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The Political Life of
Urban Streetscapes
Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet
they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and
place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role
that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both
historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of
urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different
political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign
authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few
decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban
toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers,
anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to
examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering
a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan
Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of
streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and
the cultural politics of place.
Reuben Rose-Redwood is an Associate Professor of Geography and Chair of

the Committee for Urban Studies at the University of Victoria in British
Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on the cultural politics of place naming,
geographies of urban memory, and the spatial history of the geo-coded world. He
is the co-editor of Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space
(2014) and has published in a broad range of scholarly journals, including
Progress in Human Geography, Social & Cultural Geography, Urban History,
and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. His work on the
historical geography of New York’s urban streetscape has also been featured in
various popular media outlets, such as the Discovery Channel, the History
Channel, and the New York Times.
Derek Alderman is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University

of Tennessee, USA. His research interests and published work focus on the role of
place and street naming in the context of African American identity politics and
civil rights struggles in the southeastern United States. He is co-author of Civil
Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (2008) and is perhaps best
known for advancing scholarly and public understanding of the politics of naming
streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. He is also frequently sought after by the news
media to comment on this and other cultural issues.
Maoz Azaryahu is a Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Haifa,

Israel. His research focuses on urban and landscape semiotics as well as the
cultural and historical geographies of national myths and public memory in Israel
and Germany, landscapes of popular culture, the politics of street naming, and the
cultural history of places and landscapes. He is the author of numerous books and
articles, including Von Wilhelmplatz zu Thälmannplatz: Politische Symbole im
Öffentlicehn Leben der DDR (1991), State Cults: Celebrating Independence and
Commemorating the Fallen in Israel 1948–1956 (1995, in Hebrew), Tel Aviv:
Mythography of a City (2006), and Namesakes: History and Politics of Street
Naming in Israel (2012, in Hebrew).
The Political Life of
Urban Streetscapes
Naming, Politics, and Place
Edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood,

Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu
The right of Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz
Azaryahu to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Rose-Redwood, Reuben, editor. | Alderman, Derek H., editor. |
Azaryahu, Maoz, editor.
Title: The political life of urban streetscapes : naming, politics, and place /
edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004187| ISBN 9781472475091 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315554464 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns--Political aspects. | Streetscapes (Urban
design)--Political aspects. | Public spaces--Political aspects. | Cultural
landscapes--Political aspects. | Sociology, Urban.
Classification: LCC HT113 .P64 2017 | DDC 307.76--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004187
ISBN: 978-1-472-47509-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-55446-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby
Reuben dedicates this book to Cindy, Sierra, and Riley
Derek dedicates this book to Donna
Maoz dedicates this book to his parents Yaffa and Pessach

Contents
List of figures xi
List of tables xiii
Notes on contributors xv
Acknowledgments xxi
1 The urban streetscape as political cosmos 1

REUBEN ROSE-REDWOOD, DEREK ALDERMAN, AND MAOZ AZARYAHU
2 Reading street names politically: a second reading 25

KARI PALONEN
3 Colonial urban order, cultural politics, and the naming of

streets in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Singapore 41
BRENDA YEOH
4 Revisiting East Berlin and Haifa: a comparative perspective

on renaming the past 56
MAOZ AZARYAHU
5 “Armed with an encyclopedia and an axe”:

the socialist and post-socialist street toponymy of
East Berlin revisited through Gramsci 74
JANI VUOLTEENAHO AND GUY PUZEY
6 Building a new city through a new discourse:

street naming revolutions in Budapest 98
EMILIA PALONEN
7 Locating the geopolitics of memory in the Polish streetscape 114

DANIELLE DROZDZEWSKI
viii Contents
8 Toponymic changes as temporal boundary-making:
street renaming in Leningrad/St. Petersburg 132
ANAÏS MARIN
9 The spatial codification of values in Zagreb’s city-text 150

LAURA ŠAKAJA AND JELENA STANIĆ
10 Nationalizing the streetscape: the case of street renaming

in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina 168
MONIKA PALMBERGER
11 The politics of toponymic continuity: the limits of change

and the ongoing lives of street names 185
DUNCAN LIGHT AND CRAIG YOUNG
12 Toponymic complexities in Sub-Saharan African cities:

informative and symbolic aspects from past to present 202
LIORA BIGON AND AMBE J. NJOH
13 Coloring “Rainbow” streets: the struggle for toponymic

multiracialism in urban post-apartheid South Africa 218
WALE ADEBANWI
14 Street renaming, symbolic capital, and resistance in Durban,

South Africa 240
JAMES DUMINY
15 Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices

in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. 259
DEREK ALDERMAN AND JOSHUA INWOOD
16 From number to name: symbolic capital, places of memory,

and the politics of street renaming in New York City 274
REUBEN ROSE-REDWOOD
17 Toponymic checksum or flotsam? Recalculating Dubai’s grid

with Makani, “the smartest map in the world” 290
MARAL SOTOUDEHNIA
Contents ix
18 Contemporary issues and future horizons of critical
urban toponymy 309
REUBEN ROSE-REDWOOD, DEREK ALDERMAN, AND MAOZ AZARYAHU
Author name index 320

Subject index 326
Figures
4.1 Borough boundaries in Berlin with the boundary between the

Soviet sector and the western sectors marked in solid black 60
4.2 Ha’atzma’ut Road (Independence Road), Haifa, Israel
(photograph by author) 68
7.1 Kraków’s Old Town in 1943 121
7.2 Kraków’s Old Town in 1964 125
10.1 The newly renamed House of Culture,
Croat House—Duke Stjepan Kosač175
10.2 A street in West Mostar newly named after a Catholic priest
born in 1871 and “replacing” a street name honoring the
Yugoslav Partisans 176
11.1 Old and new street names in Timişoara, Romania (2015).
Strada Turgheniev commemorates Ivan Turgenev,
a nineteenth-century Russian writer. The street was renamed
in 1993 to commemorate a senior figure in the Romanian
Orthodox Church. 191
11.2 A street name sign in central Bucharest (2005). Strada
Măndineşti was renamed Strada Sf [Saint] Dumitru in 1993.
However, the signage gives the former name with the new
name in brackets. 193
11.3 Old and new street names on an apartment block in Bucharest
(2009). During the socialist era the street was named Strada
Furnirului (Street of the Wood Laminators). It was renamed
Strada Vintila Mihăilescu (after a Romanian geographer) in
1992. However, the old name remains on a number of the
apartment blocks along this street. 194
12.1 Clearly written, conspicuously posted, and well-positioned street
signs at an intersection in the formal area of Akwa, the erstwhile
colonial district, of Douala, Cameroon (photograph by
Ambe Njoh) 206
12.2 A house at the corner of Streets No. 5 and No. 8 in Dakar’s
Médina. The resident has sign-posted it by hand, indicating his
occupation (photograph by Liora Bigon). 210
xii Figures
12.3 An example of the signage system of Mutengene, as inscribed
in white chalk by authorities of the Société Nationale
de l’Electricité du Cameroun (SONEL), the quasi-national
electricity corporation in Cameroon (photograph by
Liora Bigon) 213
13.1 Taking anti-apartheid activism to the streets in Durban,
South Africa (photograph reprinted with permission from
Kyle G. Brown) 227
14.1 Map of renamed streets in Durban, South Africa circa 2008
(cartography by James Duminy) 244
14.2 Renamed street sign in Glenwood, Durban, South Africa, 2014.
New signs had identical structures and the same “DIN A Text”
official typeface. Old signs were left atop the new, crossed out
with red tape (photograph by Andrew Duminy). 247
16.1 “Freedom from Shanties” (Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine 1880) 281
17.1 Navigating the geo-coded world of Dubai with Makani 296
17.2 Miscalculating encoded orthography with Makani 297
Tables
6.1 “Populist” elements of Budapest’s city-text in the 2010s 110

7.1 Street name changes within the Planty in Kraków, Poland 118
7.2 Street name changes on main roads outside the city center of
Kraków, Poland 119
8.1 The fourth wave of street renamings in Leningrad/St. Petersburg
(1991–onward)140
8.2 The wave that was not: un-renamed places with imperial or
religious connotations in Leningrad/St. Petersburg 141
16.1 The renaming of the West Side avenues, 1880–1890 279
16.2 A select list of commemorative place names in Harlem,
1925–2007283
Contributors
Wale Adebanwi is a Professor in the Department of African American and

African Studies at the University of California, Davis and Visiting Professor,
Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown,
South Africa. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology as a Gates Scholar
at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK, as well as in Political Science
at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His research has focused on a range of
topics addressing the question of the social mobilization of interest and power
in contemporary Africa. He is also the author of Authority Stealing: Anti-
Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (2012),
Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and
Corporate Agency (2014), and Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian
Press and the Politics of Meaning (2016). He is the editor or co-editor of six
other books.
Derek Alderman is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University
of Tennessee, USA. His research interests and published work focus on the
role of place and street naming in the context of African American identity
politics and civil rights struggles in the southeastern United States. He is
co-author of Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (2008) and
is perhaps best known for advancing scholarly and public understanding of the
politics of naming streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. He is also frequently
sought after by the news media to comment on this and other cultural issues.
Maoz Azaryahu is a Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Haifa,
Israel. His research focuses on urban and landscape semiotics as well as the
cultural and historical geographies of national myths and public memory in
Israel and Germany, landscapes of popular culture, the politics of street naming,
and the cultural history of places and landscapes. He is the author of numerous
books and articles, including Von Wilhelmplatz zu Thälmannplatz: Politische
Symbole im Öffentlicehn Leben der DDR (1991), State Cults: Celebrating
Independence and Commemorating the Fallen in Israel 1948–1956 (1995, in
Hebrew), Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (2006), and Namesakes: History
and Politics of Street Naming in Israel (2012, in Hebrew).
xvi Contributors
Liora Bigon is an Africanist urban historian at the Institute of Western Cultures,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Holon Institute of Technology, Israel.
She has published six books and edited collections including: A History of
Urban Planning in Two West African Colonial Capitals (Mellen, 2009);
Garden Cities and Colonial Planning: Transnationality and Urban Ideas in
Africa and Palestine (Manchester University Press, 2014); French Colonial
Dakar: The Morphogenesis of an African Regional Capital (Manchester
University Press, 2016); and Place Names in Africa: Colonial Urban Legacies,
Entangled Histories (Springer, 2016).
Danielle Drozdzewski is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University
of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research draws upon
ethnographic approaches to examine the geographies of remembrance and in
particular the intersections of identity, cultural memory, and place. She is
keenly interested in how memories of war are articulated in public spaces,
through memorialization and commemorative vigilance, and also in private
spaces through family narratives across generations. She has conducted
research in Poland, Germany, Thailand, Singapore, Britain, and Australia. Her
recent edited collection, Memory, Place, Identity: Commemoration and
Remembrance of War and Conflict, was published by Routledge in 2016.
James Duminy is a Research Officer in the African Centre for Cities at the
University of Cape Town in South Africa and General Secretary of the
Association of African Planning Schools. He holds master’s degrees in town
and regional planning (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) and
urban history (University of Leicester, United Kingdom). His research
interests center on the interface between planning theory and history, with a
focus on colonial and postcolonial Africa within the context of the wider
global South.
Joshua Inwood is an Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University where
he holds a joint appointment with the Department of Geography and the Rock
Ethics Institute. His research interests focus on understanding the social,
political, and economic structures that make human lives vulnerable to all
manner of exploitations, as well as how oppressed populations use social
justice movements to change their material conditions.
Duncan Light is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Tourism and Hospitality
at Bournemouth University, UK. His research focuses on the cultural
geographies of post-socialist change with particular reference to Romania, a
country he has visited extensively. In particular, his work explores the
relationships between urban space, political identities, and public memory. He
has published on practices of renaming streets and urban places in Romania in
journals such as GeoJournal, Journal of Historical Geography, and the Annals
of the Association of American Geographers. His recent work has also
examined the relationships between place naming and tourism practices.
Contributors xvii
Anaïs Marin is an Assistant Professor and Marie Curie Fellow with Collegium
Civitas in Warsaw, Poland. A political scientist with expertise in post-Soviet
and border studies, her doctoral thesis, defended in Sciences Po Paris in
2006, was dedicated to the “paradiplomacy” of St. Petersburg and the city’s
influence on Russian foreign policy-making in the 1990s. She has taken part
in several research projects on Eastern European borderlands and served as a
pro bono adviser for the Task Force on External Borders of the Association
of European Border Regions (AEBR). In parallel to her academic career as a
border and IR scholar, she has provided policy advocacy for the Finnish
Institute of International Affairs (FIIA), a think tank based in Helsinki
(2010–2014). As a Marie Curie Fellow, she is currently conducting
comparative research on the “dictaplomacy” of authoritarian regimes in post-
Soviet Eurasia (2015–2017).
Ambe J. Njoh is a Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in the School of
Geosciences at the University of South Florida. He has written eleven books
and published more than a hundred journal articles and book chapters. His most
recent book, French Urbanism in Foreign Lands (Springer, 2016), examines
the influence of France on the urban built environment in various countries. His
latest work on toponymic inscription has focused on Nairobi, Kenya and Dakar,
Senegal, and appears in the Journal of Asian and African Studies (2016).
Monika Palmberger earned her PhD at the University of Oxford and is currently
a Visiting Professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research
Centre, University of Leuven and a Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow at the
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. She
has published widely in internationally renowned journals on questions of
memory, generation, aging, and migration, and is the author of three books:
How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in
Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina (Palgrave, 2016), Memories on the Move:
Experiencing Mobility, Rethinking the Past (with Jelena Tosic, Palgrave, 2016),
and Caring on the Move: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration
Across Societies (with Azra Hromadzic, Berghahn, forthcoming).
Emilia Palonen is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of
Helsinki. She has published widely on populism and commemoration in
Hungary and the history of Budapest as well as engaging with Fidesz politics
of marking spaces in Budapest, architecture, and nationalism. She has worked
on Academy of Finland projects focusing on transnational Hungarian left-wing
intellectuals and on populism. Her background is in urban and area studies and
poststructuralist theory, and she has worked as a Lecturer in Cultural Policy
Studies and Political Science, specializing in Public Administration and
Organization Studies.
Kari Palonen is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Jyväskylä,
Finland. He has served two five-year terms as Academy of Finland Professor,
directed the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual
xviii Contributors
Change, and he is currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Redescriptions.
His recent books include “Objektivität” als faires Spiel. Wissenschaft als
Politik bei Max Weber (2010), Rhetorik des Unbeliebten. Lobreden auf
Politiker im Zeitalter der Demokratie (2012), The Politics of Parliamentary
Procedure: The Formation of Westminster Procedure as Parliamentary Ideal
Type (2014), Politics and Conceptual Histories (2014), and From Oratory to
Debate (2016).
Guy Puzey is a Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
His main research interests are in language policy, and his Arts & Humanities
Research Council-funded doctoral thesis drew on the theories and metaphors
of Antonio Gramsci to examine the political dimension of language activist
campaigns in Norway and Italy. Puzey has carried out extensive research
focusing on the relative visibility of languages in public spaces, while in critical
toponomastic studies, he has incorporated the linguistic landscape approach
into studies of power and place naming. In 2011, he edited a special section of
Onoma, the journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, on
“Toponomastics and Linguistic Landscapes.”
Reuben Rose-Redwood is an Associate Professor of Geography and Chair of
the Committee for Urban Studies at the University of Victoria in British
Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on the cultural politics of place
naming, geographies of urban memory, and the spatial history of the geo-
coded world. He is the co-editor of Performativity, Politics, and the Production
of Social Space (2014) and has published in a broad range of scholarly
journals, including Progress in Human Geography, Social & Cultural
Geography, Urban History, and the Annals of the Association of American
Geographers. His work on the historical geography of New York’s urban
streetscape has also been featured in various popular media outlets, such as
the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the New York Times.
Laura Šakaja is a Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Zagreb.
She received her PhD in social and economic geography from the State
University “M. V. Lomonosov” in Moscow and a PhD in geography from the
University of Zagreb. Her publications include the books, Culture and Space:
Spatial Organization of Cultural Activities in Croatia (Kultura i prostor:
prostorna organizacija kulturnih djelatnosti u Hrvatskoj, Zagreb, 1999) and
Introduction to Cultural Geography (Uvod u kulturnu geografiju, Zagreb,
2015). She has also published works on mental maps and imaginative
geographies, daily environments, and the spatial aspects of ethnic relations. In
recent years, her work has been focused on street toponymy and urban statuary
as semiotic features of the city. She is currently involved in research on blind
persons’ images of urban space.
Maral Sotoudehnia is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography at
the University of Victoria. Her research interests include the commodification
of urban space, the spatial politics of smart geo-addressing applications,
Contributors xix
and the production of digitally mediated forms of value in disruptive
computing applications. Her dissertation research investigates the
intersections between cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, their underlying
blockchains, and how both accelerate or resist the creation of financially
inclusive and exclusive spaces.
Jelena Stanić has an undergraduate degree in geography from the University of
Zagreb and an MSc in Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management from
the University of Manchester. Her undergraduate thesis examined the impact
of different political regimes on the urban toponymy in the Croatian capital of
Zagreb, from random space interventions to the mass encoding of the city with
ideological values and landmarks. After receiving her MSc degree, Jelena has
turned her career toward the environmental field in which she has been involved
through research and consulting positions.
Jani Vuolteenaho is a Senior Lecturer in human geography at the University of
Turku, Finland. His previous contributions to critical toponymic literature
range from an award-winning article on the everyday uses of unofficial place
names in early-twentieth century Helsinki (Dyos Prize in Urban History;
co-authored with Heikki Paunonen and Terhi Ainiala) to topical case studies
on spectacular naming as a place-making and branding tool. Vuolteenaho has
edited several journals, anthologies, and theme issues, including Terra, the
cultural magazine Särö (Rupture), COLLeGIUM: Studies Across Disciplines
in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Critical Toponymies, a ground-
breaking collection of essays on the politics of place naming.
Brenda Yeoh is a Professor (Provost’s Chair) in the Department of Geography
and Vice-Provost (Graduate Education) at the National University of
Singapore (NUS). She is also the Research Leader of the Asian Migration
Cluster at the Asia Research Institute at NUS. Her research interests include
the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, along with a wide
range of migration research themes in Asia, such as cosmopolitanism and
talent migration; gender, social reproduction, and care migration; and
international marriage migrants.
Craig Young is a Professor of Human Geography in the Division of Geography
and Environmental Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
His research interests include a focus on the cultural geographies and politics of
identity (from the individual to the urban and the nation) in the context of post-
socialist transformation, particularly in Eastern Europe, including street names.
He is the co-editor of Cosmopolitan Urbanism (2006) and co-author of a number
of articles on post-socialist identity formation in journals such as Nationalities
Papers, Europe-Asia Studies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
Acknowledgments
We first discussed the idea of publishing an edited book on the politics of street
naming at the Naming Places/Placing Names Workshop in Greenville, North
Carolina, which the three of us organized in Fall 2007. The workshop brought
together a band of scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia to discuss
the political aspects of place naming, and we would like to thank all the participants
for their camaraderie and ongoing contributions to the field of critical toponymy.
Following the Greenville workshop, two of the participants, Lawrence Berg and
Jani Vuolteenaho, published the first edited book on the “critical turn” in
toponymic scholarship entitled, Critical Toponymies: The Contested Politics of
Place Naming (2009), and a year later we published an article in Progress in
Human Geography on new directions in critical place name studies (Rose-
Redwood Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). Over the past decade, the field of
critical toponymy has grown considerably, and the present collection brings
together classic and contemporary writings on one major thematic focus of this
literature: the politics of street naming. By focusing on the political life of urban
streetscapes, we hope that this edited volume demonstrates the relevance of
critical toponymic scholarship to the field of urban studies more broadly. We are
especially grateful to the authors who have contributed to this book, since, without
their efforts, this collection would not have been possible.
We would also like to acknowledge the anonymous peer reviewers for their
constructive feedback on the book proposal and initial drafts of the chapters as well
as the editorial teams at Ashgate and Routledge. In particular, we are grateful to
Commissioning Editor, Katy Crossan, and Editorial Assistant, Amanda Buxton,
both formerly at Ashgate, who oversaw the first stage of this book project. Midway
through the project, Ashgate was incorporated into Taylor & Francis, and we would
therefore like to thank our new Editor, Faye Leerink, and Editorial Assistant,
Priscilla Corbett, at Routledge for seeing this book manuscript through to completion.
Much of the editorial work on this project took place during the Summer and
Fall of 2016 when the lead editor was on sabbatical, so we would like to acknowledge
the institutional support of the University of Victoria for providing the time and
resources that aided in the completion of this project. We are also grateful to family,
friends, colleagues, and students for their moral support and encouragement,
especially: Maleea Acker, Helena Andrade, Jen Bagelman, Julian Bakker,
xxii Acknowledgments
Lawrence Berg, Liora Bigon, Nick Blomley, Spencer Bradbury, Jordan Brasher,
Janna Caspersen, Lindsay Chase, Keith Cooper, Teresa Dawson, Terrence Dicks,
Lisa Domae, Chris Fortney, Barry Fruchter, Michael Glass, Daniel Good,
Marguerite Holloway, Alicia Hubka, Jolene Jackson, Lisa Kadonaga, Sun-Bae
Kim, Sara Koopman, Bob Lamm, Jen Mateer, James McCarthy, Preston Mitchell,
Matthew Mitchelson, Pamela Moss, Cam Owens, Alison Root, Amber Rose,
CindyAnn Rose-Redwood, Sierra Rose-Redwood, Riley Rose-Redwood, Maral
Sotoudehnia, Steve Spina, Simon Springer, Jordan Stanger-Ross, Jonathan Tilove,
Eliot Tretter, Brian Tucker, Jani Vuolteenaho, and Melvin White.
A number of chapters included in this collection are reprinted with permission
from previously published works. Chapter 2 is a revised reprint published with
permission from the Finnish Political Science Association. The chapter originally
appeared as Palonen, K. (1993), “Reading Street Names Politically,” in K. Palonen
and T. Parvikko (Eds.), Reading the Political (pp. 103–121), Helsinki: The Finnish
Political Science Association. Chapter 3 is a revised reprint published with
permission from Wiley. The original publication appeared as Yeoh, B. (1992),
“Street Names in Colonial Singapore,” Geographical Review, 82(3): 313–322.
Chapter 7 is a revised reprint published with permission from Elsevier and
originally appeared as Drozdzewski, D. (2014), “Using History in the Streetscape
to Affirm Geopolitics of Memory,” Political Geography, 42: 66–78. Chapters 8,
15, and 16 have been reprinted with permission from Taylor & Francis and were
previously published as Marin, A. (2012), “Bordering Time in the Cityscape.
Toponymic Changes as Temporal Boundary-Making: Street Renaming in
Leningrad/St. Petersburg,” Geopolitics, 17(1): 192–216; Alderman, D. and
Inwood, J. (2013), “Street Naming and the Politics of Belonging: Spatial Injustices
in the Toponymic Commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Social & Cultural
Geography, 14(2): 211–233; and Rose-Redwood, R. (2008), “From Number to
Name: Symbolic Capital, Places of Memory, and the Politics of Street Renaming
in New York City,” Social & Cultural Geography, 9(4): 431–452. Lastly, Chapters
9, 12, and 14 are revised reprints published with permission from SAGE and
originally appeared as Šakaja, L. and Stanić, J. (2011), “Other(ing),
Self(portraying), Negotiating: The Spatial Codification of Values in Zagreb’s
City-Text,” Cultural Geographies, 18(4): 495–516; Bigon, L. and Njoh, A.
(2015), “The Toponymic Inscription Problematic in Urban Sub-Saharan Africa:
From Colonial to Postcolonial Times,” Journal of Asian and African Studies,
50(1): 25–40; and Duminy, J. (2014), “Street Renaming, Symbolic Capital, and
Resistance in Durban,” Environment & Planning D, 32(2): 310–328.
1 The urban streetscape as
political cosmos
Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman,
and Maoz Azaryahu
Through its street names, the city is a linguistic cosmos.

