The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. Designed by the late super-architect, Zaha Hadid, it is an enormous, bright white, almost liquid pavilion, all curves and flow. The outside inspires, and yet the inside chagrins. Entrance fees keep all but the wealthiest citizens outside its gates, with only one interior space open to all, a permanent homage to the late President Heydar Aliyev, whose holograms manifest from the shadows as visitors move through a space of tribute to his life and career. Paradoxically, this highly exclusive space has also become emblematic of a better future among wide swaths of Azerbaijanis who know the building if only in pictures or from distant roadways.

Geographer Natalie Koch's smart new book, The Geopolitics of Spectacle, helps us understand just this kind of place. For while many a writer has taken up the startling new skylines of post-Soviet capitals, taking easy aim at the corruption or money-laundering that often attends these seemingly Disney-like landscapes, Koch urges her readers to take these scenes seriously, as central elements in the practical (and tactical) engineering of support for new polities across newly transforming cities, particularly in the lesser known Central Asian capitals of former Soviet space. Seven cities provide grist for discussion: Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, alongside briefer excursions through Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Baku (Azerbaijan), Doha (Qatar), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Naypyidaw (Myanmar), and Bendar Seri Bagawan (Brunei).

The Introduction to this book is programmatic, lucidly written, and persuasive. Sidestepping the often capitalism-centric readings of public pageantry from theorists such as Guy Debord, whose almost entirely pejorative take on spectacle-as-false-consciousness is one that Koch looks to displace, she starts from the premise that spectacle is inconstant across time and space. Scenes that startle one century may find little uptake the next, and if urban spectacle is to succeed, it must work relationally alongside the “unspectacular” to achieve its ends (3). Rather than presuming the cynical ideologies of authoritarian leaders bent on hoodwinking the masses through the use of shiny objects, Koch argues that all urban transformations build on mixed agendas that are the product of competitive politics in even the seemingly most authoritarian of states, and are inflected by the agency of ordinary people within them (8). In Koch's reading, liberalism and illiberalism are neither spatially nor nationally segregated: mixed agendas are historically contingent and oblige us to look at the everyday practices of those who launch such projects, and those who live alongside them.

What ensues is a set of commentaries on urban planning, foremost in Astana, with a view to some of its unspectacular environs such as the Aral Sea fishing communities that no longer fish because they are no longer seaside. The refreshing part of Koch's pan-Asian approach is a comparative model that puts the new skylines of Ashgabat, Astana, and Baku into dialogue with cities otherwise left to separate area studies conversations, where Doha and Abu Dhabi most often find themselves on the travel pages of a globalized Middle East, and where Naypyidaw and Bendar Sari Bagawan stand in for the somehow more closed reaches of Southeast Asia. The challenge of such a broad purchase comes in the details, or the relative absence of them, for Koch's reader ultimately needs to know a fair bit already about each of these places to follow the swift readings of their urban fates. Beyond passing comments from a handful of non-state actors logged over the author's many years of coming and going across this region, we do not learn a great deal about different social constituencies and what they accord these new urban worlds, nor do we find interviews with urban planners or builders themselves. Pausing in places to simply learn more about the history, look, and feel of individual sites would amplify many of the key arguments.

Back in Baku, one might add that the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre sits on a vast empty square next to a busy highway and is framed on three other sides by fading apartment blocks cluttered with satellite dishes and wet laundry. The hasty might call this a rough trade made between the governors and the governed, inserting an indifferent wedge of wealth between the haves and have nots. Koch's deft work tells us something different: Zaha Hadid needed the laundry to achieve the full effect of this space, a scene made all the more spectacular for its somehow unlikely neighbors.