As Azerbaijan prepares to resettle hundreds of thousands of its citizens in the territory it retook during last year’s war, it has embraced a new development concept: “smart villages.” The idea has become popular around the world; it envisages small communities using the latest technologies like digital connectivity, automation, and renewable energy to maximize economic development, Eurasianet reports.
The Azerbaijani government tentatively explored the idea before the war: a State Program of Socio-Economic Development of Regions of the Republic of Azerbaijan 2019-2023 called for two pilot “smart villages” to be created. But the idea has gained momentum following last year’s war, in which Azerbaijan retook more than 8,000 square kilometers of territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, about 75 percent of the land it had lost to Armenian forces in the first war in the 1990s. More than 600,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced in that war; many of those now hope to return.
In February, President Ilham Aliyev said that the first smart village project would be implemented in Uchunju Agali, in the Zangilan district. In a September interview with Turkish media, Aliyev said that the first displaced people would return to a pilot smart village in Zangilan “by the end of this year or early next year,” though he didn’t name the village. On October 17, he formally laid the foundation for another smart village in the Fuzuli region.
The Ministry of Agriculture has explained that the smart villages will introduce agriculture based on “modern technologies and joint management and control,” but that the concept goes beyond simply farming methods. “The concept consists of ‘smart’ street lighting, cold- and heat-resistant homes, management of household waste, the installation of hydro and solar power stations and biogas energy,” the ministry said.
The government is spending $1.3 billion this year alone on building “smart cities and villages,” Aliyev told a September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Azerbaijani state-affiliated media have covered the smart village concept extensively, repeating government talking points that the use of automation will reduce the need for human labor. But analysts are divided on whether the government's enthusiasm for "smart villages" is warranted.
Gubad Ibadoglu, an economist and opposition politician, said that the government could have implemented projects like "transparent villages" or "accountable municipalities" instead of smart villages.
Attention also has fallen on another of the government’s plans for redeveloping rural Karabakh: the expansion of the country’s “agropark” system. Agroparks are large-scale, government-backed agribusiness enterprises that started operating in Azerbaijan in 2012. A total of 49 agroparks have already been established in Azerbaijan.
Agroparks in Azerbaijan are "sustainable businesses because the government creates all the infrastructure necessary and provides subsidies for them to operate," Ibadoglu told Eurasianet. The government signaled its interest in expanding the agroparks into Karabakh shortly after the end of last year’s war. In March, the Economy Ministry told state-affiliated cable Space TV that research is “being carried out in the liberated territories regarding the creation of agroparks and proposals are being prepared.”
While there have been no further details announced, during a visit this month by Aliyev to the Jabrayil region, the president was briefed on a new 50-hectare agropark there. Ibadoglu said that the agroparks in the newly retaken territories likely will be controlled by powerful people, as well.
Other analysts, though, emphasize the potential efficiency of the government’s development model. The “smart village” system will allow all government services in Karabakh to be organized in one centralized system, said Elmir Safarli, another economist. "And this in turn will pave the way for the best tech projects in the region to be applied and facilitate the flow of investments into Karabakh in the future," Safarli said.
While Azerbaijan faces challenges implementing the smart village (and the related “smart city” concept), Karabakh is an ideal place to experiment, wrote urbanist Anar Valiyev in an article for the Baku Research Institute. “The whole territory is devastated, and there is no infrastructure now; therefore, it should be built from scratch, and certain types of innovations should be implemented,” he wrote. “While doing this, the needs and demands of the population should be the primary consideration.”
After the war, the government announced that it was conducting a major survey among displaced people to find how many are interested in returning to the region and what they would like to do there; results of the survey have not yet been made public. But Bakhtiyar Aslanov, a researcher and national coordinator for Germany’s Berghof Foundation, and himself a displaced person from the first war, said attitudes on the “smart village” concept appear to be changing.
"In the beginning, people were uncertain about the idea, partly because the concept is new to Azerbaijani society, but also because most were imagining their homes just like they left them 30 years ago," Aslanov told Eurasianet.