—Walter Benjamin (1999, 522)
Introduction
There are few spaces as ordinary and mundane, yet politically charged, as a city’s
streets. A site of everyday routines and fleeting encounters, the “street” can also
become a place of memory as well as a space of political protest, mass demonstration,
and revolutionary action (Çelik, Favro, and Ingersoll 1994; Schechner 2003; Hebbert
2005; Butler 2015). The governing authorities of city and state, of course, have long
viewed the urban streetscape as a political technology of infrastructural power, not
only in terms of the regulation of circulatory flows of people, goods, and capital, but
also as a space in which to inscribe the ideologies of the ruling regime, and its vision
of history, into the landscapes of everyday life. One of the primary ways in which the
latter has been achieved over the past few centuries is through the naming of city
streets. Just as the statues and monuments of a fallen power are often demolished in
the wake of revolution (Verdery 1999), so too are streets renamed to mark a temporal
break with the past as the newly established regime seeks to reshape the spaces of the
present in its own image (Azaryahu 1996). Yet no matter how forcefully a political
regime may attempt to control the material and symbolic infrastructure of the streets,
its power is never absolute nor is its ability to erase the imprint of former regimes
complete or ever fully accepted by the public (Rose-Redwood 2008a; Light and
Young 2014). Consequently, while the act of street naming contributes to the
production of the urban streetscape as a political cosmos, such world-making practices
are characterized by what geographer Doreen Massey (2005, 9) calls “contemporaneous
plurality.” Put simply, the urban streetscape is a space where different visions of the
past collide in the present and competing spatial imaginaries are juxtaposed from one
street corner to the next. It is precisely at the spatial intersections of different temporal
worlds that the “political life” of urban streetscapes unfolds.
Over the past three decades, a rich body of scholarship has emerged that examines
the politics of street naming as part of a broader shift toward developing theoretically
informed approaches to the critical study of place naming, or critical toponymy
(Azaryahu 1986, 1996; K. Palonen 1993; Alderman 2003; Berg and Vuolteenaho
2 Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu
2009; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010; Vuolteenaho et al. 2012;
Light and Young 2014; Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch 2016). This “critical” turn
in toponymic studies has shifted attention from the traditional focus on the toponym-
as-linguistic-object and instead highlighted the contested processes, and spatial
politics, of naming places more generally (Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009). Critical
scholarship on the politics of street naming has been at the forefront of these efforts,
and such works have considerably enriched our understanding of the political life of
urban spaces. Importantly, critical studies of street naming are not confined to a
single discipline, but, like the very practice of place naming itself, represent a
convergence of diverse perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities.
The aim of this book is to showcase critical scholarship on the contested politics
of street naming in both historical and contemporary cities as well as to chart new
directions for this emerging field of interdisciplinary inquiry. As the contributions to
this edited collection illustrate, streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces
of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over
identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. The renaming
of streets plays a key role in the remaking of urban commemorative landscapes, and,
as such, political regimes of varying stripes have enlisted street naming as a strategy
of asserting sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power.
To explore these issues and more, the present collection brings together the works
of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists
to examine the ways in which the naming of streets intersects with more wide-ranging
struggles over the spatial politics of urban memory, social justice, and political
ideology. The primary goal of this book is therefore to assemble the writings of both
leading and emerging scholars in the field of critical toponymy to demonstrate how
conceptually and empirically rich analyses of the politics of street naming have much
to offer to contemporary theorizations of space, place, and landscape. Drawing upon a
wide range of case studies from Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and
Asia, the contributions in this volume provide detailed accounts of how the practices
of street naming have been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries,
the cultural politics of place, and material struggles over the right to the city.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we provide an overview of critical
scholarship on the politics of place naming generally, and street naming in
particular, situating such works within the context of more general developments
in cultural landscape studies. As part of this overview, we consider three primary
frameworks that have informed critical approaches to examining the politics of
street naming, which can broadly be conceived as viewing the urban streetscape
as a “city-text,” “cultural arena,” and “performative space.” Each of these
perspectives offers a distinct, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, lens through
which to interpret the political life of urban streetscapes.
The use of semiotics as an interpretive toolkit to analyze how political regime
changes have transformed the city-text arose during the 1980s and 1990s as part of
the movement among cultural geographers and other scholars to rethink the
landscape-as-text (Azaryahu 1986, 1990, 1992, 1996, 1997; for a discussion of the
landscape as a “text” more generally, see Duncan and Duncan 1988; Duncan
The urban streetscape as political cosmos 3
1990). This textual approach to the politics of toponymic inscription was largely
responsible for the initial upsurge of interest in the political aspects of street naming
as a contested spatial practice of commemoration, and the semiotic perspective
continues to inform contemporary scholarship in this area (Light, Nicolae, and
Suditu 2002; Pinchevski and Torgovnik 2002; Light 2004; E. Palonen 2008;
Azaryahu 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c; Šakaja and Stanić 2011).
From the mid-1990s onward, there has also been a growing interest in examining
how street naming and related toponymic practices are implicated in the racialization
and gendering of urban space, where the latter is viewed as a cultural arena in
which the politics of recognition are played out across the fault lines of race, gender,
and class (Alderman 1996, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Berg and Kearns 1996;
Dwyer and Alderman 2008; Rose-Redwood 2008c; Alderman and Inwood 2013).
Such works have sought to cast the study of street naming as part of the geographies
of social justice, focusing particular attention on the struggles of socially marginalized
groups to claim their rightful “place” in the public sphere of the urban streetscape.
Both of these approaches have emphasized the contested politics of designating
“official” street names—that is, the processes through which streets are named by
governing authorities who claim a monopoly on the legitimate forms of toponymic
inscription. However, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that the political
liveliness of street names and other toponyms is not reducible to official naming
processes and procedures alone (Rose-Redwood 2008a, 2016a; Light and Young
2014; Tucker and Rose-Redwood 2015; Creţan and Matthews 2016). Drawing upon
theories of performativity, non-representational theory, and ethnographic methods,
this third line of critical toponymic inquiry insists that we must also attend to the
reception of street naming practices among urban residents in their everyday lives,
which leads to a deeper consideration of naming-as-speech-act as well as both the
unconscious habits and more overt forms of everyday resistance at work in the
production of the urban streetscape as a performative space.
Each of the approaches outlined above, and discussed in more detail below, has
much to offer to a critical analysis of what we might call “streetscape politics.”
Yet they by no means exhaust the possible interpretive frameworks that might be
drawn upon to investigate the interrelations of naming, politics, and place in the
urban context (in particular, see Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009). The contributors to
the present collection find inspiration for their work in a diverse range of theoretical
traditions, which we take as a positive sign of the vitality and conceptual
experimentation that continues to characterize the field of critical urban toponymy.
From cultural indicator to technology of power: contextualizing the

critical turn in urban toponymy
The current focus of critical toponymic scholarship on the political aspects of street
naming is a significant departure from conventional approaches to urban toponymy,
which have long been mired in local antiquarianism, largely reducing the study of
street naming to the compilation of encyclopedic lists of street names for specific
cities. Writing about the history of streets and their names has been a popular genre
through which to narrate local history for over a century, and these works are often
filled with amusing tales, folkloristic anecdotes, and urban legends as an entertaining
way to inform the public about local traditions and urban heritage. Underlying the
traditional study of toponymy is a linguistic approach that has sought to uncover the
origin and meaning of individual place names, which are viewed as cultural
indicators of settlement patterns, migratory flows, regional identification, and
historical ecologies (Leighly 1978; Shortridge 1985; Jett 1997).
Although this traditional approach to toponymy can still be found in the pages of
specialized journals, its heyday was during the first three-quarters of the twentieth
century when many linguists, anthropologists, and geographers subscribed to what
we might call the toponym-as-cultural-indicator paradigm. This perspective
conceived of place names as a collection of objects, or artifacts, to be compiled and
classified as cultural “specimens” that indicate the inherent characteristics of
different cultures (Wright 1929, 140). In the field of geography, such an approach
was closely associated with the Berkeley tradition of cultural landscape studies that
Carl Sauer and his disciples, such as Wilbur Zelinsky (1967, 1988), developed. The
Berkeley-based literary scholar George Stewart’s landmark study, Names on the
Land (1967 [1945]), was particularly influential, inspiring none other than H.L.
Mencken (1948) to pen his own commentary on the street names of American
cities. The Berkeley School dominated the field of cultural geography throughout
much of the twentieth century until it was challenged by the so-called “new”
cultural geography in the 1980s, which called into question the homogenization
and reification of “culture” promulgated by the old guard (Duncan 1980).
By the 1980s, there was growing interest in the politics of landscape symbolism
and representation as cultural geographers and other scholars engaged with a range
of theoretical perspectives, including Marxism, humanism, and semiotics
(Lowenthal 1975, 1985; Harvey 1979; Cosgrove 1984). With its emphasis on the
textuality of the landscape as a “signifying system” (Duncan 1990, 17), this
intellectual milieu paved the way for a re-examination of the discursive and
ideological underpinnings of street naming as a political phenomenon. Yet, prior to
the 1990s, studies of street names generally appeared in specialized onomastic
journals with a limited audience in the more established disciplines of the social
sciences and humanities (e.g., McCarthy 1975, Stump 1988, Bar-Gal 1988, 1989).
In an academic universe where English is the predominant language of scholarship,
the Anglophone hegemony has also led academic works on street naming written
in languages other than English to be ignored (e.g., Bar-Gal 1988). This has had the
effect of such works being largely consigned to the margins of scholarly research.
However, there were some notable exceptions. For instance, Daniel Milo’s
(1986) work on French street names was published in Pierre Nora’s monumental
project, Lieux de Memoire (1984–1992). Drawing upon the early-twentieth
century sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s (1980 [1950], 1992 [1925]) classic
works on collective memory, Nora’s large-scale project had a significant influence
on studies of social and cultural memory as well as public forms of commemoration.
First appearing in French and later translated into English in the late-1990s, Milo’s
study examined French street names as “sites of memory” in multiple cities over
a long time frame. Similarly, Priscilla Ferguson’s (1988) reading of the street
names of Paris also laid the foundation for theorizing urban streetscapes as spatial
narratives and signifying systems where spatialities and temporalities intertwine.
One of the first scholarly works devoted explicitly to examining how commemorative
street naming is embedded in the construction of official political identity was Maoz
Azaryahu’s (1986) study of the political history of East Berlin’s street names.
Azaryahu’s (1988, 1990, 1991, 1992) subsequent writings during this early period
focused on the political dimensions of toponymic commemoration as an aspect of
municipal politics in Berlin during the 1920s. In particular, he provided a detailed
history of commemorative street renaming during phases of major political transition
and argued that toponymic changes, which served to inscribe historical narratives into
urban space, were indicative of broader ideological reorientations in society. In the
early-1990s, other scholars also began to develop theoretical frameworks for “reading
street names politically” (K. Palonen 1993; also, see K. Palonen, this volume). Kari
Palonen’s (1993) study of the politics of street naming in Helsinki is especially
noteworthy, because it was the first publication to attempt a comprehensive overview
of the emerging literature of street name studies.
Most of the theoretically innovative research on street naming at this time was
written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and literary scholars. Initially,
geographers were surprisingly not at the forefront of this area of scholarly inquiry
despite its inherently geographical focus. An important exception was Brenda Yeoh’s
path-breaking work on the historical geography of street naming in colonial Singapore,
which compared the official European-style street naming practices of the governing
authorities with the “alternative systems of street names that originated among the
immigrant Asian communities” (1992, 313; Yeoh, this volume; also, see Yeoh 1996).
What set Yeoh’s (1992) work apart from other early studies was that it moved beyond
focusing solely on the official practices of street naming and called attention to the
importance of competing ontologies of place that were enacted through informal,
everyday speech acts (also, see Pred 1992). Moreover, she demonstrated that street
nomenclature was more than a passive artifact but was rather a means of claiming a
city’s landscape, symbolically and materially, and using the power of urban space to
legitimize or de-legitimize certain worldviews and identities.
Garth Myers was also an important geographical voice at this time in exploring
how place names are “played with as tactics of power, or used as vehicles of derision”
(1996, 238). Myers (1996) focused on the vernacular naming of neighborhoods in
Zanzibar, and he convincingly argued that urban naming practices served as a means
of social and spatial boundary-making as well as the othering of people and places.
Like Yeoh, he noted that place naming was “exercised both by those having a great
deal of social power and by those comparatively lacking it” (Myers 1996, 244). Myers
encouraged the analysis of toponymic resistance, a point echoed specifically in the
context of street renaming by anthropologists Faraco and Murphy (1997) in their
analysis of political regime change in Spain. Uncovering the existence of this tension
between using streetscapes as instruments of elite control versus their capacity to be
used for counter-hegemonic purposes proved to be an early foundational idea in the
development of critical toponymic studies (Alderman 2008).
Various other works published by geographers were seminal to the shift from
the linguistic study of names as cultural indicators and artifacts to the critical
analysis of naming as a technology of power. Azaryahu’s (1996) landmark study
on the “power of commemorative street names” was particularly influential and
remains the most cited article in the field. His discussion proved consequential in
elucidating how street names operated, simultaneously, as a system of locational
orientation and as a socio-political text of historical commemoration. Given the
practical importance of street names and “their recurrent and unreflected use in
various contexts, both ordinary and extraordinary,” Azaryahu illustrated the ways
in which street naming inscribes political messages and commemorative meanings
into many facets and settings of everyday urban life and thus makes the past
“tangible and intimately familiar” (1996, 321). In contrast to traditional approaches
that reified and failed to unpack the street naming process, Azaryahu’s (1997)
work was critical in characterizing street naming as directed not only by ideological
considerations but also through decision-making procedures and the wider
re-planning of the political geography and semiotic order of the city. A number of
scholars have followed Azaryahu’s lead in reconstructing the larger political
decisions and identity-building work behind street name changes. Light’s (2004)
work on street renaming in postsocialist Romania is an early and noteworthy
example of this vein of scholarship (also, see Light, Nicolae, and Suditu 2002).
Additionally, Lawrence Berg and Robin Kearns (1996) broke important conceptual
ground in further defining and refining our understanding of the role of naming in the
social construction and contestation of place (also, see Kearns and Berg 2002).
Drawing from emotionally charged debates over the re-instatement of Maori names
within Aotearoa/New Zealand, Berg and Kearns (1996) argued that place naming, as
part of both the symbolic and material order, represents a way of “norming” or
legitimating hegemonic power relations and therefore plays a significant role in the
cultural politics of place. They set an important precedent in demonstrating how the
contested politics of naming can become intertwined with the wider discourses of
gender and racial identity as well as nationalism. Much of the scholarship on the
politics of place naming has tended to focus on the use of toponymic inscription as a
spatial strategy for promoting nationalistic histories and agendas; yet, since the mid-
1990s, there has been a growing body of literature that examines the multiple axes of
power and identity at play in the naming of streets and other places, thereby illustrating
how the spatial struggles over race, gender, class, and nation are mutually constitutive.
Inspired by this focus on the interrelations of race, space, and place naming, Derek
Alderman (2000) sought to make explicit the resistant and contested capacity of street
renaming and its relationship to African American struggles for political and cultural
recognition in the urban context. Examining the politics of naming roads for slain civil
rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), he critically examined the role that a
street’s site and situation—its geography—plays in debates over remembering King.
Stakeholders can and do advocate different ideas about where best to locate memories
in urban public space, and, due to continuing racial inequalities, MLK streets are
vulnerable to being segregated and marginalized. Alderman’s contributions to the
field have highlighted how traditional toponymic research, as well as more recent
critical scholarship, has failed to realize that the mere occurrence of street names
represents only half of the story. The specifics of a street name’s intra-urban spatiality
affect the negotiation of its meaning(s) and reception among different local populations.
The larger cultural politics of MLK streets is only realized by examining how names
fit into the broader geography of the city and how local political actors and groups
struggle with each other in determining not just the existence but also the geographical
scale of influence and visibility that the name is given (Alderman 2003). Alderman’s
early emphasis on the locational politics of street naming ushered in other studies of
street naming in the context of center-versus-periphery spatial relations (Šakaja and
Stanić 2011; Nada 2014) as well as broader political questions about how the
emplacing of name and memory within the urban landscape affects the efficacy of
social justice struggles (Alderman and Inwood, this volume).
The studies noted above from the late-1980s to the early-2000s, along with others
cited in this volume, laid the foundations for the field of critical toponymy. By the
end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the field had matured to the point
that the first anthology and progress report on critical toponymies had been published
(Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010).
Lawrence Berg and Jani Vuolteenaho’s book, Critical Toponymies: The Contested
Politics of Place Naming (2009), was particularly influential in marking the “critical
turn” in toponymic studies. We are now in a period of active theory construction in
which scholars are expanding and problematizing conventional understandings of
how toponymic inscriptions operate as technologies of power inside and outside the
context of formal political regimes, resistance movements, and people’s official and
unofficial performances of identity (Light and Young 2014; Tucker and Rose-
Redwood 2015; Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch 2016). In the next section, we
consider three of the main approaches to the critical study of street naming that
continue to influence contemporary scholarship on the urban streetscape as city-
text, cultural arena, and performative space, in order to highlight the evolving and
dynamic nature of critical urban toponymy.
Street naming and the political life of urban streetscapes
Street naming, political regimes, and the commemorative politics of the city-text
One of the major themes to arise from the critical turn in toponymic scholarship
has been a focus on the relation between political regime change and transformations
to the symbolic infrastructure of the urban streetscape (Berg and Vuolteenaho
2009), where the latter is conceived as a “city-text” to be interpreted through the
lens of semiotics, discourse analysis, and ideological critique. As discussed above,
this general emphasis on the textuality of street naming coincided with the
widespread interest in landscape symbolism, representation, and textuality that
swept through the social sciences and humanities during the 1980s and 1990s. If
the landscape was to be understood as a “text,” as many cultural geographers and
other scholars had argued at the time, then the act of street naming appeared to be
a quintessential example of producing the city-as-text.
From a semiotic perspective, each signifier (street name) serves to represent a
particular referent (street) within a system of signification (city-text). Viewed in
this light, the city-text functions as a system of spatial orientation in which each
street name acquires its meaning both intertextually and relationally. However, as
numerous studies have shown, street naming is not a utilitarian aid to wayfinding
alone but also plays a crucial role in embedding historical narratives into the
spaces of everyday life (e.g., Ferguson 1988; Azaryahu 1996). If a commemorative
street name is to be understood as a signifier, its referent is not only the street to
which it refers but also the historical figure or event which is thereby brought into
the sphere of public memory as part of a political regime of spatial inscription.
Along with monuments and other memorials, commemorative street names
celebrate that which the governing authorities deem worthy of public remembrance
and are thus employed in the semiotic construction of urban memory in the cityscape.
The commemorative naming of streets generally entails the reproduction of the
ethos and ideology underpinning the ruling socio-political order through officially
mandated urban toponyms. Although historical narratives become “materialized” in
urban space through the naming of streets (Rose-Redwood 2008a), the spatial
configuration of the city-text is synchronic rather than chronological, since the
traces of naming practices from different historical eras and political regimes often
intermingle in the spaces of contemporaneous plurality that constitute the political
cosmos of the urban streetscape. City-texts are thus composed of commemorative
elements, yet they are largely devoid of a narrative structure and the clear sense of
“before” and “after” that this entails (Azaryahu 1996).
As an officially authorized version of history inscribed into the cityscape, a
city-text is an expression of changing power relations and shifting political
priorities. The streetscape can therefore be viewed as a palimpsest, which is
continuously being written and re-written by multiple “authors” as well as
reinterpreted by different “readers.” Moreover, this re-writing of urban space is
never fully complete, since the city-text is always open to a layering of different
historical narratives onto each other in a process that Foote (1997) has called
“symbolic accretion” (also, see Dwyer 2004). The official authors of a city-text
generally attempt to assert their claim to a monopoly over the designation and
meaning of street names, yet over time these authorial intentions often fade from
public memory since many urban residents do not pay attention to the deeper
historical meaning of commemorative toponyms in the context of their daily
routines. This process of semantic displacement takes place when there is a
“change of referential framework that occurs when a historical name becomes a
spatial designation” (Azaryahu 1996, 322). Consequently, all the commemorative
posturing of the ruling elites may lose much of its force when we consider that
street names often become empty signifiers to many urban residents who use them
as spatial identifiers on a daily basis but may not know, or care, who or what has
been commemorated in a street name (Light and Young 2014).
Nevertheless, this does not seem to have deterred those in power from using
commemorative naming practices to naturalize and legitimize their authority. The use
of street names for commemorative purposes is based on an ancient tradition of
naming cities after their historical or mythical founders. Following the example of
Alexander the Great, new cities in the Hellenistic and Roman Empire were named
after kings and emperors, prominent examples being Alexandria, Antioch, and
Caesarea. However, the administrative regulation of street naming as a political
technology of modern government can be traced back to seventeenth-century France.
In 1605, the centralized control of assigning street names was initiated in Paris during
the reign of Henri IV. Under the aegis of the Duke de Sully, the king’s right hand and
the grand commissioner of public works, large-scale projects of urban development
were initiated in France, including building new bridges and streets in Paris. In
conjunction with the dean of the city guilds, standing at the head of the city council,
and the city’s aldermen, names were given to new streets in the city. These were royal
names celebrating dynastic titles and commemorating members of the newly
established royal family of the House of Bourbon such as rue and place Royale, rue
and place Dauphine, and rue Christine, the latter of which was named after the second
daughter of the French king (Cousin and Lacombe 1899).
Paris was also one of the first cities to systematically install official signage at
street intersections. In 1728, the chief of police issued an order to inscribe the
names of streets on the walls of buildings, thereby making street names both a
matter of official record and a visual aspect of the urban streetscape (Cousin and
Lacombe 1899). This new street regulation was later emulated in other countries
as well. In 1763, a royal decree in Sweden required that street signs should be
placed at the corners of important streets in Stockholm (Pred 1992), and a bill was
passed in 1765 requiring local councils in England to number houses as well as to
affix street signs at intersections (Miles 1973).
Since the eighteenth century, the numbering of houses and naming of streets
has become one of the primary strategies of urban spatial ordering that governments
have adopted to more efficiently tax, regulate, and control urban populations
(Thale 2007; Rose-Redwood 2008b, 2012; Rose-Redwood and Tantner 2012;
Tantner 2009, 2015). The use of numbers as street names has also been widely
adopted in some countries, such as the United States, where the utilitarian logic of
number is united with the symbolic value of commemorative naming (Rose-
Redwood and Kadonaga 2016). During the nineteenth century, those promoting
such spatial practices often viewed the urban streetscape in explicitly textual
terms with street and house numbers being likened to the “page numbers” of a
book with urban space conceived as a “great ledger of the community” (Rose-
Redwood 2008b). Unlike the “new” cultural geography of the 1980s and 1990s,
this earlier iteration of the city-as-text focused less on questions of spatial narrative
and more on creating a legible typography, or “page layout,” for the city-text. Yet
even numerical street names can acquire symbolic value as part of the urban
commemorative landscape (Rose-Redwood 2008a, 2008c; Zerubavel 2014).
Urban toponyms—whether they be numbers or names—have the potential to
become constitutive elements of a commemorative system of nomenclature that
inscribes an officially approved narrative of historical memory into the geography
of the city. In particular, naming streets after persons and events interweaves “an
authorized version of history into ordinary settings of everyday life” (Azaryahu
1996, 312). As an honorific measure, commemorative street naming is an act of
civic canonization that aims to secure a place for that which is commemorated in an
officially sanctioned “hall of fame” embedded in the rhetorical space of the cityscape.
As an expression of power, street naming often plays an important role in
struggles over the symbolic control of public space. Such toponymic conflicts are
especially acute in the context of bi-lingual or multi-lingual societies, where the
very decision of which languages to use on street signs, as well as the placement of
each in relation to the other, can itself be a politically charged issue (Jones and
Merriman 2009; Azaryahu 2012a; Bigon and Dahamshe 2014). Yet, in both mono-
lingual and multi-lingual contexts, street names play an important role in the
geopolitics of public memory and are therefore susceptible to being replaced during
periods of revolutionary change of the socio-political order. As an act that signifies
control over history and public space, rewriting the city-text is a practice of historical
revision that doubles as a “ritual of revolution.” During periods of significant
political change, street renaming generally involves both the decommemoration of
the previous regime’s pantheon of heroes and its replacement through processes of
recommemoration, where the newly established regime typically views such
changes as a legitimate form of “symbolic reparation” for past wrongs whereas the
champions of the old order often see these very same developments as vengeful acts
of “symbolic retribution” (Swart 2008; Azaryahu 2011a; Adebanwi, this volume).
One of the first instances of the commemorative renaming of streets as a result
of revolutionary change occurred in Paris during the French Revolution, and such
street name changes became routine during successive regime changes in France
thereafter (Cousin and Lacombe 1899). In 1792, a decree was issued that required
all royal and clerical denominations to be replaced by revolutionary national and
republican names. The old Christian saints lost their titles, while the new “saints”
of the revolution were inducted into the revolutionary hall of fame through
engraving their names onto the walls at the street corners. Under Napoleon’s rule,
an official decree issued in 1800 stipulated a revision of street names in Paris, and,
with the collapse of the imperial regime in 1815, some 50 Parisian streets were
renamed, most of them regaining their pre-1789 designations (Cousin and Lacomb
1899). The susceptibility of commemorative street names to political changes
shows that, from the perspective of the governing authorities, the ideological
reorientation entailed in the rewriting of the city-text seems to trump the spatial
disorientation and urban confusion that may result from the renaming of streets.
There is now an extensive body of critical scholarship that examines the politics
of street renaming in the wake of major political transformations (Berg and
Vuolteenaho 2009). In particular, the toponymic changes that accompanied the rise
and fall of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states have garnered
considerable attention (e.g., Light 2004; Gill 2005; E. Palonen 2008). Likewise, the
struggles over street renaming associated with other geopolitical flashpoints, such as
the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the end of apartheid in South Africa, have been
the focus of numerous studies (e.g., Peteet 2005; Swart 2008). Scholars have also
considered the toponymic legacy of imperial conquest, colonialism, and the ongoing
efforts to rewrite the city-text as a spatial strategy of nation-building in various
postcolonial contexts (Bigon 2008, 2009; Nash 2009; Giraut and Houssay-
Holzschuch 2016; Wanjiru and Matsubara 2017). Some recent studies, including
several included in the present volume, emphasize the limits to toponymic changes
that have occurred as a result of political shifts, highlighting the continuing presence
of “left-over” street names that remain in place despite the fact that they do not align
with the prevailing ideology (Light and Young 2014; Light and Young, this volume).
Such works are significant because they call attention to the spatial unevenness of
toponymic change, which complicates the narratives we tell about the political life
of urban streetscapes.
Although other approaches to critical toponymy have emerged in recent years,
the semiotic analysis of the city-text continues to offer new insights into the politics
of street naming (E. Palonen 2008; Azaryahu 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c;
Šakaja and Stanić 2011). Yet semiotic approaches have never implied “a reduction
of the city in its entirety to a mere text” (Azaryahu 1996, 324). On the contrary, they
can help us appreciate “not that the world (space-time) is like a text but rather that a
text … is just like the rest of the world” (Massey 2005, 54, italics in original). Only
then can we avoid what Massey refers to as “the longstanding tendency to tame the
spatial into the textual” (2005, 54). It is precisely this taming of space and place into
“text” that critical toponymic scholarship has sought to call into question by
de-naturalizing the regimes of spatial inscription that make up the taken-for-granted
spaces of everyday life. While urban streetscapes are not reducible to the inscriptions
of sovereign power alone, they most certainly are one of the most significant spaces
in which the statist dream of rendering “representation” and “reality” equivalent—
by transforming history into geography—intersects with the everyday lives of urban
inhabitants whose geographical imaginations and lived experiences will forever
exceed the sovereignty of signification.
Urban streetscapes as cultural arenas and the geographies of social justice

