are barriers designed to blend with the colors of the newly restored facades. Had I not known they existed and had I not been staying behind them, I probably would never have noticed them. Every fifty meters or so, almost invisible doors give access to the mahalla, the historic residential quarters still inhabited. Open by day, closed at night.
Beyond these barriers lies a different city: neighborhood mosques, small shops, garden-squares, domestic courtyards, spaces where everyday Uzbek life continues to unfold.
Mahalla as spaces of resistance
From an anthropological perspective, the mahalla today represent spaces of cultural and social resistance. Not an overt or explicitly political resistance, but the kind of everyday resistance that Michel de Certeau describes as tactics: practices of survival and continuity enacted by those who do not control the spaces they inhabit.
Mahalla resist because they continue to produce non-commodified forms of social life, they host informal economies independent of tourism, they preserve ways of living that cannot be transformed into spectacle, they safeguard local memories that do not fit the official narrative.
They are, in a sense, the living proof that a city never fully coincides with the urban project that seeks to contain it.
