Kazakhstan’s Developing Nurkent Border City With China
Kazakhstan’s new Nurkent City, near the border of China, is continuing to be constructed in the Panfilov region of Kazakhstan’s also newly created Zhetysu. This includes parts of the Kazakh South-East and parts bordering Kyrgyzstan. Nurkent is located near one of Kazakhstan’s two railway crossings on the border with China, opposite China’s Khorgos city.
Nurkent is planned to house 100,000 people, with 90% of the first district, comprising of two 80-apartment residential buildings completed. The Government agency responsible said that the total budget for the first stage is 2.56 billion Tenge (US$5.6 million). The project is Kazakh funded, although China’s COSCO acquired a 49% lease on the city land.
It is expected that these residential facilities and the related engineering and communications infrastructure will be completed by April this year.
In addition, in the second quarter of this year, the completion of access roads, heat supply, a block-modular boiler house, and on-site networks together with a further two 60-apartment residential buildings should be finished.
Between 2018-2020, a transformer substation for 1260 kW, a sewerage system for 28 km, five pumping stations, heat supply for 14.8 MW, a clean water reservoir for 1.4 thousand cubic metres were built.
The entire development and construction of Nurkent City Phase One is scheduled to be completed in September 2023.
The master plan of Turkent city was approved in 2017. Full completion is scheduled by 2035. Nurkent is seen as instrumental in assisting with the resettlement of workers of the Khorgos-Eastern Gate, being the largest transportation and logistics hub on the Belt and Road Initiative. A dry port, part of the Khorgos-Eastern Gate Free Trade Zone, began operations in January 2015. Those workers will be retrained as a permanent labor resource for what is already a major trading hub between Kazakhstan and China.
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