The urban streetscape is not merely a blank slate upon which sovereign powers
inscribe their ideologies, it is also a “cultural arena” in which different social groups
struggle over what histories and whose identities are to be recognized or ignored in
and through the official city-text (Alderman 2002a; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and
Azaryahu 2010). Viewing the streetscape as a cultural arena—while just one of
several possible analytical lenses—can help us understand the socio-political
processes and conflicts that underlie the production and consumption of urban
toponyms. It also leads to a deeper consideration of who has the power (or not) to
name, who has a right to the city and to be visible within the streetscape, and whose
visions of, and claims to, the urban past, present, and future will predominate
(Dwyer and Alderman 2008). The geographies of street naming are therefore not
solely the product of social power but also an important conduit for achieving
power—making the political authority, ideological persuasions, and geographical
imaginaries of aspiring sovereigns appear to be part of the “natural order” of the
world. And, yet, such processes of naturalization are never complete and, in some
cases, can become the subject of intense political controversy.
The stakes are high for defining and debating street naming because of the powerful
role that place and landscape play in social life. As Peteet (2005, 153) observes,
“[n]ames, and their meanings, form part of the cultural systems that structure and
nuance the way we see, understand and imagine the world.” Put simply, place naming
has the potential to bring new worlds into being by calling forth particular socio-
spatial actions—including violence, dispossession, and exclusion. Counter-naming
practices can also be used to contest hegemonic national narratives (Zeidel 2006) and
“unsettle” dominant territorial claims (Murphyao and Black 2015). The endowing of
places with new oppositional names and meanings can be controversial since these
narrative struggles frequently become weapons in broader debates over who and what
should be remembered (and conversely forgotten).
Importantly, the social and political “life” of street names illustrates that a city’s
road network is not simply a set of abstract spaces and flows but also the vehicle
for emotion, memory, and a sense of place (Alderman 2006; Caliendo 2011).
These emotional geographies are not separate from the political, economic, and
social struggles of urban populations; rather, they constitute and structure their
experiences with, and perceptions of, being included or excluded from wider
notions of urban citizenship. As a growing number of activists, academics, and
public officials have recognized, the (re)construction of urban streetscapes through
the renaming of streets is not simply a matter of semiotics and semantics alone but
is also an important practice in achieving or denying broader geographies of social
justice (Alderman and Inwood, this volume).
For historically marginalized groups across a wide range of national contexts,
city streets have emerged as arenas in which to question the absence of their
culture and heritage within traditional place-based narratives. Woodman (2015),
along with a growing number of scholars, argues that absence is something
actively created through naming practices and that it exerts a presence or influence
in social life more generally. Moreover, Swart (2008) explores how the rewriting
of street names in post-conflict societies can serve as a mechanism of transitional
justice for formerly victimized and invisiblized groups, providing a form of
symbolic reparation for reclaiming their identity and dignity while also being a
legal instrument of change in advocating for basic civil rights.
Place renaming is now strategically employed by indigenous peoples, racialized
minorities, and other marginalized groups to challenge their exclusion and
misrepresentation within long-established framings of public space (Monmonier
2006; Koch and Hercus 2009; Rose-Redwood 2016). In the United States, this has
been most clearly seen in the efforts of African Americans to cleanse the urban
landscape of references that valorize white supremacy. In the immediate wake of
the Charleston Massacre of 2015 and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement,
a number of American communities became embroiled in debates about why their
schools, parks, and streets memorialize the names of southern Civil War generals,
leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, and other historical defenders of slavery and racism
(Sullivan 2015; Bryan 2016). Many of these communities have called for a
renaming of such places as part of a restorative justice project that sees the killing
of African Americans by white supremacists and trigger-happy police as an
extension of a society that de-values the memories, experiences, and welfare of
people of color. For some activists, the symbolic violence inflicted through racist
street naming patterns is part of, rather than apart from, the wider physical
violence, discrimination, and oppression faced by black America.
The cultural arena of the urban streetscape is therefore a site of socio-political
struggle and resistance. This resistance can take the form of overt protest in the
streets and official renaming campaigns at city hall, but it can also involve more
informal yet no less important dissident performances, such as the refusal to use a
particular street name in everyday speech or the layering of counter-meanings
onto a name as a means of reappropriation and reclamation. For instance, the
name Hayti—long used pejoratively by whites to refer to black settlements in the
southern United States—was claimed and reimagined by African Americans in
Durham, North Carolina, to mark and promote the urban district’s proud history
of black economic empowerment and cultural expression amid humiliating Jim
Crow segregation and discrimination (Kellogg 1977).
While urban toponymic patterns are highly racialized, they are also deeply
gendered. A recent study of seven world cities found that, on average, only 27.5
percent of the streets studied had female names (Poon 2015). The gender
inequalities inscribed into many city-texts prompted a French feminist group,
Osez le Féminisme, to protest the fact that only 2.6 percent of Parisian streets have
female names. Unsurprisingly, the limited number of women honored are the
wives or daughters of famous men. This massive gap in the recognition of men
and women on street signs exists, ironically, at the same time that Paris is becoming
known for its progressive street and transportation policies. Osez le Féminisme’s
protest for street equity involved covering the official street signs of 60 roads with
the names of women, which attracted significant public attention but was only a
temporary reversal of power (Jaffe 2015). Such media reports and acts of resistance
notwithstanding, the study of the gender politics of street naming is still a woefully
neglected theme in urban studies and critical toponymic scholarship.
It may be tempting to frame streetscape struggles over race and gender in the
starkly black and white terms of a dominant/marginalized duality, yet it is also
important to recognize that the political actors involved in the contested politics of
street naming are not monolithic groups (Rose-Redwood 2008c). Giraut and
Houssay-Holzschuch (2016) insist that critical toponymic studies should move
beyond exclusive categories to explore the various combinations and nexuses that
emerge between different contexts, actors, and technologies of toponymic
inscription if we are to better understand the politics of place naming in comparative
perspective. The complex range of interests that converge within the arena of
street naming can complicate and even compromise the very definition of what a
geography of social justice looks like and for whom, and on whose terms, the
urban streetscape enacts justice. Indeed, toponymic resistance is not by any means
restricted to those historically known to be excluded or discriminated against
(Morin and Berg 2001). Amid the growing push for city street networks to foster
multicultural inclusion, there has been significant push-back from those unwilling
to relinquish their power and ideological position within the landscape. For
example, while the call to remove street names that reference the slave-holding
Confederate States of America is increasingly felt across the United States
(Blinder 2016), it is striking how few cities have actually engaged in the place
renaming that would topple these racist images. In fact, some states such as
Tennessee have recently passed “heritage protection” laws that could clearly limit
the rewriting of racialized street names as well as impede the removal of
Confederate memorials and monuments (The Denver Post 2016).
Although urban streetscapes have undoubtedly been arenas of toponymic conflict,
recent research has engaged in a productive critique of the commonplace framing of
the politics of street naming through the analytic lens of resistance. Moving beyond
an overly politicized and reductionist notion of contestation, Light and Young
(2014) point to the role that habit plays in everyday practices to explain why people
often do not use newly introduced street names. Other scholars have also argued that
we must move away from seeing resistance, rather statically, as “a property deduced
from a presupposed hegemony” and instead make room for a more performative
conception of toponymic power that recognizes the diversity of modes, acts, and
political subjectivities involved in the contestation of street naming (Duminy 2014,
325). It is to this third approach to the politics of street naming that we now turn.
Beyond representationalism: from the city-as-text to the urban streetscape as a

performative space of everyday life
Given that the field of critical toponymy initially emerged as part of the cultural
turn in the social sciences and humanities, much of the scholarship on the politics
of street naming has conceptualized the urban streetscape in textual and
representational terms. Indeed, whether we adopt a semiotic approach or view the
landscape as a cultural arena, street naming is typically understood as a form of
“representation” in a double sense. On the one hand, urban place names are
commonly viewed as signifiers that linguistically represent that which is signified,
and, on the other hand, the visibility of street signs is seen as an important way to
politically represent different social groups in the public spaces of the city. In
other words, despite all the nuances of its analyses, much of the critical scholarship
on street naming, and place naming more generally, continues to be framed within
the orbit of representationalist modes of thought.
As an epistemological and ontological project, representationalism is based upon
the belief that the primary purpose of language is to represent the world. According
to this viewpoint, language is representational and representation is linguistic. This
chain of equivalence between language and representation has a long history and is
deeply ingrained in both modern scientific thought and humanistic inquiry (Rose-
Redwood and Glass 2014). Whether we view names as mere labels that are ascribed
to pre-existing things in the world (à la positivism) or naming is understood as a
reflection or representation of social power (à la critical social theory), we shall in
both cases remain tethered to the chain of representationalist thought. The problem
with this way of thinking is that language has many more uses in the world beyond
its representational function and the act of representation can take many different
forms beyond the medium of linguistic textuality. This is significant for critical
toponymic scholarship because it means that it is possible to think about place
naming and related forms of spatial inscription as more-than-representational
practices. This de-coupling of language and representation is essential if we are to
move beyond representational modes of analysis and towards a critical account of
urban streetscapes as “performative spaces” of everyday life.
A number of scholars have begun to explore the implications that performative and
non-representational theories have for rethinking the politics of place naming as a
spatial practice. As early as the 1990s, Myers (1996) called attention to the
performative aspects of place naming and the need to move beyond the map by
considering the uses of toponyms in ordinary speech situations through ethnographic
methods (also, see Entrikin 1991). Kearns and Berg (2002) extended this line of
inquiry by examining place name pronunciation as a performative act, drawing upon
Judith Butler’s conception of performativity as “the reiterative and citational practice
by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (1993, 2). This emphasis on
the performativity of naming is grounded less in the textual analysis of semiotics or
hermeneutics and more in the pragmatics of speech acts as embodied practices.
Focusing on the contextual and relational uses of language in ordinary life, pragmatics
has its roots in the theory of performative utterances, or speech acts, developed by
J.L. Austin during the mid-twentieth century, which served as the basis of his classic
study, How To Do Things With Words (1962). Austin insists that speech has the
capacity not only to describe or represent pre-existing objects or events but can also
perform an action in the world, since “to say something is to do something” (1962,
12, italics in original). For Austin, a speech act is only performative when it is uttered
in the “appropriate circumstances” by an authorized spokesperson following
established procedures. Subsequent theorists, such as Derrida (1988) and Butler
(1993), have challenged this conventionalist reading of performativity by
demonstrating how the very process of authorization is itself a performative practice
that can never escape the contingency of its own self-validating logic and is thus
always open to potential contestation (Rose-Redwood and Glass 2014; Butler 2015).
Since the act of naming is a primary example which Austin himself uses to
illustrate the notion of the performative utterance, it should come as no surprise that
one of the first accounts to critically examine street naming as a political practice
took Austinian speech act theory as its point of departure (K. Palonen 1993, also, see
K. Palonen, this volume). In hindsight, the performative approach to street naming
seems to have been largely eclipsed for much of the 1990s by representational
readings of the city-text. Over the past decade, however, there has been growing
interest in reconsidering the performative and more-than-representational
dimensions of street naming. For instance, Rose-Redwood (2008a) explores the
“performative limits of the official city-text” in his study of the renaming of Sixth
Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas in mid-twentieth century New York. In
particular, he illustrates how the official act of street renaming is not guaranteed by
governmental decree alone but very much depends upon its performative “uptake”
in everyday urban life. Likewise, Adebanwi (2012) offers a comparative analysis of
the geopolitics of street naming in New York and Lagos, Nigeria, from a performative
perspective, while Duminy’s (2014, 310) study of political conflicts over street
renaming in Durban, South Africa, seeks to advance a “performative conception of
symbolic capital and resistance [that] may aid our understanding of naming
processes in contested memorial landscapes.” These in-depth case studies have
enriched our understanding of the performances and counter-performances
associated with street naming and, in the process, have heightened our awareness of
the performative limits of official naming practices, on the one hand, and the
performative force of everyday speech acts, on the other.
One of the most significant methodological developments to arise from the
performative turn in urban toponymic scholarship has been a renewed interest in
studying how official and unofficial street names are used by urban residents in their
everyday lives. As noted above, Light and Young (2014) provide a particularly
compelling account of the importance of habit in shaping the use of urban place
names in ordinary speech situations. Using a mixed-methods approach, they show
how a market named in honor of a prominent Communist Party activist, Piaţa
Moghioroş, in Bucharest, Romania, was officially renamed during the postsocialist
era, yet the majority of urban residents continued to use the original name more than
two decades after its official decommemoration. In this specific case, Light and
Young (2014) contend that the ongoing usage of a socialist place name in a
postsocialist context is not so much a form of conscious resistance to the current
political-economic regime—as the notion of the urban streetscape as a “cultural
arena” might suggest—but is rather a result of habitual practices among ordinary
“users” of urban spaces.
While not explicitly drawing upon theories of performativity per se, several
other recent studies have also explored the everyday uses of street names in
different contexts (e.g., Shoval 2013; Creţan and Matthews 2016). This emphasis
on the reception and use of urban toponyms has enlarged the scope of critical
urban toponymy by moving beyond the archive and the map to consider the daily
“life” of street names. As a result, such works have demonstrated that there is far
more to the politics of street naming than a focus on the proclamations of political
authorities alone would suggest. This emerging research trajectory, therefore, has
the potential to broaden our conception of the relation between place naming and
politics in a number of important ways. Specifically, it demonstrates that there are
indeed limits to the sovereign assertion of a monopoly over naming practices,
since, whether through unconscious habit or overt resistance, the users of urban
space may undercut the legitimacy of officially sanctioned street names. This
insight leads to a realization that the political life of urban streetscapes is not
solely confined to the arena of formal politics, and thus our critical analyses of
street naming must likewise extend beyond the sovereign declarations of
officialdom. Finally, a performative approach to studying the everyday use of
street names can help elucidate how naming is not a singular act of political will
but rather depends upon a series of reiterative citational practices enacted by a
diverse array of social and political actors. This shifts our attention from the
production to the reproduction of urban space, because the performative force of
a particular name is contingent upon its repetitious use in daily life.
Naming, politics, and place: key themes in the present collection
Although there is far more to the politics of the “street” than the issue of naming
alone, the contributions to this edited collection illustrate how the social struggles
over street naming have played a significant role in the political life of urban
streetscapes. Each of the contributors to the present volume approaches the field
of critical urban toponymy from a different vantage point—both theoretically
and empirically—yet there are also a number of common themes across the
chapters showcased in this book. One major focus is the relation between street
naming and the “colonial urban order” from Southeast Asia (Yeoh, this volume)
to Sub-Saharan Africa (Bigon and Njoh, this volume) as well as the contested
politics of street name changes in postcolonial contexts, with the case of South
Africa being a prime example (Adebanwi; Duminy, this volume). Another
thematic area that features prominently in the present book is the use of street
naming as a political technology of nationalism and the toponymic consequences
of the political-economic transition from socialism to postsocialism in Europe
(Azaryahu; Drozdzewski; Light and Young; Marin; Palmberger; E. Palonen;
Šakaja and Stanić; Vuolteenaho and Puzey, this volume). In many respects,
these two geopolitical transformations—the shift from the colonial-to-
postcolonial and socialist-to-postsocialist—have framed much of the critical
scholarship on urban toponymy over the past three decades, so it is to be expected
that many of the chapters in this collection speak directly to these concerns.
However, as we outlined above, there are other important issues associated
with the politics of street naming that deserve consideration as well. In particular,
several chapters in this collection call attention to the ways in which street naming
has contributed to the racialization of urban streetscapes (Adebanwi; Alderman
and Inwood; Bigon and Njoh; Duminy; Rose-Redwood; Yeoh, this volume). As
these studies illustrate, the naming of streets should not be seen in isolation from
broader questions of social and spatial justice, especially in relation to the politics
of racism, racial segregation, and the ongoing legacies of white supremacy. Street
naming is also implicated in the gendering of urban space. More often than not,
the street naming process has been dominated by masculinist policy agendas
resulting in far fewer streets being named in honor of women than men in cities
around the world, as a number of contributions in this volume attest (Duminy; K.
Palonen; Rose-Redwood; Vuolteenaho and Puzey, this volume).
Additionally, class power and the privileges of property ownership have long
influenced the practices of place naming, and the naming of streets is no exception.
Street naming is often a strategy for generating “symbolic capital” by enhancing
the prestige of particular individuals or groups (Duminy; Rose-Redwood, this
volume). This form of “reputational politics” (Alderman 2002a) is, in large part,
why the commemorative work that street naming performs is so important,
because it not only naturalizes and legitimizes selective visions of the past but is
also instrumental in spatializing the social boundaries of belonging and exclusion
along the axes of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and citizenship (Alderman and
Inwood, this volume). The commemorative politics of street naming is therefore a
reoccurring theme in urban toponymic scholarship. Yet the commemorative value
of street names sometimes conflicts with the governmental imperative of using
street addresses as the basis of producing spaces of legibility, especially with the
growing prevalence of digital geo-addressing technologies and the rise of the
“smart city” (Sotoudehnia, this volume; also, see Rose-Redwood 2012).
Taken together, the contributions in this book explore a wide range of thematic
concerns related to the politics of street naming in a diverse array of geographical
locales. They also draw upon a variety of theoretical perspectives, including
everything from semiotics and discourse analysis to theories of performativity,
hegemony, and postcolonialism. In particular, Kari Palonen draws upon Austinian
speech act theory and Weber’s conception of politics to offer a “second reading”
of his landmark study on “reading street names politically” (Chapter 2). Brenda
Yeoh also revisits her classic study of official and vernacular street naming in
colonial Singapore, illustrating how “daily use implied competing representations
of the landscape, rather than a single, municipally imposed image” (Chapter 3). In
Chapter 4, Maoz Azaryahu examines the interplay between decommemoration
and recommemoration through a comparative analysis of street renaming
campaigns in East Berlin and Haifa. Similarly, Jani Vuolteenaho and Guy Puzey
also consider the case of street toponymy in East Berlin, yet they do so by way of
an innovative engagement with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (Chapter 5). In
Emilia Palonen’s chapter, she turns her attention to “street naming revolutions” in
Budapest and builds upon Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse to explore
how the act of street naming produces a “discursive universe” (Chapter 6).
The next four chapters by Danielle Drozdzewski (Chapter 7), Anaïs Marin
(Chapter 8), Laura Šakaja and Jelena Stanić (Chapter 9), and Monika Palmberger
(Chapter 10) also trace the discursive effects of political regime changes on the
“city-text” in Kraków (Poland), Leningrad/St. Petersburg (Russia), Zagreb (Croatia),
and Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina), respectively. In doing so, these contributions
examine how street naming practices are implicated in spatializing the geopolitics
of memory, the socio-political processes of Othering, temporal boundary-making,
the spatial codification of values, and the inscription of nationalist ideologies into
the urban streetscape. Whereas most studies of the politics of street naming
emphasize the transformations to the city-text that result from political regime
changes, Duncan Light and Craig Young draw our attention to the performative
limits of street naming, the “ongoing lives” of street names from past political
regimes, and the “politics of toponymic continuity” (Chapter 11).
The regional focus of the book then shifts to the African context with Liora Bigon
and Ambe Njoh offering a general account of the “toponymic complexities” in Sub-
Saharan African cities (Chapter 12), while Wale Adebanwi (Chapter 13) and James
Duminy (Chapter 14) both explore the toponymic politics of race and identity in
post-apartheid South Africa. Similarly, Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood
consider how African Americans have historically been “written out” of cultural
landscapes in U.S. cities and highlight the ways in which naming streets in honor of
slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., has been part of a broader movement
for social and spatial justice (Chapter 15). Drawing upon Bourdieu’s theory of
symbolic capital and Massey’s work on the relationality of place, Reuben Rose-
Redwood then examines the spatial politics of race, gender, and class as they
unfolded with the renaming of streets in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New
York (Chapter 16). In the penultimate chapter, Maral Sotoudehnia brings together
the field of critical urban toponymy with scholarship on digital geographies and
critical software studies to consider recent efforts by Dubai’s government to create
a new digital geo-coding system to render the urban landscape into a space of
calculability (Chapter 17). Lastly, we close the book by offering some concluding
reflections on the future horizons of critical toponymic inquiry (Chapter 18).
In the varied accounts outlined above, the urban streetscape is presented as a city-
text of historical commemoration, a cultural arena in which struggles over spatial
justice unfold, and a performative space of everyday urban life. We view the diversity
of theoretical approaches in the current volume as a positive indication that toponymic
scholarship is no longer languishing in the “atheoretical caverns of geographical
inquiry,” as Myers (1996, 238) lamented two decades ago. On the contrary, the field
of critical toponymy has blossomed, and by assembling classic and contemporary
studies on the politics of street naming into a single collection, this book highlights the
breadth, depth, and geographical scope of urban toponymic scholarship as well as its
relevance to wider theoretical debates about space, place, and landscape.
Whether we view the urban streetscape as a text, cultural arena, or performative
space, the practice of street naming is an act of world-making, whereby the naming of
streets, and the establishment of a “street name regime” (K. Palonen, this volume),
aims to bring new “worlds” into being by reshaping the geographical imaginaries and
spatial coordinates of everyday life. This world-making capacity of street naming led
the urbanist Walter Benjamin to envision the urban streetscape as a “linguistic cosmos”
(1999, 522; also, see Ferguson 1994; Regier 2010). However, it should be recalled that
the term “cosmos” generally implies a “world or universe as an ordered and harmonious
system” (Oxford English Dictionary 2016). This dream of the streetscape as a well-
ordered cosmos has seduced one political regime after the next. Yet, if this book seeks
to convince the reader of anything, it is that the “order” and “system” which political
authorities attempt to impose upon the urban streetscape is necessarily a contingent
spatio-temporal order, which is always open to the possibility of contestation and
transformation. If the streetscape is indeed a “cosmos,” as Benjamin suggests, then it
is most certainly a political cosmos—or a world of spatial politics—that is subject to
the vicissitudes of changing political fortunes, social struggles, and habitual routines,
which collectively constitute the political life of urban streetscapes.
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2 Reading street names
politically
A second reading
Kari Palonen
Introduction
The politics of names and naming was among my main research interests in the
first half of the 1990s, but it soon took a backseat to other research foci. I came to
prefer studying texts for which the link with political theorizing was more obvious
and the case of naming seemed to concern rather marginal issues. Perhaps what
Quentin Skinner (1996, ch. 4) writes, specifically that renaming is only a rather
marginal aspect in the study of conceptual changes, also cooled my interest in the
topic. However, I would now like to revisit my earlier interest in the politics of
naming in the present chapter by offering an updated account, or “second reading”
in the parliamentary sense, of my essay, “Reading Street Names Politically”
(Palonen 1993b). The main idea is to incorporate an abridged account of the
politico-theoretical scheme sketched in the Introduction of the original book,
Reading the Political (Palonen 1993a), and later revised on various occasions,
particularly in “Four Times of Politics” (Palonen 2003). In this second reading of
street names politically, I insist on the politico-theoretical perspective as well as
emphasize the procedural aspects of politics.
Four aspects of politics

