Abstract
The transformation of Bukhara during the 20th century illustrates the paradoxical relationship between urban modernization and cultural heritage preservation in the Soviet Union. Following the Soviet annexation in 1920, Bukhara, a UNESCO World Heritage site characterized by centuries-old Islamic urban structures of mahalla neighbourhoods, caravanserais, madrassas, and traditional courtyard houses, was progressively reorganized through successive master plans informed by Soviet principles of centralized planning, functional zoning, and the creation of socialist administrative centres. Although state protection mechanisms for individual monuments were formally introduced from the 1950s onwards, available scholarship indicates that approximately 350 of the roughly 500 ha of the city’s historic territory were substantially transformed during the Soviet period, with consequences that scholars have characterized as a significant disruption to the historic urban landscape in the sense developed by Bandarin and Van Oers. The review identifies three interpretive frameworks in the existing literature: a modernization narrative emphasizing infrastructure improvements; a preservation critique pointing to largely irreversible cultural losses; and an emerging, more nuanced perspective recognizing the paradoxical coexistence of monument protection and large-scale urban redevelopment. Based on a systematic examination of approximately 40 scholarly sources and archival materials, the review highlights critical research gaps, including limited comparative analysis across cities, insufficient documentation of the erosion of intangible heritage, and the absence of integrative analytical frameworks linking Soviet-era transformations to contemporary urban challenges.
1 Introduction
In the first half of the 20th century, many historic cities of the Turkic world, including Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, and Baku, underwent profound transformations following the establishment of Soviet rule (). Soviet urban policy, based on centralized governance, planned construction, and functional zoning, fundamentally altered the urban culture, social organization, and architectural environment that had evolved over centuries (; ; ). Traditional neighbourhood systems (mahallas) and the dense fabric of madrassas, mosques, caravanserais, and artisanal workshops were gradually transformed as new administrative centres, industrial zones, and standardized residential districts were introduced (; ; ; ).
These processes are widely associated with a characteristic spatial and symbolic division of the city into “old” and “new” parts, a phenomenon repeatedly documented across the post-Soviet urban landscape (; ; ). The integration of new technologies and governance frameworks into existing heritage contexts has been shown to generate persistent tensions between legacy structures and modern demands, particularly where digital and image-based design tools are introduced into the conservation and reinterpretation of historic forms (). The tension between modernization and heritage preservation during the Soviet period has therefore had long-lasting consequences that continue to shape contemporary urban policy in Central Asia and the wider Turkic world (; ).
Among these cities, Bukhara, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993, provides a particularly illustrative example. Its centuries-old urban structure, characterized by courtyard houses, a system of guzars (neighbourhoods), monumental ensembles, and traditional bazaars, was subjected to successive waves of Soviet-era reconstruction from the 1920s to the 1970s (). In recent decades, the scholarly literature on the transformation of Bukhara has grown substantially, drawing on archival sources, master plan documents, and comparative urban studies (; ).
The aim of this brief review is to synthesize existing scholarly research on the Soviet-era transformation of the urban environment in Bukhara, identify key themes and controversies, highlight research gaps, and suggest directions for future research. The review situates Bukhara’s experience within the broader context of urban heritage management in the Turkic world and contributes to ongoing debate on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach advocated by UNESCO ().
2 Pre-Soviet urban structure of Bukhara
In scholarly literature, pre-Soviet Bukhara is consistently described as a city shaped by centuries of Islamic urban culture. Estimates of the city’s intramural area vary modestly across sources: reports approximately 170 ha, while , drawing on 19th-century topographic surveys, gives a perimeter of about 9.4 km and a total area of approximately 185 ha. These boundaries, defined by the 16th-century fortress walls, remained largely unchanged until the 20th century and provide the principal reference frame for any subsequent discussion of urban transformation.
Within this perimeter, the city operated as an integrated functional system rather than as a collection of detached monuments. Political authority was concentrated in the Ark citadel; religious and educational life centred on the Po-i-Kalyan complex; commercial and social exchange converged at the Lyabi-Hauz ensemble and across a network of mosques, madrassas, artisan quarters, caravanserais, and bathhouses (; ; ). The compact, labyrinthine street network, most thoroughfares no more than 3 m wide, and the inward-facing courtyard house materialized an underlying preference for privacy associated in the literature with broader Islamic urban traditions ().
Comparative work on residential architecture in Uzbekistan situates Bukhara within a regional family of historic cities while highlighting its distinct character. records that houses in Fergana show Kashgar influence, with fireplaces and open galleries; Samarkand dwellings feature more spacious layouts with intricate wood carving; and Khivan houses use thicker clay walls for climatic insulation. The Bukharan residential tradition is set apart by rooms enclosing the courtyard on all four sides and a notable absence of external decoration (). Despite these contrasts, scholars converge on a shared morphology of spatial enclosure and a clear division between outer and inner courtyards (). At the beginning of the 20th century, Bukhara is reported to have comprised some 217 guzars, each functioning as a unit of social, religious, and administrative interaction (). Read together, these features present pre-Soviet Bukhara not as an aggregate of monuments but as a holistic spatial and sociocultural system—an understanding now central to the Historic Urban Landscape framework and to subsequent debates on heritage management ().
