New Tashkent Targets Global Capital With 20,000-Hectare City

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — Uzbekistan's New Tashkent project is positioning itself as one of the largest and most ambitious greenfield urban developments in the world, its backers told the fifth Tashkent International Investment Forum, as competition among cities for global capital, talent and innovation intensifies.

The forum served as a platform for a broader shift in how national competitiveness is measured. Vladislav Butenko, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group, said a country's future strength now depends directly on the global attractiveness of its leading cities — not solely on macroeconomic indicators.

Global rankings and pace of change

Insights from BCG's global report "Cities of Choice," presented at the forum, showed Tashkent's current standing in world rankings. The study covers the top 80 cities globally and evaluates them across more than 250 indicators.

In that assessment, Tashkent ranked in the top three worldwide for speed of change, alongside Shenzhen and Riyadh. The city also placed in the global top 10 for "advocacy" — a composite measure reflecting residents' subjective wellbeing, their attachment to the city and their desire to raise their children there.

At the regional level, Tashkent was identified as the clear frontrunner. While Almaty and Astana demonstrate strong institutional foundations and Baku stands out for current liveability, the Uzbek capital is pulling ahead on the pace of transformation.

Scale and ambition

Building cities from scratch — greenfield projects — is traditionally regarded as one of the riskiest undertakings in urban planning, prone to design failures and early-stage investor shortfalls. New Tashkent is nonetheless advancing at speed.

Davron Adilov, director of the project's construction authority, outlined the scale: 20,000 hectares have been allocated for the capital's expansion, with active construction already under way on the first 6,000 hectares. More than US$7 million has been committed to institutional groundwork and design, and over 2,000 square metres of infrastructure have been physically completed on site.

Among the first facilities to open this year will be advanced international medical clinics and the National Library of Uzbekistan, which has been officially recognised as the largest in Central Asia by both floor area and book holdings.

Climate engineering and environmental design

Project officials said New Tashkent is incorporating infrastructure solutions they describe as without precedent in global practice. The development is designed as a direct response to environmental challenges and aims to actively manage the urban climate.

Rather than installing conventional air-conditioning units throughout the city, the project will deploy a centralised intelligent system for cooling, heating and air management, which planners say will deliver substantial energy savings.

To address the arid Central Asian heat, architects have designed an extensive network of artificial canals and lakes intended to generate a mild local microclimate. A stated planning objective is that every resident will be able to reach a waterfront promenade within 15 minutes on foot from any point in the city.

The broader urban ecosystem will operate on closed-loop green economy principles, with urban waste processed at dedicated facilities and converted into electricity.

Pedestrian design and hyperlocality

New Tashkent is being designed around walkability and alternative mobility. BCG experts noted during the forum discussion that the established concept of the 15-minute city — where social infrastructure is within walking distance — is now evolving toward five-minute and even one-minute proximity standards.

In the new city, kindergartens, schools, parks, offices and cultural facilities will be embedded directly within residential clusters. Vehicle traffic will be fully separated from pedestrian paths and lanes for micro-mobility devices such as electric scooters.

Planners argue this approach not only raises safety and comfort but delivers significant budget savings by eliminating the need to spend billions of dollars on multi-lane highways and elevated road structures.

The investment case

Pavel Martinek, a partner at White Star Real Estate — an investment fund with 30 years of experience in emerging markets and an average internal rate of return of 41% on exits — set out what he described as a universal framework for assessing market attractiveness.

"A city is first and foremost an economy, and only secondarily architecture," he said. "People come to a city for jobs and opportunities."

Investors, he said, focus on fundamental markers: GDP growth, demographic expansion and job creation. All three are relevant to Tashkent, which receives more than 100,000 new residents each year.

The fund's standard entry strategy in a new market begins with commercial logistics and industrial real estate, which carry lower initial costs, before scaling into residential and Class A office space once the regulatory environment stabilises. Martinek said New Tashkent's model — in which the state assumes baseline infrastructure risk — creates transparent conditions for long-term international partnership.

Forum participants concluded that New Tashkent and the existing historic city centre are not competing but complementary. By addressing the shortcomings of legacy urban planning and embedding next-generation technologies, Uzbekistan is seeking to build Central Asia's defining city of the 21st century.