How is politics manifested in the naming of streets? This requires a specification of
the constitutive aspects of politics. I will apply the Weber-inspired perspective on
politics as a contingent and controversial temporal activity. From this perspective,
space is only frozen time, stability a temporal absence of change. Regarding street
naming as a political activity also introduces different temporal layers to the polity
(for a discussion of historical times, see Koselleck 2000). In particular, I illustrate
the practices and the possibilities of naming politics through a historical sketch of
the politics of street naming in Helsinki, read in the broader European context.
Naming and nominating belong to J.L. Austin’s classic list of performatives
within the class of exercitives. This concept is defined by him as follows:
An exercitive is the giving of a decision in favour of or against a certain

course of action, or advocacy of it. It is a decision that something is to be so,
as distinct from a judgement that is so: it is advocacy that it should be so, as
26 Kari Palonen
opposed to an estimate that it is so; it is an award as opposed to an assessment;
it is a sentence as opposed to a verdict.
(Austin 1990 [1962], 155)
In other words, the choice aspect renders to the act of naming a political dimension:
names could always be different and they are subject to potential conflicts, often
of actual controversy. Naming is the contingent act par excellence and, as such, it
can be understood to be a paradigmatic case for doing politics.
A comparison with voting is illustrative. In both cases an open question is
posed, candidates for action are presented and the selection among them completes
the act. In this sense, voting can be understood as a special case of naming in
which the presentation and selection of the candidates is explicit. Voting subjects
a question, or the choice of person, to a contingent decision instead of finding
some extra-political “reasons” for a standpoint or an appointment of a person (cf.
Weber 1971 [1917]). However, diverse attempts to “normalize” voting, to
diminish, neutralize, or control the contingency, can also be used in studying the
politics of naming.
Weber’s thinking is shaped by concepts of chance, by horizons of the possible,
by occasions or opportunities for action and their complex relationships. For
example, Weber’s concept of “the state” is based on the chances to become obeyed
(Gehorsamschance), a term mentioned in his last 1920 lecture series (see Weber
2009 and my comment on it, Palonen 2011). For Weber, some chances to act
otherwise are present in any kind of situation, but every chance is precious and
limited in time. When some projects are “realized,” this always means a loss of
some chances available in previous situations.
For understanding politics in temporal terms, I split the first term in the
conventional triad (politics, policy, polity) into two temporal activities, politicization
and politicking (first in Palonen 1993a). In 2003, I presented the relationships
between the four aspects of politics in these temporal and Weberian terms:
Politicization names a share of power, opens up a specified horizon of chances

in terms of this share, while politicking means performative operations in the
struggle for power with the already existing shares and their redistribution.
Polity refers to those power shares that have already been politicized but have
also vested interests that also tacitly exclude other kinds of shares, while
policy means a regulation and coordination of performative operations to
specific ends and means.
(Palonen 2003, 59)
Nothing is political in itself but must be politicized by someone. Politicization

consists of marking something “political” or “politics” and thereby opening a
horizon of contingency in dealing with this. In this sense, naming is inherent to
politicization, either by marking something previously unnamed or challenging
things previously named otherwise. Giving a distinct name is an act of politicking,
which might be set in relationship to certain policies or initiate new ones. In the
Reading street names politically 27
politics of naming, we can thus distinguish two dimensions—naming or not
naming—connected to politicization and polity, and this naming vs. that naming,
referring to politicking and policy.
A polity refers to a type of regime, which is historically a contingent result of
specific past politicizations and the exclusion of others. The regimes do have a
certain degree of flexibility and fluid borders, but similarly to speaking of
constitutionalist, presidential, or parliamentary regimes, we can distinguish
certain ideal types of street naming. For the analysis of specific cities, situating
them to such regime types might be perhaps the most important point of departure.
The original politicizing aspect is barely visible in modern cities as streets are
named even before they are built. Streets today don’t exist without a name,
although the “parliamentary” moment of naming might occur later. I speak of
political actors regarding both those naming and those named.
My narrative departs from the minimal level of street naming policy, referring
to the normative and teleological dimensions of naming. The next move connects
this to the broader register of politicking moves. Similarly, I start by establishing
the principles and limits of polity and then situate these to a broader perspective
of politicization, including those contesting the current forms of the polity.
The final section on the use of rhetorical genres in the interpretation of Helsinki’s
street naming politics originally focused exclusively on the tempi of the three
rhetorical genres. Quentin Skinner’s rhetorical studies inspired me to take a more
historical view on rhetoric and contributed to my studies on parliamentary
procedures (Palonen 2014a, 2014b). I have understood parliamentary debates as
the modern paradigm of the deliberative genre as speaking pro et contra and
separated from it negotiation or diplomatic rhetoric (Palonen 2010). In contrast to
the 1993 version of this chapter, I now insist that even the modest degree of
parliamentary culture present in Helsinki city politics might have played a role in
the rhetorical shift from forenames to surnames after 1900.
Street naming policy in the city

In contemporary urban politics, street naming policies regulate the contingency of
naming. They contain procedures, authoritative agents, and criteria for the
proposal and acceptance of street names. A definite procedure distinguishes the
authoritative character of street naming from the slow and spontaneous practices
in older cities (for the constitution of the naming monopoly in France, cf. Milo
1986, 287–289). The first inhabitants do not vote on the street names in the area,
but rather the names are given without knowing who will be the inhabitants (for a
critique, cf. Flierl 1991, 9). In the stage of actual naming, hardly anyone has a
personal interest to be engaged with it. Still there have been attempts from below
both to remove names from the city-text as well as to introduce new ones, but in
what was then West Berlin, for example, they were hardly successful (cf.
Sackgassen 1988, 46–55, 89–100).
The establishment of an authoritative, formal procedure excludes unofficial
naming, which, however, sometimes has been an ingenious act of resistance (on the
28 Kari Palonen
“Jan Palach Square” in Prague, see Moníková 1987, 184–185). The authoritative act
of street naming can also be a source of conflict, for example between career officials
and naming experts, while the city council’s parliamentary committees hardly have
more than a veto power over decisions (for Helsinki, cf. Terho 1979, 19–20).
Among the normative criteria for street names, the most important is the stability
principle: for unlike firm or product names, street names are intended to be “timeless”
(Närhi 1979, 26) and the change of them is regarded as exceptional. Street renamings
are a politically interesting type of policy change, not only when a regime changes
(cf. Azaryahu 1990) but also in more prosaic situations such as municipal reforms.
The common adoption of a one street-one name principle, which prohibits the
plurality of used names, is typical of many other situations of naming as well.
Street names are supposed to be accepted as legitimate by the inhabitants,
although they are seldom subjected to a referendum. Naming experts frequently
prefer a colorless city-text to names which could provoke protests and quarrels. A
provocative rhetoric has scarcely a chance of acceptance in street naming.
In particular, commemorative names referring to persons, events, and concepts
are always controversial. With Benjamin we can speak of an act of “municipal
immortality” (1983, 643), and with Arendt we can see in it a manifestation of having
been somebody rather than nobody (1981 [1960], 169–171). Commemorations are
subject to explicit policy regulations. As a general rule, for instance, the death of a
person has often been a minimal criterion for conferring a street name, but even in
western countries this criterion is not followed without exceptions.
Another criterion for street names is that the “greatness” of persons to be
commemorated must be generally recognized. The French Ministry of the Interior
categorically stated in 1946: “l’œuvre de ces personnalités doit être à l’abri de
toute polémique” [the work of these personalities must be free of any controversy]
(quoted in Toillon 1984, 11). A dilemma for naming policy is to balance the
administrative criterion of incontestability with a political majority’s claim to
draw its own profile in street naming. Another dilemma concerns the political
traditions of the city: should they be prolonged or can the actual majority impose
its will, even at the cost of the requirement of a stable street name: in the Parisian
suburbs the former communist majorities are still visible in street names.
Street names as a means of politicking

A street naming policy with its procedural, personal, and normative dimensions
can only limit the acceptable and give paradigmatic example for “good” names.
Conventional politics appeals to policy precedents, principles, and authorities, not
actively using the range of freedom permitted by them. The autonomy of the
decisions and the superiority of politics over administration (cf. Weber 1971
[1918]) tend to be absent and the significance of street names as a medium of
politics remains disputed.
Street name politicking can be oriented towards proposing new names, changing
the old ones, or reinterpreting the political in the existing names. Virtuosity may
well be already manifested in single cases as well as in turning street names into a
playground of one’s own politicking in general. Politicking does not have an
immediate interest in the general profile of street names.
A change of street names always needs special justification. Of course, street
names have been changed even where no revolutions or other regime changes
have occurred (for Berlin, see Sackgassen 1988, 282). Perhaps research has
compromised the role of a person in history or an event does not appear any longer
as glorious as it was once thought to be. Sometimes an old street name has become
politically compromised into a pejorative metonymy, say Braunauer Straße. And
conversely, the death of Dag Hammarskjöld or the murder of John F. Kennedy has
spread the name to streets all over the world: in France in 1978, for example,
Kennedy was present in 49 of 95 préfectures (Milo 1986, 307).
Because new names are always needed, a promising strategy to have a singular
name introduced lies in the naming of new streets. In this soft way, the profile of
the city-text could slowly be altered, for example, by increasing the number of
streets named for women. This kind of “compensatory naming” has also been used
as a means of preventing the return to the old names after the fall of pro-Soviet
regimes (for East Berlin after 1989, cf. Flierl 1991). But it is difficult to imagine
compensating military names—West Berlin, for example, had ca. 250 of them (cf.
Sackgassen 1988, 21)—by introducing names such as Pacifist’s Square, Civil
Disobedience’s Avenue, Conscientious Objector’s Street, or Deserter’s Boulevard.
Especially in France and Germany, the streets named after persons usually also
give a presentation of the person. A way of politicking is to change only the
reference person, not the street name itself. In West Berlin, the presentation of
Petersallee was changed from the imperialist Carl Peters to the CDU local
politician Hans Peters (Sackgassen 1988, 122–123). In Besançon, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon only got half of rue Proudhon named after him, while the other half
remained named for an older, conservative relative of his (Touillon 1984, 143).
It is obviously more difficult to explicitly revise the policy principles of street
naming than to add new ones to them. It is easy to refer to precedents, for example
when living persons have got a street or an ad hoc suspension of a principle can
also be accepted without controversies. In these cases, the city council can
manifest its sovereignty and show the limits of guidance by policy principles.
Reinterpreting a principle and opposing the policy criteria together form the
simplest means of politicking by street names. A paradigm is set by the famous
but controversial “sons and daughters” of a city. By granting a street to them, an
opposition of the inhabitants is to be expected but not doing so would show the
city to be afraid of an original person: a Besançon without a street dedicated to
P-J. Proudhon would manifest the narrow-mindedness of the local politicians. A
consciously provocative rhetoric for introducing controversial figures into the
city-text can be considered as a kind of proof in the mastery of politicking.
In politicking, the commitment to a definite name is instrumental to the
manifestation of virtuosity in the naming situation. In this sense, alternatives to
name changes are to be understood as tentative and liable to be altered if a suitable
compromise name is found. Politicking transcends the interest in naming and in
streets as a political space and is rather related to alternative media of politicking.
30 Kari Palonen
The naming polity
A naming polity constitutes a name regime for the city, shapes its profile and
regiments its change. It is based on past politicizations that are recognized as
legitimate: the naming polity preserves the existing modes of the politicized as
well as regulates them to acceptable forms. It mediates between policy and
politicking, between choosing street names and acting by means of them. The
profile of the name regime in a city is shaped both by the content of these aspects
and by the links which try to hold them together.
The maintenance of the naming polity consists, above all, in the defense of the
city council’s autonomy with respect to naming decisions over the attempts to
universalize policy rules as if they were quasi-natural. A name polity exists only
where at least some Spielraum for politicking is manifested over the claims of
making the street naming a merely administrative or police question.
The power in a naming polity also relates directly to the right of the actual
majorities in the city council to draw their own lines into the city-text, thereby
contributing to the street naming profile of the city. Policy regulations that are too
strict would leave the city without a singular profile in political imagination. But
a naming polity would also temper sudden changes in street names, by the will of
an actual majority, in the name of the political traditions of the city.
The street name regime also sets limits to politicking, for example by preventing
an over-extended use of naming streets after persons, events, and concepts. The
tendency towards the autonomization of street names from their original political
references in the course of history leaves them only known to insiders, who could
read out of them shifting temporal layers in the city’s dominant political color and
its tolerated nuances. The polity may also contain moves against the practice of
using unauthorized names (on Lodz, see Enzensberger 1987, 372).
Paradigmatic name types can always be used, if occasionally new names or
name changes are urgently needed, and they may give a specific profile to the city-
text. The opposition between the politicizing moment and its slow withering away
within the name regime can concern both the content and the character of
paradigmatic names.
In the capitals of Europe, we can detect three old paradigms for street naming:
clerical, monarchic, and military names (e.g., Ferguson 1988, 387). Their
decline can be interpreted as a diminishing of politicking in so far as they are
replaced by names from nature, local history, “culture,” and other harmless
areas. Those overtly “apolitical” names may be made to neglect the elective and
controversial character of street naming and by granting it willingly to experts
and specialists.
The dilemma of creating a singular profile of street names in modern Europe
lies just here: should the clerical, monarchic, and military names be replaced by
others even at the cost of lowering the possibility of politicking by street names
or should the rudimentary and oppressive presence of names with strong partisan
allusions be retained and only compensated by names with opposite connotations?
The same dilemma was faced in Eastern Europe in relation to communist
naming culture.
Politicization of street naming
The politicization of street names concerns the profile of a city’s street names. In
terms of my politics-typology, all naming of streets is politicizing, independently
of the content of the names. It is therefore important to identify the initial moments
of politicization as well as those that break with the limits of the existing polity
and alter the naming situation in a manner which opens up new horizons for
politicking by names. Politicization is a deconstructive move by reverting the
naming situation from its submission to the current naming regime. But how the
situation is used, and by whom the openness can be employed, is not a question of
politicization but of politicking.
Except in cases of completely new cities and streets, the primary temporal
dimension of politicization is the past. It is directed towards street names that
canonize a certain selected past, which are also subject to change or reinterpretion.
Politicization in terms of decanonization proceeds by compromising either the
value or the significance of a canonized reference in a street name. Politicization
disputes the inevitable partiality in favor of the history of the winners, so typical
both to unreflective and consciously partisan acts of street naming.
The decanonization of street names is by no means necessarily replaced by
rehabilitating persons post mortem through street naming—this is rather a move
in politicking. In its formality, politicization merely renders naming into a
controversial issue. Constitutive for a politicized reading of street names is rather
an obstinate refusal of constructive alternatives: if they are presented, they are
only instruments for getting rid of the compromised names. The politicization of
street names may be strategically concentrated on eliminating some key canonized
names, knowing well that the chances are normally minimal in such cases and
therefore a concentration of efforts in selective campaigns may be wise.
A minimal decanonization does not even attempt to change the street names but
aims at improving the competence and interest among citizens in reading the
existing street names politically. Learning to give attention to the partisan and
regulating character of the city-text (e.g., to the dominance of clerical, monarchic,
and military names) may sometimes be an effective means for opening the situation
to politicking. Even the replacement of the communist culture of naming in Eastern
Europe by seemingly apolitical names may be a politicizing move as the
deconstruction of a regime, which renders the naming both less ritualistic and more
open to invention, as compared to a replacement by opposite “heroic” names.
The city’s profile in commemorating persons, events, and concepts in its streets
may be rendered more significant and thus the requirement for using street names
as a means of politicking more central. By such means the presence of history, the
actuality of past struggles and conflicts, and the invocation of the significance of
past events and persons for the present, may be manifested. The problem with this
variant lies both in the conventional view of politics and in the lack of understanding
of the relative, situational, margin-oriented character of politicization.
A subversive politicizing strategy of street naming offers opportunities for
diverse inversions and modifications of past naming by using nicknames or
altering the content and compromising the original reference. The critique of the
32 Kari Palonen
history of winners canonized by dates does not require much research and
imagination in finding events from other years with opposite political significance.
Opening the naming situation by politicization may also result in making the
naming appear to be more playful than a canonical event. Besides inversions,
playing with names through verbal jokes is always possible, such as through the
use of ironic names (for both self-irony and the rehabilitation of commonly
pejorative names by the German feminist naming culture, cf. Pusch 1990). It is
possible to invent ingenious acronyms from the initials and in general using
manufactured names, which only indirectly refer to words in common language or
which attempt to create new words.
Politicization by these means may also introduce supplementary names for the
streets, as is common practice in personal names. If a writer, for example, uses a
pseudonym, why couldn’t she also do the same thing for the address: it would
require ingenuity also in the post office. This would deny the monopoly of one
authorized name for streets and abandon the principle of one street-one name, by
allowing streets to concur with each other in the number of nicknames. Related to
the plural experience of the street itself by its inhabitants and users, this would be
a simple means of politicization. Not only cities but also streets could have a name
profile of their own, instead of a single name.
Still, a type of limit for politicizing street naming may be found both in the
singularity and in the stability requirements. Without some definite singularity
and rigidity in designating an object, it would hardly be possible to speak of proper
names at all. But this does not necessarily mean that all streets should have only
one authorized name, which always remains the same.
From forenames to surnames: street names in Helsinki1

A brief look at the map of the inner city of Helsinki is enough to show a
predominance of forenames, which gives the city-text a singular profile. Of
course, forenames are a common resource of street naming, particularly in relation
to the calendars of the saints and the names of royalty. In Helsinki, however, key
forenames are secular and non-dynastic. To read them politically requires recourse
to the history of the country, city, and practices of street naming themselves as
well as comparisons with other European capitals, especially Paris and Berlin.
Using street names for commemoration as a system of nomination, related to
the idea, “d’adopter des noms qui n’eussent pas de rapport direct avec le lieu
auquel ils étaient imposés” [to adopt names not directly related to the place in
which they were imposed] (Milo 1986, 287), is of quite recent origin historically.
It can be located in Paris and dated back to the construction of Place de l’Odéon
in 1779; it was then radicalized during the Revolution, especially in the context of
the project of Abbé Gregoire from 1794, and continued again by Napoleon
Bonaparte (cf. Milo 1986, 286–301).
Helsinki was founded by King Gustaf Vasa of Sweden in 1550, but it remained
a provincial town. In the war between Sweden and Russia, the city was largely
burned down in 1808, and by the Peace Treaty of Hamina in 1809, Finland was
transferred to Russia with the status of an autonomous Grand Duchy. Helsinki
was made the capital of Finland in 1812—it was both closer to St. Petersburg and
farther from Stockholm than Turku. Swedish was the official language of Finland.
Finnish street names were introduced unofficially in the 1860s and officially after
1900, when Finnish became the majority language. I will call the city by the
Finnish name Helsinki, but use the Swedish street names for the period until ca.
1900 and the Finnish names for the later period.
The city was rebuilt as a capital of Empire style, according to the city plan of
J.A. Ehrenström with C.L. Engel as the architect. In the context of Ehrenström’s
city plan, the naming of all of the streets arose in response to public safety
concerns, particularly in relation to fire. Ehrenström and the Governor General of
Finland, Fabian Steinheil, formed the first committee for street naming in Helsinki,
submitting their proposals to Alexander I who visited Helsinki in 1819. In the new
Fire Order of 1820, only a few old local names referring to the context and in two
cases—Esplanaden and Bulevarden—to the streets themselves were retained;
otherwise new names were introduced. For them the new French system of using
non-natural and non-local references was practiced consequently, as if as a mark
of distinction for a capital. The new system marks an original politicization of the
street name polity in Helsinki. Even today, the street names in the city are to be
related to this politicizing and polity-creating act.
In a wider political context, creating a capital for the Grand Duchy of Finland
was a measure of nation-building, balancing the Russian requirements and the
attempt to create a specifically Finnish system of administration and “government.”
The key political figures were the Governor General, the trustee of the czar in
Helsinki, and the Ministerial State Secretary, as a trustee of “the Finns” in St.
Petersburg, while the Senate, “the internal government,” only later gained a key
place in politicking. After the transfer to Helsinki in 1828, the university became
another place of politicking, and the factions in the Diet largely originated in
student politics (cf. Klinge 1989).
The composition of the street naming committee and the procedure, with the
veto-power of the czar himself, are indices of the key role of street naming in the
capital’s bureaucratic-diplomatic style of politicking. No normative rules or
procedure for decisions on the naming polity were created: naming partly followed
some general paradigms, but to a large extent required inventions, using the skills
of politicking by the committee members which established the singularity of the
nomenclature of street names in Helsinki.
An extraordinary space for politicking was created by the inapplicability of the
common paradigms of street naming in Helsinki. In a Lutheran country, saints
were not honored. However, the clerical element was represented by a few names
of Russian, Greek Orthodox saints (St. Anna, Andreae, Georg, Helene, Vladimir),
but there could not be too many. Some central streets were dedicated to the
Romanov family, namely to Alexander I’s wife Elizabeth, his mother Maria,
along with her maiden name of princess Sophia (of Württemberg), and his brothers
Konstantin and Mihail—all of them still alive in 1820. The czar himself was not
honored with a street name until after his death (1833) with the naming of
34 Kari Palonen
Alexandersgatan. No recourse to Swedish monarchic names was made, and
Finland did not have a nobility or a military of its own. Names such as Kaserngatan
and Manègegatan referred to actual military establishments.
Republican or revolutionary conceptual names, as well as those glorifying Russia
and the Empire, were not suitable in Finland, especially after the Vienna Congress.
In the city center, Unionsgatan, proposed by the emperor himself, refers to the union
of Finland with Russia in 1809 and Fredsgatan refers to the Peace Treaty of 1809. To
them may be linked Senatsgatan (1820–1836), later changed to Nikolaigatan,
acccording to the church—and the new czar—which ran north to the Senatstorget
(1836), the key square of the city. Regeringsgatan (1836), referring to the government,
runs to the west of the Senatstorget. All of these manifested a strong loyalist bias.
However, there still remained a need for new names. As a curious but ingenious
act of politicking, the committee transferred the forenames of the leading
bureaucrats of the Grand Duchy and of the capital to the streets of the city! It was
a self-legitimizing measure commemorating the effects already done for the
benefit of the country and the city, but doing so discretely, often only using the
second forename, made them appear both as normal forenames for outsiders and
as a subtle reference for insiders. This move corresponds to the bureaucratic style
of politicking, which had no need for popular support, and it made all names look
relatively harmless to the Russian authorities. Perhaps street names also functioned
as an Ersatz for the proper Finnish nobility.
Only a few of those to whom streets were dedicated in Helsinki in 1820 or 1836
were already dead. Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt (1759–1814), the first Ministerial
State Secretary, was commemorated with Mauritzgatan posthumously, yet the
others who “got a street” in Helsinki in 1820 or 1836 were still alive. To Armfelt’s
follower Robert Henrik Rehbinder (1777–1841) was dedicated Stora and Lilla
Robertsgatan (1820) and even Henriksgatan (1836), and the naming committee
members Fabian Steinheil (1762–1831) and Johan Albrecht Ehrenström (1762–
1847) themselves were commemorated in street names (Fabiansgatan, 1820,
Albertsgatan, 1836), as well as Carl Ludwig Engel (1778–1840), who received
Ludwigsgatan in 1820. Other streets named in 1820, 1836, or 1842 were also
named for city or state officials, most of whom were still alive (Abrahamsgatan,
Bernhardsgatan, Eriksgatan, Fredriksgatan, Kristiansgatan, Rikhardsgatan,
Simonsgatan, and Vilhelmsgatan). Along with them a woman may be added:
Kajsaniemi Park (1842) was named in honor of Kajsa Wahllund (d. 1843), who
ran a restaurant there. The dedication of a street to these persons was both a sign
of gratitude and recognition as being “somebody.”
Most of these names are still used in the inner city of Helsinki. In the early years
of the twentieth century, however, a transition from a forename regime to a surname
regime occurred. Forenames were still used, but they were introduced into the city-
text simply as forenames, using the Bible (women’s names) and the national epic, the
Kalevala, as the main sources. In some cases, the older style of using forenames of
local and national heroes was still practiced, but the historian and story-teller Zachris
Topelius (1818–1898), for example, got Zachrisgatan—Sakarinkatu only after his
death (1901)—and Topeliuksenkatu (1906) already manifested the paradigm shift.
The shift in naming policy is intelligible in terms of changes in the Finnish
polity at large. After 1809, the Swedish-model Estate Diet was called into its first
session only in 1863, and only after that date was street naming subject to quasi-
parliamentary control. Onni Pekonen (2014) has analyzed how a group of Liberals
around the newspaper Helsingfors Dagblad managed to introduce remarkable
features from the West European parliamentary culture into the procedures and
practices of the Finnish estates. Thus, parliamentary aspects were present in the
Finnish polity before the radical parliamentary reform of 1906. Even if the
suffrage to the city council remained plutocratic until 1918, parliamentary
practices were also well known in the city politics of Helsinki. A need for
legitimizing the names before the city council and the electorate had become
obvious, and with the surname-style of commemoration the politico-cultural role
of past agents could be made more visible.
The latter half of the nineteenth century produced Finnish national heroes and
appealed to popular support. By manifesting that the Finns could also create
“somebodys,” a “triad of great men” was canonized (cf. Klinge 1982): the
folklorist and compiler of the Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884); the poet J.L.
Runeberg (1804–1877); and the philosopher, Fennoman ideologist, and senator
J.V. Snellman (1806–1881), with Topelius as the fourth wheel. Streets were
dedicated to Lönnrot and Runeberg only in 1906. Even Snellman, the most
political of them, had streets proposed for him outside the urban core, but only in
1928 did Snellmaninkatu replace the name of Nikolainkatu in the city center. The
special canonization of these heroes is also manifested by supplementary
dedications of small parks as well as a number of names relating to the Kalevala,
several referring to Runeberg’s epic of the 1808–1809 war (esp. Vänrikki
Ståhlinkatu), thereby making the use of Swedish military names possible, and also
to the title of Topelius’s national stories (Välskärinkatu).
Additionally, a number of “smaller national heroes” of the nineteenth century
obtained street names in the first years of the new century: the “national author”
Aleksis Kivi (1906), as well as his critic, the linguist August Ahlqvist (1906); the
jurist Mathias Calonius (1906); the fennougrist M.A. Castrén (1901); “the father
of Finnish elementary school” Uno Cygnaeus (1906); the painter Albert Edelfelt
(1906); the natural scientist J.J. Nervander (1906); the polar explorer A.E.
Nordenskiöld (1906); the orientalist G.A. Wallin (1901), and the poet J.J. Wecksell
(1908). The most obvious sign of the paradigm shift in commemoration is that in
1908 Armfelt, Engel, and Rehbinder had their surnames printed into the city map.
A transition from a cabinet-style to a more public-style of politicking required
more singularized heroes.
After the turn of the century, streets were also dedicated to heroes from the
Swedish period, including both kings and queens (Carl, Gustaf, Kristina, Adolf),
whereas Ulrika was present already in 1842, related to the Ulrikesborg’s baths.
Also included were the Sture family of Swedish regents in the fifteenth century,
the Lutheran reformer Agricola, the governors Brahe and Fleming, the economist
Chydenius, the admiral Ehrensvärd, the poet Franzén, and the historian Porthan.
The practices of a nationalist historiography were transferred to the city map. This
36 Kari Palonen
tradition spoke of Sweden-Finland and separating the Finns from others in the
Swedish kingdom and, conversely, introduced continuity into “Finnish” history
beyond the divide of 1809.
The paradigm shift, as well as the rehabilitation of the Swedish period, is
remarkable when placed in the context of the russification policy, especially in the
years from 1898 to 1904, when Governor General Bobrikov was assassinated—a
park in the suburb of Kulosaari was named after the assassin Eugen Schauman in
1958—and again from 1908 to 1914. Street naming by surnames may be
interpreted as a massive measure of commemorating “great Finns” from the past,
not so easily to be eradicated by the simple administrative means of russification.
Even the Russians Galizin and Speranski (the councillor of Alexander I,
responsible for the autonomy of Finland), whose names were added to the streets
of Helsinki during this period, were pro-Finnish, like the widow of Alexander III,
who was honored with a street name as a Danish princess (Dagmarinkatu 1906).
The Russians did not intervene in the capital’s internal affairs. In the context of
a general strike during the Russian Revolution in Fall 1905, and of the subsequent
introduction of the unicameral parliament Edukunta with universal suffrage in
1906, the abolition of “national” street names would not have been easy for them.
However, the democratization and parlamentarization of Finnish politics did not
result either in an introduction of conceptual street names from the republican or
revolutionary tradition—the proposal concerning Frihetsgatan (Freedom Street)
in 1900 was not accepted. Since this period, the paradigm of surnames has
remained the normal measure of commemoration.
In the 1920s, an expert committee was established for the renaming of the city’s
streets. Russian names were moderately changed, removing Nikolai but not
Alexander, and leaving out only the “too Russian” names of Konstantin, Vladimir,
and the surnames Kulneff (a hero from Runeberg’s epic), Galizin, and Speranski.
Even Unioninkatu was not replaced by Yliopistonkatu (University Street), although
the independence of Finland undid the union of 1809. Snellman, Lönnrot, and
Aleksis Kivi were commemorated with “better” streets than earlier, the senator Leo
Mechelin (1838–1914), viewed as suspect by the Russians, had obtained a street
already in 1917, and otherwise the nationalist commemoration continued.
The independence of Finland as a republic did not bring republican street names
to Helsinki. Freedom, equality, brotherhood, republic, democracy, and even
independence are still absent from the capital’s streets. Proposed names referring
to Europe, England, and America were not introduced. Some names corresponding
to this paradigm, however, have been adopted since 2000. This may be related to
a procedural change: street naming has moved from national to municipal politics.
The only conflict over names in the 1920s concerned the Finnish name of
Jägaregatan: a Social Democrat opposed the change of Metsästäjänkatu (Hunter’s
Street) to Jääkärinkatu, referring to the Jäger, a conspiratory Finnish battalion
trained in Germany during World War I.
Following World War II, new suburbs were built and many names were
needed, but naming was increasingly left to expert committees and naming
officials. As a tendency, commemorative naming has diminished, and those
commemorated are poets, actors, musicians, businessmen, and suburban leaders
rather than politicians. Notable exceptions are the streets dedicated to the
presidents (Ståhlberg, Relander, Svinhufvud, Kallio, Ryti) in the upper class
suburb, Kulosaari, in the late-1950s.
In three cases, a street name was given as a birthday present: the main street in
the western part of the city was named after Field Marshall Mannerheim (1867–
1951) during the war in 1942, replacing the second forename of Rehbinder
(Heikinkatu-Henriksgatan) and another long street; the composer Jean Sibelius
(1865–1956) was honored with a park name in 1945, but his former home street
was named after him only after his death; President Urho Kekkonen’s (1900–
1986) former home street was dedicated to him in 1980, whereas the same was
done with President J.K. Paasikivi (1870–1956) only posthumously (1959). The
post-World War II presidents—Mannerheim was president from 1944 to 1946—
were thus located in the city center. Paasikivi also obtained a square with a statue
opposite to Mannerheim’s mounted statue near the parliament.
But who are not commemorated by street names in Helsinki? As elsewhere (for
West Berlin, cf. Sackgassen 1988, 56–57, 83–88), the history of winners written
by street names has been a masculinist history. There are queens and princesses,
daughters of former proprietors and biblical women, but dedications to women
based on their own merits have been few: Kajsa Wahllund, the philanthropists
Aurora Karamzin (Aurorankatu in 1906, Karamzininkatu in 1967) and Alli Trygg
(who was honored by a park dedication in 1939), and the writer Minna Canth
(1844–1897), who was commemorated with a street name in 1917, were the only
ones before World War II. The early feminists, who contributed to the first
women’s suffrage in Europe, have hardly been commemorated by streets, Lucina
Hagmanintie in Haaga being the only exception.
The city council in Helsinki has always had a “bourgeois” majority, and even
moderate “leftists” have seldom been commemorated. The street of the Social
Democratic Party office in Siltasaari was, however, named Paasivuorenkatu
(1938) for the moderate Social Democrat trade union leader Matti Paasivuori
(1860–1937) during the first coalition of Social Democrats and bourgeois parties.
A leftist, female poet, Katri Vala (1901–1944), was commemorated by the naming
of a park (1953); and even a former commissar of the Reds from 1918, Oskari
Tokoi (1873–1963), who soon broke with the Bolsheviks and emigrated to the
United States, posthumously obtained Tokoinranta in Siltasaari in 1968.
The exclusion of foreigners is an official policy of the city (cf. Terho 1979, 18;
Närhi 1979, 28), allegedly due to the difficulty of writing and pronunciation. Still,
proposals for such dedications have been accepted in some cases: Henry Ford on
the basis of a factory in 1945; Dag Hammarskjöld on the basis of a UN
recommendation (1963); V.I. Lenin on the occasion of his hundredth birthday in
1970 (behind the headquarters of the communist party), and for Copernicus in
honor of his five hundredth birthday in 1973. Lutherinkatu was already given in
1906, without a mention that Martin Luther was a foreigner. A committee of the
city in 1992 decided to remove Lenininpuisto from the city-text, but this was
finally rejected by the city council.
38 Kari Palonen
Street naming in Helsinki during the period of Finnish independence has
downplayed the politicizing idea of commemoration. When neither controversial
persons nor republican concepts are used as new street names, the naming polity
has become more like one of a provincial city rather than one of a capital in Europe.
All of this is probably connected to the growing power of naming experts and
officials who mostly fear controversies and politicking. The policy aspect of street
naming has only left space for politicking in exceptional circumstances. The
politicizing profile of a capital created by Ehrenström’s committee of street
naming contained an element of representation, viewing the names from the
perspective of visitors rather than of inhabitants, while the expert-based name
policy is closely related to the interests of homes, cars, and post offices, holding
flaneuring as suspect.
EU membership has reorganized political conflicts in Finland: the divide
between the isolationists and the Europeans has become important across the
traditional divisions. The name of Helsinki has, after 1975, been used as a political
metonymy, like Yalta or Maastricht. Aspirations of becoming a European
metropolis, connecting the east and the west, have arisen in Helsinki. One
condition for doing this is to break with the low political profile of street naming,
not necessarily by counter-commemorating but rather by appealing to the
linguistic imagination by word playing of all kinds. A politicizing approach would
make the inhabitants ask for the origins and the acceptability of the present street
names as an integral part of both city politics as well as everyday life.
The rhetoric of street naming