3 Soviet urban planning interventions and heritage transformation
3.1 Early Soviet period and the first master plans (1920s–1940s)
After the establishment of Soviet rule in 1920, the new administration initially occupied existing historic buildings and confiscated elite property; the Central Revolutionary Committee, for example, was installed in the Ark Citadel in 1921 (). The period from 1921 to 1925 is generally treated in the literature as transitional, with no radical spatial reorganization ().
Systematic urban planning began in 1931, when the architect Dolgov of the Moscow-based Giprogor Institute prepared Bukhara’s first master plan. Contemporary planning discourse is revealing: experts treated the city’s historical value as residing solely in the “conglomeration” of individual monuments, while modern architecture was held to be obliged not to evoke the past (). This interpretation effectively subordinated heritage preservation to the goals of modernization—a pattern subsequently identified across Central Asian cities (; master plan envisaged low-rise residential blocks beyond the fortress walls and laid the foundation for a new civic centre opposite the Ark citadel (Figure 1). This restructuring reflected a fundamental tendency of Soviet urban planning: the deliberate displacement of administrative functions away from the traditional historic core, signifying both physical transformation and a symbolic shift in the hierarchy of urban space (; ).
FIGURE 1
3.2 Reconstruction and heritage transformation (1930s–1960s)
Between the 1930s and 1960s, large-scale urban development programmes had a profound impact on Bukhara’s historic landscape, although the precise scale of loss is unevenly documented across sources. Published studies report widespread demolition of courtyard houses, mahalla neighbourhoods, commercial buildings, and architectural monuments under the rubric of “regulation” and “sanitation” (), with several 17th-century madrassas, mosques, caravanserais, and trading domes among the structures lost. Regional archival summaries indicate that a substantial proportion—reported by some sources at approximately 80 per cent—of the buildings within the Ark citadel was lost during this period (Figure 2); given the limited primary documentation accessible to scholars, this figure is best treated as an indicative estimate rather than a confirmed count (; ).
FIGURE 2
The transformation extended well beyond individual monuments. Historic quarters between the city gates were progressively replaced by industrial enterprises, hospitals, educational institutions, and standardized residential blocks. According to , of the approximately 500 ha constituting Bukhara’s historic territory, on the order of 350 ha were substantially altered during the Soviet period; this figure, although widely cited, derives from a single secondary source and would benefit from corroboration through GIS-based archival reconstruction. Reported losses also include nine of the eleven city gates and significant sections of the defensive walls, demolished to accommodate new transport infrastructure. Intangible heritage was likewise affected: historical toponyms were excluded from official terminology and cartographic representations, while the social communities that maintained them in collective memory were weakened by demographic change and internal migration policy (; ).
3.3 Emergence of heritage consciousness and preservation efforts
Alongside this transformation, the Soviet period also saw the gradual emergence of heritage protection mechanisms. In 1953 the architect N. I. Frenkel conducted a specialized survey of the Shahristan area, leading to the placement of 35 historically significant sites under state protection (); the Bukhara Shahristan was subsequently designated an architectural and ethnographic reserve. Effective protection nevertheless remained limited: as shows, listed monuments were frequently rented out for utilitarian uses, including the Kokaldosh Madrasah as a warehouse and the Divanbegi Madrasah as a branch of a restaurant.
The 1960s master plans, developed under the architects Chunikhin and Slonimsky at the Uz-Gosproekt Institute, represented a significant conceptual shift. For the first time, historical heritage was conceived not as a set of individual monuments but as an integrated urban territory requiring holistic protection—an approach that anticipates the later UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (). However, the simultaneous policies of industrial construction and standardized housing, reinforced by the 1955 Resolution “On the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction”, produced an inherent contradiction between preservation aspirations and development practice (). As notes for comparable Central Asian contexts, the resulting architectural homogeneity further reinforced the apparent duality between the “Old City” and the “New City”.
4 Discussion
4.1 Key controversies and competing perspectives
The literature on the Soviet-era transformation of Bukhara presents several competing interpretive approaches, and similar tensions are documented across other Turkic cities, although direct comparative work remains rare. One school of thought emphasizes the modernizing achievements of Soviet planning, citing the introduction of modern infrastructure, sewerage, and public services that materially improved living conditions (). An opposing reading highlights largely irreversible cultural losses—the destruction of centuries-old architectural ensembles, the disruption of traditional social structures, and the erasure of local identities (). A more nuanced perspective, emerging in recent scholarship, attempts to acknowledge the complexity of Soviet heritage policy as simultaneously destructive and protective, producing a paradox in which key monuments were preserved while the surrounding urban environment was systematically transformed (; ).
The notion of “urban dualism” — the division between “old” and “new” cities remains a central analytical category (). Some scholars interpret this division as evidence of colonial spatial policy, while others read it as an outcome of broader 20th-century modernization processes (); comparable patterns have been documented in Tashkent (), Samarkand (), Khiva (), Riga (), and Baku (), suggesting that Bukhara’s experience is best understood as one node in a wider Eurasian pattern rather than a singular case. This debate parallels broader debates in cultural heritage studies about how to balance development pressures with the preservation of historic urban spaces ().
