UK’s Chapman Taylor company will create a master plan for Azerbaijan’s Shusha city liberated from the Armenian occupation in the last year’s war.
The company won a tender by the State Committee on Urban Planning and Architecture and will receive 3.94 million AZN (about $2.4 million) to create a master plan for the city, local media reported on May 26. Champan Taylor has built several other projects in Azerbaijan, including Deniz Mall (the largest shopping center in the South Caucasus), Port Baku Tower 2 and the luxurious apartment residence K Residence. Set up in 1959, Champan Taylor has been involved in a number of construction projects in Europe, Asia and Middle East.
The Azerbaijani government earlier announced that it would spend $1.5 billion on the reconstruction of Azerbaijan’s liberated territories in 2021.
The State Committee on Urban Planning and Architecture started the planning and design work to restore Shusha back in March and Shusha was declared Azerbaijan’s cultural capital by the presidential order on April 7.
President Ilham Aliyev inaugurated a number of new infrastructure projects and laid a foundation of a new mosque and school in Shusha on May 12.
Founded by Azerbaijan’s Panahali Khan in 1752, Shusha had been Azerbaijan’s historical and cultural center before the city’s occupation by Armenian forces in 1992.
Azerbaijan liberated Shusha along with a huge part of its Nagorno-Karabakh region in last year’s 44-day-war. The Russian-brokered November trilateral statement also stipulated the return of Azerbaijan’s Kalbajar, Aghdam and Lachin regions that Armenia had occupied and kept as a buffer zone during the war in the early 1990s.