Since Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the distinction between the past-oriented forensic, the
future-oriented deliberative, and the present-oriented epideictic genres of rhetoric
(Aristotle 1980, 1358b–1359a), remains a valuable conceptual tool, which can
also be applied to the politics of street naming. As oriented towards a future use,
street naming is always deliberative, but it can have different links to forensic and
epideictic rhetoric. Taking my suggestions on the temporality of the politicking
and politicization aspects as starting points, my hypothesis is that politicking and
policy are deliberative-epideictic, while politicization and polity are deliberative-
forensic operations.
The introduction of a street name always contains a future-oriented dimension.
Politicking with street names can be understood negatively, as opposed to the
functionalization of singular acts of naming for policies and naming regimes. In this
sense, it manifests the autonomy of the present by opposing pre-decided policies to
become the future fate of street names in the city. But a policy also has an epideictic
dimension in the requirement of “beautiful” or “pleasant” street names.
In a name polity, the rhetoric of names is functionalized to a combination of
forensic and deliberative rhetoric. In this case, the forensic rhetoric bound with the
formation of stable paradigms for the name polity has an obvious priority. But,
like other regimes, the street name polity is open to change, mediated by singular,
but functionalized, decisions on new street names. Additionally, the politicizing
rhetoric of street naming is forensic in its politics of history and memory, regarding
the chances of decanonizing the past, but it is also deliberative in opening new
playfields for contingency, for politicking with names in general.
This triad of rhetorical genres can render intelligible the paradigm shifts and
slow transformations in the politics of street naming in Helsinki. The politicizing
move of creating a name polity around 1820 used both a specific forensic rhetoric
oriented towards a very near past and combined it with an epideictic rhetoric of
forenames, experienced as pleasant street names. The paradigm shift after 1900 to
a regime of surnames uses forensic rhetoric oriented toward the past but also
contains a deliberative dimension in connection with the new parliamentary
elements of the polity.
The transition to a regime dominated by policy experts combines a change
towards the epideictic rhetoric of pleasant names with a provincial turn in forensic
commemoration. A break with this practice is, to some degree, possible by a
politicizing counter-commemoration of women, foreigners, and so on.
Reinterpreting the past, by rejecting the conventional and constructive rhetoric of
naming experts, in favor of a more playful rhetoric of irony appears, in the present
European political context, to be a more promising rhetorical strategy, both for
Helsinki and for other cities. The shift after 1981 in Finnish politics from the
semi-presidential towards a parliamentary political culture has the potential to
provide the conditions for such a change.
Note
1 This discussion is based on a number of commentaries (Aminoff and Pesonen 1971;
Pesonen 1971; Närhi 1979; Terho 1979) and the name directories, Helsingin kadunnimet
(1971) and Helsingin kadunnimet 2 (1979).
References
Aminoff, B. and Pesonen, L. (1971). “Helsingin kadunnimistön synty ja kehitys vuoteen
1946 mennessä.” In L.A. Pesonen (Ed.), Helsingin kadunnimet (pp. 31–64). Helsingin
Kaupungin Julkaisuja 24: Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus.
Arendt, H. (1981 [1960]). Vita activa. München: Piper.
Aristotle (1980). Rhetorik. German trans., F. Sieveke (Ed.). Munich: Fink.
Austin, J.L. (1990 [1962]). How to Do Things with Words, J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà
(Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Azaryahu, M. (1990). “Renaming the Past: Changes in ‘City Text’ in Germany and Austria,
1945–1947.” History and Memory, 2(2): 32–53.
Benjamin, W. (1983). Das Passagen-Werk, R. Tiedemann (Ed.). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Enzensberger, H.M. (1987). Ach Europa! Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Flierl, T. (1991). “Mit der Geschichte leben.” In D. Guhr, T. Schneider, and G. Wehner
(Eds.), Berlin: Plenzlauer Berg. Straßen und Plätze (pp. 6–13). Berlin: Hentrich.
Flierl, T. (1992). “Die Straßennamenumbenennungen in Prenzlauer Berg—der Diskussions—
und Entscheidungsprozeß.” Berlin: Aktives Museum Faschismus und Widerstand (mimeo).
Helsingin kadunnimet (1971). Helsingin kaupungin julkaisuja 24.
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Helsingin kadunnimet 2 (1979). Helsingin kaupungin julkaisuja 32.
Klinge, M. (1982). Kaksi Suomea. Porvoo: WSOY.
Klinge, M. (1989). Keisarillinen Aleksanterin yliopisto, 1808–1917. Keuruu: Otava.
Koselleck, R. (2000). Zeitschichten. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Milo, D. (1986). “Le nom des rues.” In P. Nora (Ed.), Les lieux de la mémoire II (pp. 284–315).
Paris: Gallimard.
Moníková, L. (1987). Die Fassade. München: Hanser.
Närhi, E.M. (1979). “Kaavanimistö kielen osana.” In L.A. Pesonen (Ed.), Helsingin Kadunnimet
2 (pp. 22–28). Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin julkaisuja 32. Helsinki: Kauppakirjapaino.
Palonen, K. (1993a). “Introduction: From Policy and Polity to Politicking and Politicization.”
In K. Palonen and T. Parvikko (Eds.), Reading the Political (pp. 6–16). Helsinki: The
Finnish Political Science Association.
Palonen, K. (1993b). “Reading Street Names Politically.” In K. Palonen and T. Parvikko
(Eds.), Reading the Political (pp. 103–121). Helsinki: The Finnish Political Science
Association.
Palonen, K. (2003). “Four Times of Politics: Policy, Polity, Politicking and Politicization.”
Alternatives, 28(2): 171–186.
Palonen, K. (2007). Re-thinking Politics: Essays from a Quarter-Century. K. Lindroos
(Ed.). Helsinki: The Finnish Political Science Association.
Palonen, K. (2010). “Objektivität” als faires Spiel. Wissenschaft als Politik bei Max
Weber. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Palonen, K. (2011). “The State as a Chance Concept: Max Weber’s Desubstantialization
and Neutralization of a Concept.” Max Weber Studies, 11(1): 99–117.
Palonen, K. (2014a). The Politics of Parliamentary Procedure. Leverkusen: Budrich.
Palonen, K. (2014b). Politics and Conceptual Histories. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Pekonen, O. (2014). “Debating ‘the ABCs of Parliamentary Life’: The Learning of
Parliamentary Rules and Practices in the Late Nineteenth-Century Finnish Diet and the
Early Eduskunta.” PhD dissertation, University of Jyväskylä.
Pesonen, L.A. (1971). “Kadunnimistön tarkistus v. 1946 alueliitoksen johdosta ja
nimistön laatiminen uusiin kaupunginosiin.” In L.A. Pesonen (Ed.), Helsingin
kadunnimet (pp. 69–86). Helsingin kaupungin julkaisuja 24.
Pusch, L.F. (1990). Alle Menschen werden Schwestern. Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp.
Sackgassen. Keine Wendemöglichkeit für Berliner Straßennamen (1988). Berlin: Dirk Nischen.
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University Press.
Terho, O. (1979). “Nimistö kaavan osana.” In Helsingin kadunnimet 2 (pp. 15–21).
Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin julkaisuja 32.
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politische Schriften (pp. 245–291). Tübingen: Mohr.
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3 Colonial urban order, cultural
politics, and the naming of
streets in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Singapore
Brenda Yeoh
Introduction
The power of naming, according to Todorov (quoted in Robinson 1989, 160), is
“often the first step in taking possession,” and place names are among the first
signifiers to commemorate new regimes and reflect the power of elite groups in
shaping place-meanings. Thus, “the sudden rash” of Tlaxcalan place names in
northern Mexico cannot be explained without understanding Aztec colonial
policies of the fifteenth century, while making sense of the Germanic place names
of southern Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay cannot be divorced from knowledge of the
nineteenth-century streams of immigrants into the region (Robinson, 1989, 160).
Todorov also reminds us that Columbus was:
careful to name the sequence of the first five newly discovered places [in the
Caribbean] in a rank order which tells us a great deal of the context of his
historic enterprise: the Savior (San Salvador); the Virgin Mary (Santa Maria
de la Concepciòn); the King (Fernandina); the Queen (Isabela); and finally
the Royal Prince (Juana).
(quoted in Robinson 1989, 160)
In a similar fashion but a different context, streets christened Victoria, Albert,

Queen’s, King’s, Coronation, and Princess Elizabeth (after British royalty)
ubiquitously found in major ex-colonial South and Southeast Asian cities were
inscribed onto the landscape as part and parcel of the lexicon of British nineteenth-
century colonialism. In the case of colonial Sub-Saharan Africa, “place- and
street-names were drawn from a European spatial and environmental design
lexicon” while toponymic inscription was treated as “an occasion to embellish the
power of [European] countries in a foreign land” (Bigon and Njoh 2015, 29).
Moving into the twentieth century, Cohen and Kliot (1992) illustrate the way the
Israeli nation-state has selected Biblical and Talmudic place names for the
administered territories of the Golan, Gaza, and West Bank in order to reinforce
national Zionist ideologies and project Israel as the rightful heir to the Holy Land.
Similarly, Bigon and Dahamshe (2014, 619) demonstrate how the Israeli road-sign
system in the Galilee region has become a means of “symbolic power” to
“defamiliarise the Arabic toponymic repertoire” and advance the Hebraization of
42 Brenda Yeoh
the landscape amidst heightened ethnolinguistic and sociopolitical tensions. As
Byrnes (2002, 28) reminds us, the naming of places operates on at least three
levels—identifying a place, owning it metaphorically, and codifying and
categorizing space—and in doing so, place naming produces a “taxonomy of
knowing: a way of seeing, ordering and recording the world in order to possess it.”
In this vein, Emmerson (1984, 4) points out that names, following the so-called
“Humpty Dumpty position,” are “rooted neither in reality or custom, but express
instead the power of the namer over the thing named.” At the same time, the
naming process did not only reflect the power of dominant others to assign place-
meanings, but was contingent on the social relations of deference and defiance at
work. As Rose-Redwood et al. (2010) have shown, toponymics as a field of study
has moved in the course of the last two decades from a central focus on etymology
and taxonomy, to one interested in the cultural politics of place naming and
toponymic practices as a means of lending insight to sociocultural, political,
environmental, and ideological struggles (also, see Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009).
The bulk of critical scholarship on toponymics in recent years has concentrated on
postcolonial contexts (and other parallel times of major political change such as
the post-war or post-apartheid periods) where (re)naming practices quickly
become contested arenas in which the inscription of state or elite ideologies of
nation-building is being recalibrated or challenged by “counter-hegemonic
ideologies of subordinate groups” (Alderman 2008, 205). In the case of
postcolonial and newly independent Singapore, Yeoh (1996, 305) argues that the
“mapping of nationalist ideologies onto Singapore’s street-names was an uneven
process, reflecting the contradictions and swings in the policies of nation-building
and at the same time incorporating to some extent the reactions and resistances of
its citizens.” Elsewhere, Berg and Kearns (1996, 99) contend that “the process of
naming places involves a contested identity politics of people and place,” and they
go on to show how the debate over the reinstatement of Maori names in Aotearoa/
New Zealand traded explicitly in the rhetorics of “race,” “culture,” and “nation,”
while Duminy (2014, 324) draws on post-apartheid street naming in Durban to
illustrate “the emergence and performance of diverse, competing claims
surrounding historical memory, as well as contemporary political and symbolic
legitimacy.” Clearly, an energized cultural politics of naming—“how people
control, negotiate, and contest the naming process as they engage in wider
struggles for legitimacy and visibility” (Rose-Redwood et al. 2010, 457)—often
accompanies a major change of regimes.
This chapter, however, gives attention not to the cultural politics of regime
change but to the inner workings of colonial power at its heights in the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on colonial Singapore as a case
study, the chapter turns attention back to the colonial regime where the “power of
the namer over the thing named” was magnified by colonial policies of
dispossession and control operating under conditions characterized by highly
asymmetrical power relations. A system of street names bearing the inscription of
imperial personalities and racialized imagery, and based on European perceptions
of urban order and functioning, was put in place in colonial Singapore as part and
The naming of streets in Singapore 43
parcel of the lexicon of British nineteenth-century colonialism. In this context,
opportunities to overtly contest or negotiate the naming process were highly
circumscribed. Instead, as the chapter goes on to discuss, the emergence of
alternative Asian systems of place signification in daily use served as competing
representations of the colonial urban landscape. The juxtaposition of more than
one system of street names testified to the syncretic character of the colonial city
and belied the colonizers’ vision of the urban landscape well-integrated by a
single, overarching system of signification. Street names in the rapidly growing
colonial city were hence part of an indefinable but interminable contest of
Sisyphean proportions between colonizers, the colonized, and place. In this vein,
the chapter moves on to reflect on the tensions between colonialism’s schemes of
power to remake the city in its own image, on the one hand, and the everyday
strategies to evade control and continue with their own livelihoods, daily routines,
and communal rituals on the part of colonized inhabitants, on the other.
Street naming and urban order in the colonial city

In colonial Singapore, the municipal authorities were empowered to establish a
network of place and street names to facilitate the identification, demarcation, and
differentiation of the urban built environment for the purposes of colonial rule.
From the early days of the Settlement, Stamford Raffles decreed that “each street
should receive some appropriate name” and that it was “the duty of the police to
see [that they were] regularly numbered” (Buckley 1984, 84). Under section 28 of
the Indian Act XIV (Conservancy) of 1856, the commissioners were empowered
to affix in a “conspicuous … place at each end, corner, or entrance of every street”
in the town of Singapore a board on which was “the name by which such street is
to be known” (Harwood 1886, 1263–1264). A clear and well-ordered system of
street and place names was essential to the colonial and municipal authorities for
a number of practical purposes. Accurate addresses and clearly signposted streets
were necessary for levying house assessments and public utility rates as well as
for efficient postal, firefighting, and transport services. Portions of streets in
colonial Singapore were occasionally renumbered, reclassified, or renamed to
accommodate the requirements of the municipal assessment office.
Street names that were phonetically similar were often changed in order to
avoid confusion and delay in summoning the fire brigade to the correct location in
the event of a fire. In 1858, it was noted in the municipal meetings that much
confusion reigned among the streets of Singapore because not only were certain
streets, canals, and squares nameless, there were others where the same name had
been given to two or even three streets (Buckley 1984, 667). The municipal
commissioners embarked on the process of removing some of the confusion by
naming and renaming some of the streets but the duplication of names was not
entirely remedied. Half a century later, during a fire in early 1908, the fire brigade
was delayed as a result of the confusion of D’Almeida Street (a street in the
European business quarter off Raffles Place) with Almeida Street (a street in
Chinatown off South Bridge Road, later renamed “Temple Street”). Vigilance in
44 Brenda Yeoh
ensuring urban order was hence a continual colonial endeavor, as exemplified by
the renaming of Syed Ali Road to Newton Road (after Howard Newton, the
assistant municipal engineer in the late-nineteenth century) to avoid confusion
with Syed Alwi Road (MPMCOM October 16, 1914).
The legibility of the urban environment was also crucial to the surveillance
functions of the state, functions which ranged from the taking of a population
census, orthodox police work such as inspecting houses, instituting arrests, posting
notices, and serving summons on occupiers, to public health concerns such as
tracing the source and spread of “dangerous infectious diseases.” A well-organized
network of street names was necessary if clandestine activities, dangerous
diseases, and the Asian population in general were to be rendered less amorphous,
more visible to the observation and “gaze” of the authorities, and hence more
accessible to control.
The official naming process

The naming of places, whether as a conscious, deliberate event or a more informal
process of evolution, is in varying degrees a social activity. As Pirie (1984, 43)
has argued, this is so “either by virtue of it involving joint decisionmaking and/or
in respect of it occurring within a given social milieu in which there are formal or
informal conventions of name selection, assignment and adoption.” The naming
process is hence not only of toponymic significance but also embodies some of the
social struggle for control over the means of symbolic production within the urban
built environment.
In colonial Singapore, official street and place names were assigned at municipal
meetings on the approval of the commissioners.1 Names for consideration were
normally proposed by the municipal assessor, although suggestions sometimes
originated with the municipal president, one of the commissioners, or the requests
of property owners. Once decided, notice of new or changed street names was
advertised in the press and the schedule circulated amongst various heads of
government departments including the chief police officer, the commissioner of
lands, and the secretary of the Fire Insurance Association. The official naming
process was strongly dominated by the opinions of municipal and government
officers, and occasionally, those of influential property owners, but it was relatively
impervious to the views of people who lived on or used the streets, and was hence
generally detached from the social milieu of the plebeian classes. Street nomenclature
became a means by which the authorities were able to project onto the urban
landscape their perceptions of what different areas within the city represented.
Rationales for colonial street names