4.2 Research gaps
Despite growing scholarly attention, several significant research gaps remain. First, comparative studies of Turkic cities, examining how Soviet planning simultaneously affected Samarkand, Tashkent, Baku, Ashgabat, and other historic centres, remain limited; while recent work on Samarkand (), Tashkent (), and Baku () has begun to fill this gap, systematic cross-city comparisons that distinguish city-specific outcomes from systemic patterns of Soviet urban policy are still lacking. Second, documentation of intangible heritage losses, including the erosion of toponymic traditions, the transformation of mahalla-based social practices, and changes in craft production networks, remains insufficient (). Third, the existing literature lacks an integrated analytical framework linking Soviet-era transformations to contemporary urban issues such as tourism-driven redevelopment, gentrification pressures, and the tension between international conservation standards and local development priorities (; ).
A further gap concerns systematic, quantitative assessment of cultural heritage losses. As digital documentation advances, notably, through GIS-based spatial analysis, digital reconstruction, and computational urban-form evaluation, it becomes increasingly feasible to map the scale and morphological consequences of urban transformation across historical periods with greater precision. Recent computational work in flood-resilient urban design demonstrates how data-driven, optimization-based methods can be used to evaluate large numbers of urban form variants against multiple performance criteria (); analogous approaches have clear potential for retrospective analysis of heritage transformation, including reconstruction of demolished urban tissue and quantitative assessment of changes in density, permeability, and land use.
4.3 Future directions
Future research should advance in several complementary directions. Comparative studies of urban heritage across the Turkic world would provide a more systematic understanding of how Soviet planning interacted with diverse pre-existing urban traditions. Application of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach () offers a promising framework for understanding cities such as Bukhara as multi-layered, evolving systems rather than static clusters of monuments. Interdisciplinary research integrating urban history, architectural analysis, social anthropology, and digital humanities would deepen understanding of the lived experience of urban transformation.
Equally promising are emerging tools for visualization and design ideation. Recent work on AI-based image-generative tools indicates that such platforms can support early-stage conceptual exploration and the visual reconstruction of historic architectural forms, even as their accuracy and adherence to source material require careful validation (). Coupled with computational and data-driven urban-form methods (), such approaches could allow scholars and planners to test reconstruction hypotheses, communicate heritage values to non-specialist audiences, and integrate quantitative evidence into HUL-aligned policy.
The lessons of Bukhara’s Soviet transformation also remain directly relevant for contemporary urban policy. As Central Asia’s historic cities face new development pressures, including tourism-driven redevelopment, infrastructure upgrades, and population growth, the historical record of well-intentioned but ultimately destructive interventions offers important cautionary lessons for policymakers and heritage practitioners (; ).
5 Conclusion
This mini-review has synthesised existing scholarship on the Soviet-era transformation of Bukhara, situating it within the wider context of urban heritage in the Turkic world. The reviewed literature suggests that, while key monuments were formally protected, surrounding mahallas, streets, courtyard houses, and auxiliary structures were largely demolished, with significant consequences for the integrity of the historic urban landscape; available figures, however, derive from a narrow set of secondary sources and would benefit from independent archival corroboration. Successive master plans introduced increasingly sophisticated approaches to heritage management, even as concurrent demands of industrial construction created persistent contradictions between preservation and development.
As a brief synthesis grounded in approximately forty sources, the present review has clear limitations: it does not include systematic archival work, it relies on a literature that is itself unevenly distributed across cities and periods, and its quantitative claims should be read as indicative rather than definitive. With these caveats in mind, the case of Bukhara nevertheless reinforces a broader argument advanced in heritage scholarship: that historic cities are best understood as holistic sociocultural systems rather than collections of isolated monuments, and that sustainable management of urban heritage benefits from integrated, evidence-based approaches that situate heritage within urban planning rather than alongside it.
Statements
Author contributions
NK: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Writing – original draft. RB: Software, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review and editing. TS: Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – review and editing. MA: Data curation, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft. SM: Investigation, Project administration, Writing – review and editing.
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The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.
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Summary
Keywords
Bukhara, cultural heritage, heritage preservation, historical urban landscape, Soviet urban planning, Turkic cities, urban transformation
Citation
Khayotova NZ, Bozorova RS, Safarov TT, Alimova MM and Muradov SA (2026) Urban transformation and cultural heritage in the Turkic world: reassessing the Soviet urban heritage. Front. Built Environ. 12:1819075. doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2026.1819075
Received
13 March 2026
Revised
27 April 2026
Accepted
28 April 2026
Published
19 May 2026
Volume
12 - 2026
Edited by
Wei Lang, Sun Yat-sen University, China
Reviewed by
Aref Maksoud, University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Updates
Copyright
© 2026 Khayotova, Bozorova, Safarov, Alimova and Muradov.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Nafisa Zakirovna Khayotova, nafisakha167@gmail.com
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.