Certain themes tended to predominate in the christening of streets in Singapore. A
street name often commemorated prominent figures, especially persons who were
considered to have contributed significantly to public works and urban
development. Among the 225 municipal street names listed by H.W. Firmstone,
an official with the Chinese Protectorate (Firmstone 1905), approximately 45
percent served a commemorative function; two-thirds of those honored Europeans,
and the remainder paid tribute to Asians. Europeans included resident councillors
and governors, commemorated in names such as Raffles Place, Crawfurd Street,
and Jervois Road; royalty, in Alexandra Road, Victoria Street, and Connaught
Drive; and war heroes, in Havelock Road, Jellicoe Road, and Nelson Road.
Prominent citizens and civil servants might be honored: Still Road and Makepeace
Road were named after journalists; Paterson Road and Palmer Road after leading
members of the mercantile community; Pickering Street after the first Chinese
Protector; Cook Street and Oldham Lane after missionaries; Hullet Road after a
schoolmaster; and Everitt Road after a lawyer.
Municipal commissioners and officials were not reluctant to attach their names
to streets. Between 1880 and 1930, more than forty streets in Singapore were
dedicated to their memory. The selection of suitable streets to honor individuals
was a carefully calculated process aimed at ensuring that the length, location, and
importance of the chosen street were commensurate with the esteem due the
person. For example, in choosing road names for the Tiong Bahru area, which was
opened by the Singapore Improvement Trust in the early-1930s, it was suggested
that the trust manager, Walter H. Collyer, would not object to having his name
given to one of the streets, “although he would be quite entitled to object to a street
named after him unless it [was] a really long one” (SIT 1930).
Landowners and property owners who contributed land for streets or who
defrayed the cost of making, metalling, or draining them often requested that
those streets be named after themselves or family members. Streets in Singapore
thus acquired names such as Norris Road, Chin Nam Street, Cheng Yan Place, and
Eu Tong Sen Road (Raja-Singam 1939). By perpetuating the names of ostensibly
deserving citizens and eminent public servants, municipal street nomenclature
represented the city as one dominated by enthusiastic public service and a whole
gamut of civic talent. Commemorative street names inscribed on the city landscape
a tangible record of persons who had contributed to its development.
As a city that prided itself for being the capital of the Straits Settlements and the
Malay States—“the Clapham Junction of the Eastern Seas” (Shanghai Yuan Dong
di li xue hui 1917)—colonial Singapore included numerous streets whose names
recalled linkages with places on the Malay Peninsula and surrounding territories.
These accounted for slightly more than 10 percent of the street names at the
beginning of the twentieth century (Firmstone 1905); examples were Malacca
Street, Ophir Road, Manila Street, and Rangoon Road. Municipal commissioners
often favored the orderly progression of a naming pattern in a zone of the city.
When a road near Rangoon, Mandalay, and Moulmein roads was named in 1929,
a Burmese designation was considered most suitable. Martaban Road was chosen,
followed in later years by additions of Pegu Road and Bhamo Road (SIT June 8,
1929). Such practices resulted in clusters of related street names based on a
common theme.
Although residential segregation on racial lines was not legal in Singapore,
colonial street names often indicated an unofficial dichotomy between European
46 Brenda Yeoh
and Asian residential areas. Roads in certain parts of the built environment,
specifically the European residential suburbs, received names that denoted the
symbolic transfer of sentiment and the imagery of colonial hopes. In Tanglin and
Claymore, the aristocratic European suburbs, the well-shaded, picturesque streets
bore names such as Orchard Road and River Valley Road or conjured the idyllic
imagery of the English countryside through names like Devonshire Road and
Chatsworth Road. European suburban roads also often originated as plantation
carriageways or estate boundaries and were thus named after properties of well-
known inhabitants (Lee 1988).
During the late-1920s, some municipal commissioners commented on the
choice of nonlocal street names. In October 1927, one Asian commissioner
questioned why a new road from Orchard Road to Cairnhill Road had been
christened Bideford Road. The explanation was that “Bideford was the town from
which the owner of the land on one side of the road came,” but it failed to satisfy
the commissioner, who remarked that he had never heard of the place (MPMCOM
October 7, 1927, October 29, 1927). In January 1929, another commissioner
objected to the naming of new roads on the Lavender Road reclamation area after
Cawnpore, Lucknow, Simla, Lahore, Benares, and Karachi, on the argument that
there was no “natural connection between this Colony and these places.” He
asserted that there was “no need to go outside Malaya for names,” as there were
“plenty of people deserving recognition,” a viewpoint supported by an Indian
Muslim member of the municipal board (MPMCOM January 30, 1929).
Despite these differing opinions, official names derived from British places
continued to abound. When Tanjong Katong was developed as a residential area
and a seaside resort for Europeans in the 1920s, the roads there were named after
British seaside resorts such as Bournemouth, Boscombe, Margate, and Wareham
(Raja-Singam 1939). The names of British counties and urban centers inspired
road names such as Dorset Road, Norfolk Road, Bristol Road, and Shrewsbury
Road (Assessment Department 1921). The abundance of anglicized road names in
premier suburbs for Europeans allowed the residents of the bungalows sequestered
in park-like expanses to escape the impress of the tropics and native culture and
symbolically to exist in British settings.
Place and race

Areas associated with different Asian communities were also reflected in street
names assigned by the first town committee of Singapore, appointed in 1822 to
“appropriate and mark out the quarters or departments of the several classes of the
native population” to “prevent confusion and disputes” (Buckley 1984, 81). The
committee designated separate divisions by racial group: the European area was
dignified by the term town, but the Asian immigrants were relegated to separate
kampungs (villages). Street names in each division were identified with the
intended inhabitants, as evidenced by Arab Street in the Arab kampung and
Chuliah Street in the Chuliah kampung. In the Chinese kampung, street names
such as Canton Street, Chin Chew Street, Macao Street, and Nankin Street testified
to the care taken by the committee “to advert to the provincial and other distinctions
among this peculiar people” (Buckley 1984, 83).
Although some of the proposed street names did not materialize and although
the principle of residential separation did not survive in its entirety after the
nineteenth century, the plan provided the basis for a system of street names that
associated racial identity with specific places. Even as the rapid influx of Chinese
immigrants extended the perimeters of the original Chinese kampung, overflowed
its bounds, and spread throughout the town, street names associated with the
Chinese, such as Amoy Street, Tew Chew Street, Hong Kong Street, and Wayang
Street, continued to be concentrated in the traditional heart of the Chinese
kampung, later elevated to “Chinatown.” Similarly, in the vicinity of Arab Street,
names such as Haji Lane, Bussorah Street, and Shaik Madersah Lane identify the
historical presence of the Arab kampung. Street names on the site of the original
Bugis kampung, such as Java Road, Sumbawa Road, and Palembang Road,
proclaimed the linkages with the Indonesian islands. The Chuliah kampung
marked on the original plan apparently never emerged, but an early concentration
of southern Indians on the western fringe of Commercial Square left its impress in
the name Kling Street, which leads off the square. Kling Street was shown on the
earliest comprehensive plan of the town, drawn from an actual survey (Tassin
1836), and reflected the name used for southern Indians in Singapore. “Kling”
originated as a Malay-Javanese corruption of Kalinga, the name of an ancient
empire in southern India that had trading connections with the Malay archipelago
(Crawfurd 1856). By 1905, approximately 10 percent of municipal street names
alluded to associations with various Asian communities (Firmstone 1905).
In later years, similar attempts were made to associate place with race, albeit with
increasing complications. In 1925, it was proposed that a new road off Serangoon
Road in the Indian district be named Bombay Road. However, it was learned that
the name would be offensive to the Indian community, because of the association of
the site, a former convict burial ground, with the phrase orang kena buang Bombay
(Malay for “people thrown out of Bombay”), a pejorative term for Indian convicts
transported to Singapore. To avoid that negative association, the proposal was
abandoned and the road was named St. George’s Road, by virtue of its proximity to
St. Michael’s Road (SIT April 9, 1925). Name selection in other racially demarcated
areas sometimes encountered similar problems. On balance, however, by the end of
the nineteenth century, the endurance of street names invested with racial and
cultural connotations testified to the tendency in colonial consciousness to order
society by separating the populace into recognizable racial units.
Another category of municipal street names, accounting for approximately 15
percent, included those originating in physical features, landmarks, or other
material symbols. Only about one-quarter of these signaled the presence of non-
European landmarks: Pagoda Street, Mosque Street, and Synagogue Street, for
example, were named for religious buildings; Club Street and Wayang Street, for
places of entertainment. The bulk of such names, however, referred to
transportation features such as bridges and canals, military installations, and
topographic features.
48 Brenda Yeoh
Some 6 percent of municipal street names offered information on early
economic activities (Firmstone 1905). The most prominent was Commercial
Square, the center for European business on the south bank of the Singapore
River. Other examples were Carpenter Street, Merchant Street, Fish Street, Sago
Lane, Garden Street, and Buffalo Road. These street names tended to persist even
after the activity to which they alluded had ceased or been relocated.
Although municipal authorities attempted to choose street names recognizing
Asian communities where that was deemed appropriate, and although Asian
landowners succeeded in toponymically claiming several streets for themselves,
most municipal street names honored the perceptions of power-holding Europeans
rather than those of the residents of specific areas. Even when original names
derived from the Malay vernacular were preserved, they often were transmogrified
to suit English-speaking tongues. For example, the word Saranggong, apparently
signifying an area named after the ranggung, a long-legged water bird, was
eventually transmuted into “Serangoon,” while kalang puding, which referred to
the garden croton, evolved into “Kalang Pudding.”
Asian street naming practices

Unlike the official municipal labels assigned and decreed by law, Asian street names
came informally from community-defined conventions and parameters. Practices
that gave names and meaning to the built environment and to areas of the city were
likely to be part idiosyncratic and part socialized (Cohen 1985). Asian place names
often differed not only from those assigned by the authorities but also among various
ethnic and dialect groups; occasionally there could be more than one name within a
group for a specific place. The 225 municipal street names cited in 1905 had the
equivalent of 365 Hokkien and Cantonese names, which yields a ratio of 1.6 Chinese
names for each municipal one (Firmstone 1905). As names that evolved
spontaneously through usage, Asian street names tended to remain characteristic of
the local patois. Some 65 percent of Chinese street names came from material
symbols and landmarks that formed an integral part of daily life. Temples, theaters,
markets, gambling dens, bridges, and wells lent their names to streets. Kwong Fuk
Min, the Cantonese name for Lavender Street, means “Kwong Fuk Temple Street”;
Sin Pa Sat Pin, the Hokkien name for Ellenborough Street, means “beside the new
market”; Kiau Keng Khau, the Hokkien name for Church Street, means “the mouth
of the gambling houses”; and Tai Cheng Keak, the Cantonese name for Kampong
Glam beach, means “foot of the big well.” Certain Chinese street names also
provided clues to the hidden dimensions of everyday life, as they signified the
territorial boundaries of different groups in the Chinese community. Streets such as
Ghi Hok Koi (Carpenter Street), Ghi Hin Koi (China Street), and Siong Pek Koi
(Nankin Street) were named after the headquarters of important secret societies,
which might well imply that the streets were once the operational territories of each
group (Mak 1981; Archive and Oral History Department 1983).
The close association between the identification of places and the local,
everyday life of the non-European groups was also evident in the 7 percent of
Chinese place names that denoted specific trading, artisanal, and agricultural
activities. These included certain streets that were well known for trade
specializations, such as Tau Hu Koi, or Upper Chin Chew Street, which means
“beancurd street.” It was so named because of the number of beancurd
manufacturers located there. Macabre, though equally essential, activities were
identified in Kuan Chha Tiam Koi, or “coffin-shop street,” and Sey Yun Kai, or
“street of the dead,” named for the preponderance of death houses where the dying
waited out their days and for the shops selling funeral paraphernalia in the same
area. Agricultural pursuits also featured in names such as Chhai Hng Lai, translated
as “within the vegetable gardens,” and Eng Chhai Ti, translated as “ground where
[a vegetable called] eng chhai is planted.”
Approximately 15 percent of Chinese street names were purely descriptive or
directional in content. Some indicated location by specifying a general area or
proximity to another street; others identified streets on the basis of the number of
buildings originally erected along them. For example, Ji Chap Keng means
“twenty buildings”; Chap San Kang means “thirteen shops”; Peh Keng A means
“eight small buildings,” a name not inappropriate for a very short street. The
numerical mode of description figured in the names of main thoroughfares on both
sides of the Singapore River: Tai Ma Lo, or “great horse-carriage way,” and Ji Ma
Lo, or “second horse-carriage way,” were Cantonese names for South Bridge
Road and New Bridge Road on the southern side as well as for North Bridge Road
and Victoria Street on the northern side. Other descriptive street names owed their
origins to the physical structure of the streets. Among these were names like Gu
Kak Hang, meaning “ox-horn lane,” an apt descriptor of a crescent-shaped street
leading off and back to Tanjong Pagar Road; and Tan Pin Kai, meaning “one-
sided street,” as it had houses only on one side.
In contrast to municipally imposed names, naming in the Chinese community
seldom was commemorative. Only 5 percent of Chinese street names, as opposed to
65 percent of municipal ones, honored eminent persons (Firmstone 1905), and none
of the honorees were European. Furthermore, where a specific street was named for
an Asian person, it was normally because of the proximity of the street to a material
feature, such as a house or shop, belonging to the person rather than as a memorial
of the person’s contribution to Singapore society. Among the examples were Seng
Po Toa Chhu Au, which means “behind Seng Poh’s big house,” and Heng Long
Kai, which means “street where chop Heng Long is located.”
There was little direct correlation between municipally imposed and Asian-
derived street names. Albert Street, honoring Queen Victoria’s consort, had Asian
aliases. Among the Chinese it was called Bo Moan Koi, meaning “the street where
sesamum oil is pressed,” or Mang Ku Lu Seng Ong Kong, meaning “Bencoolen
Street district joss-house.” To Tamil speakers, it was Thimiri Thirdal, or “place
where people tread fire,” a reference to the firewalking ceremony held on the
street during the Thaipusam festival (Haughton 1891). The Chinese knew less
than 5 percent of municipal street names in their transliterated form. To the
Cantonese, Cecil Street was Si Shu Kai and Robinson Road was Lo Man San Kai,
attempts at transliteration that distorted pronunciations beyond recognition.
50 Brenda Yeoh
Firmstone (1905, 125) himself noted that whilst “Lo Man San” (Robinson) was
“quite Chinese in sound,” there was no guarantee that “the name [would be]
intelligible to the ordinary Cantonesespeaking Chinaman” and that “a very long
rigmarole” would be necessary to interpret “Robinson Road” clearly.
The contrast between municipal and Asian street names went beyond differences
in etymological content and phonetics. The two systems also represented different
ways of signifying the landscape. Whereas municipal street names primarily
sought to identify the urban landscape with civic notions of appropriateness and
ordering, Chinese nomenclature was strongly anchored to local features, symbols,
and activities that formed a significant role in daily experience. Whereas Chinese
names tended to match the use of streets to which they were attached, municipal
street names attained a level of signification that conveyed meaning over and
above the immediate material functions of the streets themselves. Another
important difference lay in the precision with which the urban landscape was
divided and defined. Municipal street names labeled exact, clearly bounded
streets; Asian varieties tended to identify general locations relative to specific
landmarks or distinguished by the presence of certain activities. For the authorities,
clearly labeled and defined streets were crucial to the governing and policing of
the city. For the Asian communities, street names served as signposts of daily
activities. They were inseparable from the substance of everyday social practice
but did not necessarily require the precision dictated by the colonial project or
ordering the urban landscape.
Counter-toponymics in the colonial urban landscape

A dual (or more precisely, multiple) system of place identification existed in
Singapore: the official network of street names and a range of alternative
descriptors attached by indigenous and non-European immigrants. The two
systems of place names had little common ground: the full English meaning and
nuances of municipal street names was not comprehended in the Chinese (and
other Asian) cultural repertory and vice versa. The language of place not only
facilitates the interpretation of the mental images of various cultural groups, but
where the naming process differs between groups it also provides a valuable tool
in understanding contrasting representations and uses of the colonial landscape
and its physical artifacts.
The capacity of Asian communities to develop and use their own names and
signifiers to denote and differentiate parts of the landscape also implies that each
community had a certain latitude in bringing a diversity of sociocultural influences
to bear on the urban landscape. Practices that conferred names and meaning to the
urban built environment were not entirely idiosyncratic but depended on Asian
perceptions and uses of specific places in terms of their associations with various
types of socioeconomic activities, religious or symbolic sites, and territorial gangs.
The persistence of different systems of signification in the city showed that
municipal representations of the landscape did not command an unchallenged
hegemony. Instead, it pointed to a multiply differentiated, if vastly unequal, city
rather than the colonial ideal of a unitary city ordered by a division into recognizably
racial containers that functioned under a single, overarching system of authority.
In this context, street naming was a fraught process reflecting multiple concerns
and many moving parts. To take an example, in selecting a name for a new road
leading from Kreta Ayer to Anson Road over the site of a former Chinese (Cantonese-
Khek) burial ground (SIT March 28, 1925), the collector of land revenue, J. Lornie,
preferred one which would reflect the original association of the place with the
Chinese community. One of the earlier suggestions—“Aljunied Road”—was hence
rejected on the grounds that it “might more appropriately be given to an area in
which Mohammedans had some interest.” “Choon Guan Road,” in memory of Lee
Choon Guan, a well-known Straitsborn Hokkien shipping and real estate tycoon
who had died recently (Song 1902, 111-12), was strongly favored. However, some
of the municipal commissioners feared that as the former burial ground belonged to
the Cantonese and Khek communities, objections might be raised against a street
name commemorating a member of another dialect group. “Man Sau Road,” after
Leong Man Sau, a prominent member of the Cantonese community who died in
1916 (Song 1902, 432–433), was suggested instead, but it was turned down by the
municipal assessor on the grounds that it was phonetically similar to “Mansoor
Street,” an existing road off North Bridge Road. It was ultimately decided to
abandon the search for a Chinese name and to christen the road “Maxwell Road” in
honor of “the eminent services to Malaya of three generations of public servants
[who were] all members of one family” (Makepeace 1921, 431–442).
While the naming process was heavily skewed towards favoring British colonial
imaginaries of what constituted apposite ways of naming the growing city’s
streets, this had little relation to (let alone power over) the messy realities in the
sphere of everyday life. In colonial Singapore, municipal street names, even when
selected for their ostensibly ethnic character or according to colonial racial
templates, were seldom comprehended and were frequently ignored by the Asian
communities. In the late-nineteenth century, Haughton (1891, 208) observed that
“the names given by the municipality to the various streets [were] only used by
the European portion of the population, and the Chinese, Tamils and Malays [had]
names for the streets very different from their Municipal titles.” Although
successive town committees had selected what had been perceived as suitably
“ethnic” names such as “Hongkong Street” and “Macao Street” (for Chinese
areas) and “Jalan Sultan” (for Malay areas), “the fact remain[ed] that Municipal
names [were] ignored by the natives, with the exception of the police, who [were],
of course, compelled to learn them” (Haughton 1891, 208). Many residents of
Chinatown, for example, continued to live in ignorance of the English name of the
street in which they lived, largely because of the difficulties involved in
phonetically translating English street names into the vernacular. Examples of
such translations such as “‘Nor Mee Chee’ to mean North Bridge Road and ‘Sow
Mee Chee’ to mean South Bridge Road [were] typical of the inability of the
Chinese language to give sound to an ‘r’” (RajaSingam 1939, 14–15).
From the perspective of the colonial authorities, they despaired at what they
saw as the haphazard and imprecise manner in which Asians identified places and
52 Brenda Yeoh
furnished addresses. Firmstone, for example, concluded his study of Chinese
street and place names in Singapore and the Malay Peninsula as follows:
It is characteristic of the Chinese that in identifying streets, accuracy is the

last thing that strikes them as essential. If you ask a Chinaman—or better
still a Chinese woman—newly arrived and resident in Singapore, where he
lives, the inevitable answer will be “Singapore.” A second query will
perhaps elicit information as to the district of the town or island, but it will
take many questions before the actual address can be ascertained, though it
might have been given directly, if the person questioned had thought that it
was of any importance.
(1905, 206)
Not only did the Chinese have their own sets of street names, but also their
“happy-go-lucky way of using one expression to describe any one of perhaps a
dozen streets” was extremely frustrating from the European perspective (Firmstone
1905, 206). Tek Kah, or “foot of the bamboos,” so named because part of the road
was formerly bordered by thick bamboo groves, described an ambiguously defined
territory at the town end of Bukit Timah Road and included Albert Street, Selegie
Road, Short Street, and the numerous lanes in the neighborhood. The Malays were
said to carry this tendency of ambiguous identification even further: they took
“little notice of streets, and as a rule, only describe[d] places by kampungs”
(Haughton 1891, 49).
Asian street names also tended to be incomplete and uneven in their coverage,
abundant in areas occupied by or associated with their own communities but
sparse elsewhere. Unlike municipal street names, which were literally invented at
committee meetings and officially assigned to roadways at specific dates, Asian
street names evolved through an informal process, as initially nameless corridors
of movement grew in importance and function. Their multiplication was both
unsystematic and uncharted, becoming known to members of the community who
lived in or used the streets but often impervious to the authorities, including
government interpreters who remained “lamentably ignorant” of Asian
designations of place (Firmstone 1905, 206). Asian disregard for municipal street
names and the corresponding ignorance of Asian naming practices on the part of
authorities had practical significance for those involved in governing and policing
the city. Often addresses could not be ascertained accurately for instituting arrests,
serving court summons, or tracing the spread of infectious diseases. The latter, for
example, was often frustrated by either the deliberate falsification of addresses
where victims of infectious diseases had stayed on the part of relatives and friends,
or the inability or reluctance of Asians to furnish accurate addresses. The non-
comprehension and non-acceptance of municipally assigned street names and the
use of alternative systems rendered the Asian population less open to the
surveillance strategies of the colonial state (Yeoh 1996).
Municipal attempts to enhance the acceptability and the usage of official street
names among the Asian communities had limited success. In 1912, a Chinese
municipal commissioner proposed that Chinese and Malay characters
corresponding phonetically to the existing English-language names should be
added to the street signs to popularize the official designations (MPMCOM July
21, 1912). Although the municipal board unanimously endorsed the proposal, it
ultimately was not implemented because of high cost and the difficulty of
expressing many of the names phonetically (MGCM June 24, 1921; MPMCOM
June 24, 1921; MMSC3 July 8, 1921). When pressed further by Asian
commissioners and the Mohammedan Advisory Board to add Asian characters to
street name plates, the municipal president R.J. Farrer expressed his skepticism as
to the usefulness of Asian name plates, arguing in the case of Malay names that
the addition would only benefit “an infinitesimal section of the population” as
there were “very few inhabitants of the town who [could] read Malay (Arabic)
characters but [were] unable to read Roman characters” (MPMCOM December
29, 1922). This was refuted by one of the Malay commissioners, Che Yunus bin
Abdullah, who argued that Malay characters would be extremely useful and would
be of especially “great assistance to Malay policemen who [were] unable to read
the Roman characters” (MPMCOM December 29, 1922).
What prompted Asian community leaders to press for the addition of Asian
street names appeared to have been a desire to stake their communities’ claims on
the landscape. Dr H.S. Moonshi, for example, prefaced his arguments for the
addition of Malay characters by reminding the Board of what he saw as the basic
Malay character of Singapore. He argued, “as Singapore is a Malay country and
the prevalent language is Malay, Municipal Commissioners should add Malay
characters in the new streetname plates to be put up” (MPMCOM December 29,
1922). In the same way, for the Chinese municipal commissioners, the addition of
Chinese names represented a means of impressing on the built environment the
Chinese character of the city. Although the requests were rejected on financial
grounds, they indicated that the contest for identification in the landscape was also
expressed at the level of official discourse.
Conclusion
In Singapore, whilst colonialism established a network of official place and street
names reflecting the mental images of the dominant culture, names given by non-
European immigrant cultures continued to persist beneath the surface. As a
process, the naming of places in Singapore was not the simple prerogative of the
municipal authorities but was contingent on social dynamics, albeit under
conditions of highly uneven power relations between colonizers and the colonized.
The authorities had the power to select what were considered appropriate
names and to assign them formally to the streets of the city, but the Asian
communities comprised the social milieu which retained the power over whether
the names took on common usage or were ignored or substituted. Official street
nomenclature and its representations of meaning did not automatically pass into
local currency but instead encountered impermeable barriers. Instead, the
existence of alternative Asian name systems in daily use implied competing
54 Brenda Yeoh
representations of the landscape, rather than a single, municipally imposed
image. The naming of places was also an important element of the colonial
enterprise of governance and surveillance. Failure to impose and enforce the
adoption of one uniform system of place names partly reflected the lack of
absolute power for the colonial authorities and the cultural politics in the
interstices of everyday life in the colonial city.
Note
1 In the 1920s, with the increasing complexity of municipal affairs and the necessity for a
division of labor amongst commissioners, the task of deliberating on street names was
assigned to a special committee. Minute papers, normally containing the municipal
assessor’s suggestions, were first circulated to the municipal president, committee
members, and occasionally heads of various government departments for opinions to be
registered before coming before the committee.
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4 Revisiting East Berlin and
Haifa
A comparative perspective on
renaming the past
Maoz Azaryahu
Introduction
Street naming has become a conventional feature of urban commemoration that
expresses not only administrative control over, but also inscribes ideological
agendas within, urban space. As already demonstrated during the French
Revolution and addressed in a growing number of scholarly works since the mid-
1980s, street names belong to the geopolitics of public commemoration, which
makes them susceptible to replacement within the context of regime changes,
postcolonial transitions, and population exchanges following wars. In such
circumstances, a large-scale commemorative renaming of streets and the rewriting
of the historical narrative inscribed on street signs, city maps, and in official
registers signify a break with the recent past and the onset of a new era in political
history. Such revisionist measures introduce the change of regime into the
language of the cityscape and into the practices of everyday life.
Renaming the past is about asserting political control over both history and
public space. Possibly a prolonged process punctuated by discontinuities evincing
shifts in political priorities, renaming the past involves political and ideological
incentives and constraints that direct the actual timing and scale of the
commemorative renaming of streets. Notably, beyond demonstrating the new
regime’s prerogative to restructure the commemorative landscape of the city,
renaming the past is a function of specific political interests, pressures, constraints,
and priorities, one issue of which is the timing of politically motivated toponymic
changes. The actual timing and extent of renaming the past is contingent on the
dynamic relationships between various political actors involved in decision-
making at state, city, and borough levels as well as on the pressures from below
exerted on the street naming authorities by individuals and civic organizations.
Another issue is what constitutes the primary objective of a large-scale renaming
of streets. In principle, renaming the past is about rewriting the history celebrated
on street signs so as to make it ideologically congruent with the new regime’s
vision of history. In particular, renaming the past involves a twofold procedure.
One is damnatio memoriae (damnation of memory) evident in the
decommemoration of heroes and events associated with and representative of the
old regime. Milan Kundera observed that “The streets that do not know their
names are the ghosts of monuments torn down” (1996, 127). As is often the case
Revisiting East Berlin and Haifa 57
in such circumstances, renaming streets is both a celebration of triumph and a
mechanism for settling scores with the vanquished regime. The other is the
commemoration of heroes and events representing the new regime and its vision
of history. When regime change is construed in terms of restoration,
commemoration may assume the form of recommemoration, namely, the
reinstitution of names removed by the former regime, for renaming streets is
about substituting one name for another. However, the actual pattern and dynamic
of renaming the past, and specifically the interplay between decommemoration
and commemoration, involves particular ideological emphases and political
priorities that reflect specific interests and needs as well as power constellations
that influence and direct the renaming process.
A revised version of an article originally published in 1992, this chapter employs
a comparative perspective to explore the dynamic of renaming the past as a
technique of historical revision. At the center of this historical investigation is the
juxtaposition of patterns of renaming the past carried out in Spring 1951 in Haifa,
Israel, and in East Berlin, the capital of communist East Germany. In both cities
renaming the past followed a change of regime and the establishment of a new
political order. The two renaming operations were contemporaneous but unrelated.
The juxtaposition of the toponymic changes in these cities and the comparative
perspective this affords provide insights into the political dynamics of renaming
the past as a measure of historical revision in the context of regime change.
Historical background: Berlin’s street names, 1813–1947
The German Empire (Kaiserreich)

Nationalized by the Prussian state in 1813, the names given to Berlin’s streets and
squares celebrated the Prussian dynasty and its military glory. After the unification
of Germany in 1871 and the institution of Berlin as de facto capital of the German
Reich, street names also commemorated German national figures such as Schiller
and Lessing. As commemorations of the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian
war of 1870 following which the German Empire was founded, streets were
named after battlefields and victories. In Berlin and adjacent towns, streets were
named after the members of the Hohenzollern dynasty, most notably kings and
Emperors. Streets were named for Bismarck, the “founding father” of the Second
Empire. Generally speaking, the history commemorated in Berlin’s street names
evinced the political hegemony of Prussia in the German Reich.
The Weimar Republic

In November 1918, the Kaiser abdicated and the short-lived first German republic
was established. Notably, Greater Berlin was incorporated in October 1920 and,
as a result, some street names appeared simultaneously in different boroughs. The
transition from monarchy to republic was not articulated by a corresponding
erasure of the dynastic heritage from the street signs of the German capital, even
58 Maoz Azaryahu
though this matter was continually raised by communists and Social Democrats in
the city council (Azaryahu 1988). In practical terms, street naming in Berlin was
a prerogative of the Prussian state and although the Social Democrats governed
Prussia, the republican authorities undertook no comprehensive renaming of the
dynastic past.
The Third Reich

The Nazis, aware of the propaganda value of street names and determined to erase
all traces of the Weimar Republic, were swift in their actions to rename all those
streets associated with the former regime and its history. In his memoirs Willy
Brandt, the future German chancellor, wrote: “In Lübeck on 20 March (1933) a
large number of people were taken into so-called protective custody. Soon
thereafter the renaming of streets began” (Brandt 1982, 80). National-Socialist
commemorations honored Nazi leaders and heroes.
Berlin, 1945–1948
The renaming of the Nazi past was high on the political agenda for reviving political
life in Berlin following the collapse of the Third Reich (Azaryahu 1990, 2011). The
city was divided into four sectors, each ruled by an allied military government. The
unelected city government instituted by the Soviets in May 1945 was communist-
led. Even though the need to “democratize” the street signs was a matter of
consensus, two different approaches became apparent. The moderate approach
advocated by conservative circles sought to undo Nazi commemorations and to
re-institute the pre-Nazi names. The communists, at the other end of the political
spectrum, supported a radical approach, according to which the democratization of
political life should include the renaming of both Nazi and Prussian (namely
military and monarchic) traditions. The communist-led municipal administration
launched a large-scale renaming operation that went beyond the purge of Nazi
commemorations to include Prussian commemorations as well, but the new Social
Democratic administration that took office after the democratic elections held in
Berlin in October 1946 scaled down the purge of the official register of street
names. The renaming process was officially concluded in February 1947, with the
official renaming of 151 streets in the 20 boroughs of Berlin.
Historical background: Haifa’s street names, 1934–1948

Naming streets in Haifa began in the late-1920s with the rapid urban development
of what had been in the Ottoman period a small settlement at the foot of Mt.
Carmel, and its transformation into an industrial center of British mandate
Palestine. Haifa was a mixed Arab-Jewish city, and during the 1940s the two
communities were of similar magnitude: approximately 70,000 residents. From
the early-1930s, the two communities lived in geographically separated areas of
the city with the Arabs concentrated in the lower parts of the city and the Jews
residing in Hadar Ha-Carmel, the new Jewish neighborhood built on the slopes
of Mt. Carmel.
As an expression of the cooperation between Jews and Arabs at the municipal
level, each community was autonomous with regard to naming streets in its
respective neighborhoods (Goren 2006). In 1934, the municipality set up a Names
Committee with both Jewish and Arab members, the role of which was largely
limited to coordinating the naming of streets at the municipal level. The municipal
council was involved in naming streets in the area near the new Imperial port built
by the British government and these street names celebrated imperial rule. In
1934, the main thoroughfare along the port area was named Kingsway, and the
following year a thoroughfare in downtown Haifa was named after King George
V. Central streets were named after General Allenby, who had led the victorious
military campaign against the Ottomans in the Near East in 1917, and Stanton, the
first British governor of Haifa.
The commemorative naming of streets in Arab Haifa began in 1935. Streets
were named after the Hashemite kings of Transjordan and Muslim Caliphs,
warriors, and victories as well as philosophers and poets from the Golden Age of
early Islam. In 1937, the Municipal Council approved the naming of streets after
Saladin, who had defeated the Crusaders in 1187, conquering Jerusalem, and the
Hijaz, the area of the holy Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina. In 1948, around
80 Arab street names were included in the official register of street names. The
street names in the Jewish areas of the city—their number was around 300 in
1948—were regulated by the Hadar Ha-Carmel Committee and inscribed the
Zionist narrative of Jewish history and national rebirth onto the local street signs.
Central thoroughfares in Hadar Ha-Carmel were named after Herzl, the founding
father of modern Zionism, and Max Nordau, the celebrated author who had
supported Herzl.
Renaming the past: the necessary condition

Intended for posterity, the lifespan of commemorations is limited by the politics
of commemoration. Any large-scale commemorative renaming of streets is a
result and expression of a radical reshaping of power relations; renaming the past
is a function of a discrepancy between the worldview of power-holders and the
historical narrative inscribed on street signs. The renaming of streets in East
Berlin and Haifa in 1951 were local variations on a national theme: the
establishment of the communist East Germany in the Soviet zone of occupation
in Germany and the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel in part of former
British Mandate Palestine.
In November 1948, Berlin was divided in two (Figure 4.1). The communists,
with the support of the Soviet military government, declared the eight boroughs of
the Soviet sector (East Berlin) as “democratic” Berlin under communist municipal
government, and East Berlin became the capital of the German Democratic
Republic, which had been officially established as a state in the Soviet zone of
occupation in Germany on October 7, 1949.
60 Maoz Azaryahu
Figure 4.1 Borough boundaries in Berlin with the boundary between the Soviet sector and
the western sectors marked in solid black
The 1947 partition plan of British Mandate Palestine assigned Haifa to the future
Jewish state. In April 1948, the Haganah, the Jewish militia, defeated the local
Arab militia and secured control of the entire city, following which most Arab
residents and political leaders left the area with new Jewish immigrants settling in
the abandoned Arab sections of the city. On May 15, 1948, the State of Israel was
proclaimed and all of Haifa became part of the sovereign State of Israel.
Priorities, constraints, and prolonged delays

The immediate dismantling of street signs bearing the name of Adolf Hitler in
German cities after the surrender to the Allies signaled the demise of the Nazi
regime (Azaryahu 2011, 2012). Such symbolic acts are of great political resonance.
Of particular interest are circumstances in which renaming the past is delayed for
a prolonged period, creating a situation where the persistence of the old system of
commemorative names is openly incongruent with the new regime and its vision
of history.
East Berlin
As evinced by the failed attempt of the communist-led municipal government in
May 1945–October 1946, Berlin communists were well aware of the need to align
the municipal registry of commemorative street names with their vision of a new,
democratic Germany. With the division of Berlin in November 1948, the
communists were no longer constrained by the need to share power with other
parties. In a speech delivered on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the
“democratic Berlin,” East Berlin mayor Friedrich Ebert explained:
From these days on Berlin’s working masses in the eight boroughs of the east
could proceed without hindrance under the leadership of the parties of the
working class in the way they had begun since 1945 in the whole of Berlin.
(Neues Deutschland 1958)
In regard to naming streets, the communist authorities had a free hand to mold the
commemorative landscape in the section of the city under their control according
to what was the ideologically correct version of historical heritage from their
perspective. This was Marxist-Leninist in terms of doctrine and “progressive” and
“democratic” according to official propaganda. Significantly, other cities in the
Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany had already achieved the radical
“democratization” of the street signs prescribed by the communist party.
The first stage in reshaping the commemorative landscape of East Berlin was
not about the decommemoration of “reactionary,” mainly Prussian, traditions but
rather about the commemoration of prominent communist leaders and heroes.
According to a well-established convention, the naming of streets or squares after
historic figures was occasioned by anniversaries, thereby emphasizing the
symbolic honor entailed in the commemorative gesture. On August 18, 1949, on
the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the execution by the Nazis of Ernst
Thälmann, the leader of the communist party, in Buchenwald, the municipal
government of East Berlin announced the forthcoming renaming of both
Wilhelmplatz in Berlin-Mitte (the historical center of Berlin) and the nearby
subway station Kaiserhof after Thälmann (Neues Deutschland 1949a). The slain
communist leader of the KPD personified the legacy of communist anti-fascist
martyrdom and was a distinguished member of the East German pantheon. The
renaming ceremony was held on November 30 in the presence of the leaders of the
communist state and the martyr’s widow (Neues Deutschland 1949b). This
renaming was emblematic in how it combined decommemoration and
recommemoration into a powerful message about the demise of the old
“reactionary” political order and the onset of a new “progressive” political order.
In honor of Lenin’s eightieth birthday on April 22, 1950, Mayor Ebert initiated
the renaming of a main thoroughfare and a square in Prenzlauer Berg and
Friedrichshain Leninallee and Leninplatz, respectively (Minutes 1950a). In
January 1951, the central committee of the ruling communist party requested the
municipal government of East Berlin to rename the Lustgarten, a prestigious
location in the city center, Marx-Engels-Platz (Tägliche Rundschau 1951a). The
involvement of the central committee in this commemorative matter indicated the
outstanding importance assigned to it by the communist authorities.
Naming main thoroughfares after Stalin, the Soviet leader, and Wilhelm
Pieck, the president of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), celebrated the
new political order in the Soviet sphere of influence. Naming streets after heads
of state belonged to the cult of personality of communist leaders. In each member
state of the Soviet Bloc, the dual cults of Stalin and of the local communist
leader celebrated the new communist order and indicated subordination to the
Soviet Union.
62 Maoz Azaryahu
On December 22, 1949, on the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday, the
Frankfurter Allee in Friedrichshain was renamed Stalinallee. The old street signs
were removed in the morning and in the afternoon tens of thousands gathered in the
street, which had been decorated with flags and slogans (Berliner Zeitung 1949).
Wilhelm Pieck, the president of the GDR, was also celebrated by the regime as the
founding father of the communist German state. A year later, on the occasion of
Pieck’s seventy-fifth birthday, the Lothringer Straße in Berlin-Mitte and Prenzlauer
Berg was renamed Wilhelm-Pieck-Straße (Neues Deutschland 1951a).
Clearly the priority of the newly instituted communist government was to
commemorate the prominent heroes of the Stalinist pantheon on the street signs.
In their symbolic capacity as representations of the ruling regime, these new
commemorative names asserted—through their placement in prestigious
locations—the transformation of East Berlin into the capital of the communist
state under construction in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany.
Haifa
In April 1948 the former mixed, Jewish-Arab city became predominantly Jewish.
The need to express the transformation of Haifa into an Israeli city with an
overwhelming Jewish majority by means of renaming streets was on the municipal
agenda. The national government was not involved. The pressure to rewrite the
registry of street names in accord with political and demographic conditions
largely came from below. “Concerned citizens” sent letters urging the municipal
government to implement what they considered to be necessary changes. The first
letter concerning the need to rename streets was discussed by the municipal
council in October 1948 (Minutes 1948). Whereas some letters dealt with
fundamental issues, others were concerned with specific names that should be
replaced or given to streets.
A basic issue was the need to rename so-called “foreign” names—mainly
British and Arab—in Haifa. In general terms, replacing “foreign” street names
was construed as a statement about post-1948 Haifa as a mainly Jewish city in an
independent State of Israel. The number of such “foreign” names was estimated
to be around 100, approximately a quarter of the street names in the official
register. The letters sent to the municipality differed in regard to the extent and
scope of the toponymic changes needed. A maximalist approach maintained that
the municipality should initiate a comprehensive purge of “foreign”
commemorations from the municipal street name registry. Several letters
requested renaming specific Arab street names after fallen soldiers (Letter
1950a). Remarkably, there were no specific demands to decommemorate King
George V or General Allenby. However, the first letter to the municipal
government regarding the need to rename streets specifically requested the
decommemoration of Stanton, the first British governor of Haifa, in light of his
openly anti-Zionist position. As the author of the letter explained, “there should
be no objection to renaming Stanton St. … No one will be sorry when this name
will no longer adorn the walls of Haifa” (Letter 1949b).
In response to the letters urging renaming, the municipal government
acknowledged the need to harmonize the street names with the new political and
demographic conditions, but it deferred the task to the new municipal administration:
The problem you raised—replacing Arab street names by Hebrew ones and
giving names to new streets—has been on our mind for a few months already
and we acknowledge the need to solve it once and for all. However, we cannot
do it [prior to] new elections to the municipal council.
The … municipal council to be elected will address the issue and will
formulate clear principles regarding both changing names and giving new
names so that the new names will express in both content and sound the
political transformation that has taken place in our country and our city.
(Letter 1950b)
“Renamings, at long last”

Renaming the past is about taking measures directed at harmonizing the official
register of street names with the ideological underpinnings of the ruling political
order. A revolutionary transformation of the ruling order is a necessary condition
only. As the cases of East Berlin and Haifa show, a prolonged delay in
implementing ostensibly anticipated toponymic changes is a possibility. Such a
delay is the result of a dynamic interplay of specific priorities and constraints. In
the case of a delay, the question arises as to what prompts the municipal authorities
to put an end to the impasse and vigorously engage in renaming the past.
Pressures and incentives: East Berlin

Despite the need to introduce Stalinist commemorations into the cityscape, the
issue of decommemoration (i.e., renaming the ideologically incorrect past inscribed
on East Berlin’s street signs), was also on the municipal agenda. Pressure to
proceed in this direction was exerted from above. On March 30, 1950, the East
German government decreed that all cities and towns in the GDR should rename
streets that did not comply with the ideological premises of the East German regime
(Minutes 1950d). Unreported in the East German press, the decree stipulated that:
[s]treets, roads and squares that carry militaristic, fascist and anti-democratic
names or such named after people, places and other terms associated with
military, fascist or anti-democratic acts, should be renamed by 31 July 1950.
Whereas in 1945 the purge of Nazi names was at the top of the renaming agenda,
in 1950, after the most explicit Nazi names had already been purged, the emphasis
was on the need to cleanse the official register of street names of the “reactionary”
legacy of former political regimes, most notably “military” and “monarchic”
commemorations. According to the second clause of the decree, street name
changes were to be approved by elected local authorities. This lent a democratic
64 Maoz Azaryahu
aura to a procedure that in fact had been ordained by the communist state and
executed by communist-controlled local governments. The third clause specified
the criteria for selecting new names. These were to be names of people and places,
terms or appellations “closely connected” with the “anti-fascist” and “democratic”
regime of the GDR, or names rooted in vernacular traditions. Above all, persons
after whom streets were to be named should be distinguished for their special
accomplishments in the service of “progress.”
The decree of March 30, 1950, made the purge of “reactionary” street names
mandatory throughout the GDR. Following the declaration of this decree, the
issue of purging “reactionary” public commemorations in East Berlin was raised
on the official municipal agenda. At its meeting on May 4, 1950, the East Berlin
municipal government stipulated the renaming of three streets in Niederschönhausen
in Pankow (Minutes 1950b). The reason given was that Wilhelm Pieck, the
President of the GDR, requested renaming streets with “military and monarchic”
names in the area; remarkably, the three streets were in the vicinity of the Schloss
Niederschönhausen (castle), the official residence of the President of the GDR. In
actuality, three monarchic names were replaced: Kronprinzenstraße became
Majakowskistraße, after the famed Soviet revolutionary poet, and Kaiserin-
Auguste-Straße was renamed Tchaikowskistraße, after the renowned Russian
composer. Replacing monarchic names by Soviet/Russian commemorations was
a resonant statement about the ideological reorientation of the GDR. The third,
Friedrich-Wilhelm-Straße was renamed Stille Straße (Quiet Street), “because of
its character” (Minutes 1950b).
The renaming of the monarchic past in the vicinity of the presidential palace
was laden with political meaning, but it had little actual impact on East Berlin as
a whole. Of greater impact on the historical cityscape of the East German capital
was the decision of the municipal government taken on May 11, 1950, one week
later, to “exile” the famous equestrian statue of Friedrich II (the Great) to
Sanssouci, the palace complex of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Potsdam (Minutes
1950c). Designed by Christian Rauch in 1851, the statue adorned Unter den
Linden, the central boulevard of Prussian Berlin. The official reason given for the
monument’s removal was the alleged damage it had suffered during the war.
The decree issued by the East German government in March 1950 set a time
limit for the comprehensive purge of all street names that did not accord with the
ideological criteria specified. Notably, most other cities and towns in the Soviet
Zone of Occupation had already expunged undesired commemorations from the
official register. In these circumstances, the purge of “reactionary” commemorations
in East Berlin seemed to be a question of time only.
Remarkably, despite preliminary signs to the contrary, East Berlin’s municipal
government failed to maintain the time limit set by the decree. It is unclear whether
pressure was exerted on the municipal government from above to initiate extensive
renaming of the past according to the criteria stipulated in the decree. However,
there was a clear incentive for an extensive renaming operation in East Berlin: the
third Festival of Youth and Students, which was due to be held from August 5
through 9, 1951, in East Berlin.
At its meeting on December 22, 1950, the city government announced its
support for the first international event in Berlin since 1939:
The municipal government of Greater Berlin greets with special joy the
Council of the World Organization of the Democratic Youth for its decision
to hold the World Youth Festival 1951 in Berlin. The municipal government
considers the convening of this great peace meeting in Berlin to be a large
award for the city. It is proof that in the eyes of democratic people in the
whole world Berlin has remained not only the capital of Germany, but is also
acknowledged as a center of power in the struggle for world peace.
The youth of the world will find in Berlin in summer 1951 a different
population than that of before 1945, a Berlin that no longer subscribes to
hatred of peoples and races but a Berlin that expresses solidarity with the
struggle of youth for peace.
(Minutes 1950e)
As the announcement makes clear, the planned communist-oriented world festival

was of the utmost importance to the East German regime. In his autobiography,
Erich Honecker, then head of the state’s Youth Movement, the Freie Deutsche
Jugend (FDJ), which was the formal host and organizer of the festival, noted that
the festival offered the opportunity “to demonstrate the change which had taken
place in our country since the liberation from fascism” (Honecker 1980, 188). At
its weekly meeting on March 8, 1951, the municipal government issued a decree
about the realization of the world youth and students festival (Minutes 1951b).
This paved the way for making the necessary preparations for the mega-event
scheduled for the summer.
Early in April 1951, the prime minister of the GDR made a public appeal to the
citizens to “support the world youth festival” (Neues Deutschland 1951b). On
April 12, Neues Deutschland, the organ of the ruling communist party, announced,
speaking for its readers: “We greet the students of the world” (Neues Deutschland
1951c). On the same day, the municipal government passed a resolution to rename
25 streets in East Berlin. The headline of the report about the resolution in the
Tägliche Rundschau, a newspaper published by the Soviet Army in the Soviet
zone of occupation in Germany, announced: “Renamings, at long last”; according
to the newspaper, the resolution was “the first part of the renamings that have long
been demanded by the population” (Tägliche Rundschau 1951b). The renaming
procedure was top-down, and the reference to an alleged popular demand to
rename streets indicated the need of the regime for democratic legitimacy.
Prospects and incentives: Haifa

The obstacle specified in the anticipated changes to the official registry of street
names in Haifa was of a formal nature, namely, the understanding that the pre-
1948 city government did not represent the electorate and therefore did not have
the authority to initiate necessary changes. Elections for a new municipal council
66 Maoz Azaryahu
took place in November 1950 (Al Hamishmar 1950). Negotiating a coalition
proved difficult, and a mayor was only elected in January 1951, with Abba
Khoushy, the powerful leader of MAPAI (Labor) in Haifa, at the helm.
The election of a mayor put an end to two and half years of caretaker municipal
government. In February 1951, the Municipal Council elected a municipal Names
Committee that was entrusted with the task of proposing street names to the
council, which was the sovereign body in this matter (Minutes 1951b). This was a
stark break with the past, when neighborhoods were independent in this respect.
The new Names Committee meant centralization at the municipal level.
The first meeting of the Street Names Committee was convened in March 1951.
In its first session the chairman explained that the role of the committee was to
institute new names and to replace “the street names which did not have Hebrew
names, of which there are approximately one hundred” (Minutes 1951c). He noted
that in his view the names selected should be commemorations of Jewish and
Israeli history. On the agenda of the meeting were also Arab street names that were
in neighborhoods resettled by Jews after 1948. As a committee member noted, the
issue was “highly political.” The consensus was that “foreign” street names should
be changed, but the question was whether the change should be comprehensive or
only partial, with most members supporting the latter approach. One maintained
that the names were familiar and there should not be a “wholesale” purge of Arab
names. Another suggested to check all names, but to consider each according to its
merit, the aim being to delete “absurd” names such as Stanton St. A third member
proposed retaining Arab street names pertaining to the history of Haifa. The
chairman’s view was that most Arab names should be deleted from the registry.
However, the renaming of streets in Haifa in May 1951 was not about a purge of
“foreign” street names. The incentives were the third anniversary of the Jewish
military victory in the battle for Haifa in April 1948 and Israel’s third Independence
Day celebrated a few weeks later. For the mayor, the anniversaries were both an
obligation and an opportunity to celebrate Israel’s Independence on the street signs.
Patterns of renaming
East Berlin: decommemoration and recommemoration

Aimed at decommemorating the Prussian-German monarchy and military tradition
inscribed on street signs, the renaming operation in East Berlin in April–May
1951 was carried out in four successive rounds. At the weekly meeting of the
municipal government on April 12, 1951, the director of the department for
transportation and municipal enterprises presented a list with 25 streets to be
renamed (Minutes 1951d). The responsibility of this department for street names
was instituted in 1947 by the municipal government of a then still unified city
(Azaryahu 2011). Further resolutions followed suit, with 26 renamings on May
10, 35 on May 24, and 69 on May 31 (Minutes 1951e; Minutes 1951f; Minutes
1951g). Altogether, 155 streets were renamed in the eight boroughs of East Berlin
in the course of the toponymic cleansing decreed by the communist municipal
government. In comparison, the purge of politically incorrect street names in the
20 boroughs of Greater Berlin in 1947 entailed 151 renamings in a city with
almost 9,000 street names.
Each of the four renaming rounds had clear thematic characteristics. The first two
were directed at erasing the memory of the ruling Prussian dynasty and included
names such as Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße, Auguste-Viktoria-Straße, Prinz-Heinrich-
Straße, or Prinz-Oskar-Straße. The third round was directed at deleting street names
expressing the monarchic idea such as Kaiserstraße, Königstraße, or
Kronprinzenstraße. The most prominent “casualty” of the third round was Otto von
Bismarck, the founding father of the German Empire, whose name was obliterated
from the street signs of Lichtenberg, Weißensee, Köpenick, and Treptow.
The fourth round focused on decommemorating the Prussian-German military
heritage, represented through the names of prominent generals and celebrated
victories. Among the generals were heroes of the anti-Napoleonic “Wars of
Liberation” at the beginning of the nineteenth century such as Gneisenau, Yorck,
and Blücher, and Prussian generals involved in the wars against Denmark (1864),
Habsburg Austria (1866), and France (1870) that led to the founding of the
German Empire under Prussian leadership. In this round of renaming,
commemorations of the Prussian-French war of 1870 also disappeared, most
prominently streets named after significant battlefields, such as Sedanstraße,
Belfortstraße, and Metzstraße.
The main thrust of the renaming operation was to “democratize” and
“demilitarize” the street signs. The new street names, obviously indispensable,
were a by-product of the purge of ideologically incongruent commemorations.
The purge of “reactionary” street names was an opportunity to fill the vacancies
with the names of heroes of the German revolutionary tradition and of communist
activists as well as of martyrs of the anti-Nazi resistance movement, thereby
enhancing the “progressive” tone of the version of history inscribed on the street
signs. Street names in Treptow commemorated Thomas Münzer and Florian
Geyer, the heroes of the Peasants’ rebellion of 1525. Friedrich Engels and
Ferdinand Lassalle were commemorated in Pankow and Köpenick, respectively.
At the same time, “progressive” writers, artists, and scientists such as Kurt
Tucholsky, Romain Rolland, Max Lieberman, and Marie Curie were
commemorated as well.
In certain areas, efforts were made to replace disgraced “reactionary” thematic
arrangements of names with others that were more ideologically and culturally
congruent. In Karlshorst, where the Soviet military administration had its
headquarters, streets that had been named after members of the Hohenzollern
dynasty were renamed after lakes in Brandenburg, the region in which Berlin is
situated (Tägliche Rundschau 1951b). The street names in the so-called “French
neighborhood” in Weißensee commemorated battlefields of the Franco-Prussian
war of 1870, and hence, according to official assessment, belonged to the
“militaristic” and “imperialist” tradition. Following the renaming operation, the
“French neighborhood” was transformed into a “composers’ neighborhood,”
where street names commemorated famous European composers.
68 Maoz Azaryahu
Haifa: commemoration and decommemoration
In April 1951, Haifa’s newly elected mayor approached the recently established
municipal Street Names Committee to offer “a few street names that should be given on
Independence Day” (Minutes 1951h). In its session on April 16, a few days after the
third anniversary of the battle for Haifa, the council discussed “giving national names
to streets” to commemorate the victory (Herut 1951a). According to another newspaper,
the new names were to celebrate Israel’s third Independence Day (Davar 1951). In a
festive session held some three weeks later, on the eve of Independence Day, the council
formally approved five renamings that “symbolized Israel’s War of Independence”
(Herut 1951b). Later that month, the Municipal Council approved two more renamings
(Al Hamishmar 1951). The commemorations combined local and national aspects of
Israel’s national narrative. The national aspect was evident in the names Derekh
Ha’atzmaut (Independence Road), Rehov Kibbutz Galuyot (Ingathering of the Exiles
St.), and Rehov Shivat Zion (Return to Zion St.). The latter two names were prominent
themes of the Zionist narrative of the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral
homeland. The name Ma’ale Hashihrur (Liberation Slope) commemorated a decisive
battle waged there during the battle for Haifa. The names Shderot HaHaganah
(Haganah Blvd.), Rehov Hameginim (Defenders St.), and Rehov Hagiborim (Heroes
St.) conflated the local and national aspects of Israel’s War of Independence. Notably,
the new street names were generic commemorations, celebrating values such as
independence or ingathering of the exiles or the heroes and defenders in general,
befitting the collectivist ethos of the period (Figure 4.2). Despite specific requests from
bereaved families, no individual fallen soldiers were commemorated.
Figure 4.2 Ha’atzma’ut Road (Independence Road), Haifa, Israel (photograph by author)

Though the renamings of streets in Haifa were few in number, their symbolic
impact was substantial. The purge of “foreign” street names was not a priority, but
rather a welcome by-product of the stated intention to commemorate Israel’s
independence on street signs. The importance assigned to the new commemorations
was underlined through selecting central thoroughfares in downtown Haifa, the
names of which were British and Arab commemorations. Three commemorations
of the colonial past in downtown Haifa were purged: Kingsway became Atzmaut
(Independence) Road, King George V St. became HaMeginim (Defenders) St.,
and Stanton St., named after the anti-Zionist British official, became Shivat Zion
(Return to Zion) St. in what was a clear case of a symbolic retribution. These three
renamings replaced the colonial past with Zionist history. Some Arab names were
also replaced. Iraq St. became Rehov Kibbutz Galyot (The Ingathering of Exiles
St.), a symbolic message in its own right since it was instituted when Iraqi Jews
were leaving Iraq, most of them for Israel. Saladin St., a significant Arab-Muslim
commemoration, was renamed Rehov Hagiborim (Heroes St.).
Aftermath
East Berlin
The purge of “reactionary” Prussian names from the street signs of East Berlin
also included decommemorating the heroes of the anti-Napoleonic Wars of
Liberation (1813–1815), prominent among them Prussian generals and field-
marshals Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, Yorck and Blücher, Lützow and Körner.
However, a year after these men had been consigned to oblivion a change in
official doctrine reinstated their heroic stature in the East German pantheon. The
transition to “national historiography” in East Germany was in tune with the need
for a “progressive” military heritage to lend ideological support to the creation of
the East German armed forces in 1952 (Azaryahu 1991, 135–141). As a result of
this about-turn in official historiography, the Prussian generals of the Wars of
Liberation became hailed as “Prussia’s best men” (Neues Deutschland 1952).
In June 1952, the communist party prompted their commemorative
“rehabilitation.” According to this new official policy, monuments to the generals
should be restored. Regarding streets that had been renamed “as the result of a
false interpretation of socialist historiography” (Der Spiegel 1952), the official
policy was that though the discarded street names should not be restored, they
should be considered for use with new streets built in the course of the
reconstruction of East German cities, as long as the local population was
supportive, which was especially the case in former Prussian garrison towns.
Renaming the past in East Berlin was about purging the memories of the
monarchy and military glory of Prussia from the street signs. However, such
historical memories persisted in West Berlin, which was unaffected by the
ideological zeal of the communist regime: as a result of the incorporation of
Greater Berlin in 1920, many street names, prominent among them being
commemorations of the Prussian dynasty and military history, recurred in different
70 Maoz Azaryahu
boroughs of the city. Such dynastic and militaristic commemorations were
eliminated in 1951 in East Berlin, but persisted in West Berlin.
Haifa
Inscribing preeminent Zionist commemorations on Haifa’s street signs in May
1951 was a symbolic celebration of triumph. The toponymic changes were clearly
not about a comprehensive purge of “foreign” street names. However, this issue
was writ large on the municipal agenda. In 1953, the mayor urged the Municipal
Names Committee to accelerate the tempo of changing the 72 “foreign” street
names still extant in the city (Letter 1953). Preliminary proposals included 39 Arab
street names; however, the number of changes was reduced by July 1953 to 19
names, among them names of streets in an area in downtown Haifa that lay in ruins
(Minutes 1953). The Municipal Council approved only one change: the name of
Omar al-Mukhtar, an anti-colonial pan-Arab martyr, was replaced on the street
signs by that of Naftali Herz Imber, the author of the lyrics of Hatikvah, the Zionist
anthem that became Israel’s national anthem.
Notwithstanding the mayor’s frustration with the slow tempo of the purge of
“foreign” names in 1953, it transpired that the policy of the city leaders in regard to
“foreign,” mostly Arab, street names was actually careful, measured, and selective.
The names changed were those of pan-Arab heroes or geographical areas outside
Israel. Early Caliphs and Arab philosophers were not decommemorated. In April
1958, the tenth anniversary of Israel’s independence, the Municipal Council
approved changing four Arab street names (List 1959), and this was the last change
in the official registry of “foreign” street names in Haifa.
Conclusion
The comparative perspective employed in the study of renaming streets in East
Berlin and Haifa in Spring 1951 offers insights into the dynamic and patterns of
renaming the past as a political procedure aimed at harmonizing the names and
commemorations inscribed on local street signs with the new political order and
its ideological underpinnings. However, major power shifts are a necessary
condition only. The actual tempo and patterns of renaming the past are the result
of a particular interplay of pressures, constraints, incentives, and priorities.
A large-scale renaming operation entails a purge of the official registry of
street names. A major issue is the relationship between commemoration and
decommemoration as aspects of renaming the past. In East Berlin, the objective
of renaming the past was to purge “reactionary” (i.e., “monarchic” and
“militaristic”) commemorations from the street signs of the communist-ruled
sectors of Berlin and to abrogate the dissonance between the vision of history
inscribed on the street signs and the ideology of the communist regime. In Haifa,
on the other hand, the primary objective was to commemorate Israel’s
independence on the street signs, while decommemoration was a welcome
by-product of this procedure.
As the cases of East Berlin and Haifa show, renaming the past is a process that
can stretch over a prolonged period of time. Renaming the past in Haifa in Spring
1951 was the beginning of the process whereas in East Berlin it marked its end
(Azaryahu 1986). Renaming the past in Haifa marked the start of realigning local
street names with the narrative of Israel’s independence. The purge of “foreign”
street names in later years was partial only and ended in 1958. In East Berlin,
renaming the past in April–May 1951 was the last stage of a process that began in
May 1945, when, after the surrender of Nazi Germany, the purge of “reactionary”
street names was a high priority.
Renaming the past in East Berlin in 1951 took place in the communist part of
a divided Berlin. The commemorative traditions discarded in East Berlin were
left intact in West Berlin, where streets further commemorated German and
Prussian military and monarchic traditions. With the reunification of Germany
and Berlin in 1990, renaming the communist past became a major political issue
(Azaryahu 1997). However, the recommemoration of German emperors and
Prussian generals whose names had been erased in 1951 in East Berlin was not
on the public agenda: according to municipal regulations, duplicate street names
were to be avoided, and therefore street names already in existence in West
Berlin could not be introduced in East Berlin. Paradoxically, the ideologically
oriented purge of “reactionary” traditions in East Berlin in 1951 proved in the
long run to be a contribution to reducing the number of duplicate commemorations
in the re-unified city.
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72 Maoz Azaryahu
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5 “Armed with an encyclopedia
and an axe”
The socialist and post-socialist
street toponymy of East Berlin
revisited through Gramsci
Jani Vuolteenaho and Guy Puzey
Introduction
Writing about Berlin, Maoz Azaryahu once outlined a paradigmatic approach in
contemporary research on the politics of honorific street naming:
The selection of street names is a political procedure determined by ideological

needs and political power relations. Even if it may be presented as a response
to popular sentiments, it is always implemented by nominated agents of the
ruling political order and the naming procedure is a manifest feature of
authority. … In democratic regimes, local government is legally in charge of
naming streets, even though the state may have some rights as to the names
of streets in specific areas of the national capital that are rendered nationally
representative. Such differences matter less in authoritarian regimes, where
local and central authorities are only formally differentiated.
(1997, 481)
Whilst not denying the serviceability of the above generalizations in many

research settings, in this chapter we will argue that focusing on the overtly political
procedures and meanings of street naming is not the only avenue to the
advancement of critical toponymic scholarship. One valuable contribution of
“politicized” street naming research in recent decades has certainly been the
accumulation of detailed mappings of local-scale and intra-state governmental
and party-political processes and contingencies, especially in periods following
radical or revolutionary political changes. In particular, research into socialist and
post-socialist urban contexts across Eastern and Central Eastern Europe has
revealed much about top-down processes and the political wrangling linked with
odonymic de- and re-commemorations. It has also highlighted the honorific-
pedagogic functions that street (re)naming serves for the legitimization of political
systems and rendering as “natural” state-sanctioned ideological values and
interpretations of the past (e.g., Azaryahu 1986, 1996, 1997, 2009; Light 2004;
Gill 2005; Marin 2012; Palonen 2015). As a flipside, however, this research has
tended to sideline less obviously political aspects of street naming. It is
“Armed with an encyclopedia and an axe” 75
symptomatic, for instance, that many critical readings of street toponymy have
revolved around explicitly honorific inscriptions of historical events and heroic
individuals typical of high-prestige urban locations. As Rose-Redwood (2008),
Vuolteenaho and Ainiala (2009), and Berg (2011) have all noted, critical
toponymists have often turned a blind eye to other types of thematic, possessive,
or otherwise deceptively “banal” street and place names that proliferate in the
urban landscape.
We also argue that, more generally, a restricted analytical understanding of “the
political” as a more or less autonomous sphere of power-holding elites has regularly
taken place at the expense of the more elusive roles of “the cultural” and “the
popular” in street naming practices (cf. Verdery 1991; De Soto 1996). Crucially,
for our present purposes, criticism of this latter bias resonates with the conceptions
of power developed by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), according to which power
is not merely a one-directional, top-down process. In his elaboration of the notion
of hegemony, Gramsci advocated for an understanding of the cultural roots of
power and the co-existing processes of coercion and consent that shape relationships
between rulers and the ruled in any given society. Equally intriguingly, although
less widely known, Gramsci’s approach to political theory was closely tied to his
strong interest in language practices. As a young journalist in the late-1910s, as we
will outline in the following section, Gramsci even specifically criticized the
“evisceration of the old Turin” in honorific-odonymic terms, advocating instead for
a street naming policy consistent with “solidarity through memory.”
This chapter’s approach is to explore Gramsci’s specific writings about street
naming and more general ideas on hegemony to guide and inspire the study of
power and street naming. As a result, it is hoped to shed light on more covertly
political dynamics in street naming practices. This Gramscian approach will be
applied, in this instance, to the research setting of East Berlin, both during the
period of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and after its demise in the
context of a unified Germany. After investigating relevant insights from Gramsci,
we will tackle the multiple, and often paradoxical, manifestations of Marxist-
Leninist state socialism as an allegedly “people-empowering” ideology in the
street toponymy of East Berlin in 1945–1989. Analyzing both honorific and
thematic street names, we trace how the (1) self-aggrandizement of the party-led
political system (through so-called cult naming), (2) ideals of socialist
internationalism, and (3) socio-cultural indigenization of a distinctively German
socialism were manifested across East Berlin’s inner-city and suburban districts.
Next, we will apply a Gramscian lens to street name revisions as well as instances
of resilience of the GDR’s toponymic legacy in post-socialist urban development.
In line with Gramsci’s postulations, our methodological emphasis in both periods
analyzed is simultaneously on blatantly top-down (coerced) and legitimacy-
seeking (or otherwise reciprocal) relationships between name-giving elites and
ordinary Berliners. Whilst acknowledging the historical, administrative, and
socio-cultural particularities of Berlin as a stage of socialist and post-socialist
toponymic transformations, we conclude by discussing the wider implications of
Gramsci’s work for the understanding of power in critical street naming studies.
76 Jani Vuolteenaho and Guy Puzey
Extrapolating odonymic lessons from Gramsci
Gramsci’s international reputation is predominantly based on his Quaderni del
carcere (Prison Notebooks), which he wrote while imprisoned by Mussolini’s
Fascist regime in 1926–1935. This work covers a range of historical, cultural, and
political topics, including elaborations of classical treatments of political
maneuvering and pre-existing hegemony theories, observations on civic revolts
and legitimacy crises raging in many European states at that time, and commentaries
on contemporary popular culture. Gramsci’s influence as a theorist of power has
been wide-ranging and enduring across political and cultural research, not least
among subsequent hegemony theorists (e.g., Williams 1980, 1983; Laclau and
Mouffe 1985; Laclau 2005; Johnson 2007; Thomas 2009; Coutinho 2012). His
thoughts on matters such as the relationship between the state and civil society,
different types of hegemony, the role of “organic intellectuals” as cultural mediators
of hegemonic power, and the oppositional pairing of hegemony and subalternity
have been applied to the study of many different societies and political systems.
A brief outline of Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony

One of Gramsci’s innovations was that he conceived dominant influences as not
solely “limited to matters of direct political control” but also encompassing “a
more general way of seeing the world and human nature and relationships”
(Williams 1983, 145). In certain societal situations, the power of a hegemon can
be so strong that aspects of the prevailing political-cultural system—including its
founding ideologies and historical narratives—are widely internalized as
“common sense.” This notion resonates with critical toponymists’ current
insistence on the power of place naming to make political ideologies appear as the
“natural order of things” in the eyes of ordinary citizens (e.g., Azaryahu 2009, 62).
However, Gramsci also argued that any organized society is composed of both
political society (the state, the official) and civil society (the popular, the cultural
sphere). Furthermore, he made it plain that an effective hegemony can only be
won and sustained through existing ideologies, traditions, and particularly what
he termed a “national-popular collective will” (Gramsci 2007, 1559; translation in
Gramsci 1971, 130). While the institutionalized practices of power by a hegemony-
seeking regime are of necessity coerced, they simultaneously hinge on the cultural
sphere and its everyday producers (intellectuals, teachers, journalists, artists, civic
organizations, etc.) who may have an “organic” connection to the lay people and
communities. The influence of cultural hegemony thus derives not only from
coercion or force, but also from popular consent.
Significantly, Gramsci saw language-related practices as the fundamentals of
an “educational relationship” between the rulers and the ruled. “Every relationship
of ‘hegemony,’” he argued, “is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs
not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is
composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of
national and continental civilisations” (Gramsci 2007, 1331; translation in
Gramsci 1971, 350). In a fundamentally two-way relationship, the rulers mobilize
intellectual labor to propagate their ideological worldview as unquestioned
common sense. In this process, language practices—from language education
proper to linguistic standardization and “lessons” about significant historical
events disseminated through schoolbooks and other popular media—all play
quintessential roles. In this way, Gramsci showed insight into occasions when the
official and the popular were in a reciprocal dialogue. In Joseph Femia’s (1981)
formulation, Gramsci’s utopian-Marxist conception of “integral hegemony”
embraced political systems that are democratic and organically representative of
society. Furthermore, Gramsci acknowledged that in seeking to guarantee popular
consent, regimes of power often resort to a degree of self-criticism as “the cultural
environment … reacts back” (2007, 1331; translation in Gramsci 1971, 350). This
bi-directionality, of course, is not always the case: a dominant ideology can also
be merely coercive, monologic, and hence deemed a “minimal” hegemony (only
catering for elites) or a “decadent” hegemony (a corroded integral hegemony no
longer able to satisfy the masses) (Femia 1981).
The fact that Gramsci’s political thought was heavily influenced by his interest
in linguistics and his personal experience of power relations between languages
has often escaped the attention of political and social scientists, although there are
researchers who underscore the utility of this aspect of Gramsci’s thinking (e.g.,
Lo Piparo 1979; Ives 2004; Thomas 2009; Puzey 2011, 2016; Carlucci 2013). A
particularly intriguing discussion of coerced power in language practices was
penned by Gramsci himself, as a young dissident intellectual and journalist, when
he engaged in scathing criticism of ongoing street name changes in Turin. We will
now turn to this early polemic.
Gramsci as a critical toponymist

On June 1, 1917, a newly announced list of projected renamings in Turin’s city
center by the municipal street naming committee was discussed in Avanti!, a left-
wing newspaper co-edited by Gramsci. These proposals were the latest step in the
ongoing gentrification or embourgeoisement of Turin’s inherited street toponymy,
a process that had begun after Italian Unification, with an initial focus on the
memorialization of the House of Savoy and of Risorgimento heroes and symbols.
The former via Dora Grossa (named after a river) had become via Giuseppe
Garibaldi, while via Gasometro (“Gasometer Street”) had been renamed via
Giovanni Camerana (after a poet), among several other street name changes
privileging nationally exalted heroes over the inherited odonymy. The newest
proposals continued in this spirit of “progressive” eradication, aiming to change
via dell’Ospedale (“Hospital Street”) to via Galileo Ferraris (after an engineer
and physicist, 1847–1897) and via del Deposito (“Warehouse Street”) to via
Quinto Agricola (after a Roman general), for instance.
In the very same issue of Avanti!, Gramsci’s critical commentary was published.
As a brief odonymic case study of Gramsci’s own, this short article bore the
sardonic title, “Il progresso nello stradario” (Progress on the Street Map). Gramsci
complained about the decorative function of the proposed names, void of any
organic meaning connected to the places in question. With more than a hint of
nostalgia for the local working-class heritage, Gramsci wrote:
Armed with an encyclopedia and an axe, [the street naming committee] is

proceeding with the evisceration of the old Turin. Down come the old names,
the traditional names of popular Turin that record the fervent life of the old
medieval commune, the exuberant and original imagination of the Renaissance
artisans, less encyclopedic but more practical and with better taste than the
merchants of today. They are replaced with medal names. The street map is
becoming a medal showcase. … Every name [in the artisans’ city] was a
branch of life, it was the memory of a moment of collective life. The street
map was like a common patrimony of memories, of affection, binding
individuals together more strongly with the ties of solidarity through memory.
The shop-keeping bourgeoisie has destroyed this heritage. … All the princes,
regents, ministers and generals of the House of Savoy have been given their
niche. … The encyclopedia has provided the rest. The bourgeois city is
cosmopolitan, in other words a false international, a false universality. … It
is the triumph of the colourless and tasteless cosmopolis.
(Gramsci 1982 [1917], 183–184; translation by Guy Puzey)
It is perhaps not surprising that a Marxist philosopher would criticize bourgeois

naming practices, but Gramsci was also criticizing the “evisceration of the old
Turin.” This is entirely in keeping with his approach to organicity: the notion that
there should be an organic link of ideas between political and intellectual power
structures and the social groups they seek to represent. Here, Gramsci was calling
for more sensitive, considered, and authentic naming, with a sense for the actual
social history of a place and not only the history represented by elites and their
heroes drawn from encyclopedias. In the terminology of the Prison Notebooks,
the Turin street naming case was illustrative of a mismatch between political and
civil societies, and of a coercive political culture from the viewpoint of local
working people.
While Gramsci was not the only writer to recognize political tensions in the
urban geography of street names prior to the recent critical turn in place name
studies (Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009), his criticism of Turin’s neotoponymy
intriguingly anticipated subsequent writings on hegemony and recent critical
toponymic literature. Indeed, a dominant streak in the latter field has been a
premise that place names—and especially street names, with their immediate
dependency on political regimes and ideologies—mirror hierarchies of social
power and temporal disruptions in regimes of governance. Much of this research
has analyzed odonymic de- and re-commemorations in the aftermath of regime
changes in socialist and post-socialist cities.
Still, the implications of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony go far beyond his time-
specific journalistic criticism of Turin as a city where “the official” and “the
elitist” did not communicate with the organic meanings of “the popular.” As
already insinuated, from a Gramscian perspective, it is somewhat problematic that
critical toponymists have often treated commemorative street naming as a merely
one-way (top-down) symbolic practice. In this regard, critical scholarship on
street naming has tended to halt its analytical and theoretical curiosity on the same
level that the young Gramsci concluded his commentary on Turin’s street name
changes, namely on the conception of the urban namescape as an elitist “medal
showcase” with its functions of memorialization, commemoration, and
aggrandizement. In other words, critical street name scholars have largely failed
to address the complexities of toponymic power related to the reciprocal
relationship between the rulers (elites) and the ruled (civil society). Consequently,
socio-culturally attuned research questions on covert strategies to affect people’s
worldviews, or the name-givers’ responsiveness to protests and popular
sensibilities, have thus far mainly escaped their analytical and conceptual attention
(for some partial exceptions and openings to dislodge this otherwise widespread
trend, see Vuolteenaho and Berg 2009; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu
2010; Alderman and Inwood, this volume).
Writing in 1930, in one of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci returned briefly to
the subject of street naming. Even though this was a fleeting mention, in this
connection he framed the role of street names as part of the “ideological structure
of a ruling class,” due to their influence on public opinion. Hence Gramsci saw
street naming as a component in the organization of ideological structures, and he
went on to explain how important the study of these structures could be:
The press is the most dynamic part of the ideological structure, but not the
only one. Everything that directly or indirectly influences or could influence
public opinion belongs to it: libraries, schools, associations and clubs of
various kinds, even architecture, the layout of streets and their names. …
Such a study [of how the ideological structure of a ruling class is actually
organized], conducted seriously, would be quite important: besides providing
a living historical model of such a structure, it would inculcate the habit of
assessing the forces of agency in society with greater caution and precision.
What can an innovative class set against the formidable complex of trenches
and fortifications of the ruling class?
(Gramsci 2007, 333; translation in Gramsci 1996, 53)
Here Gramsci provides an engaging reminder of the potential significance of

studies exploring the dynamics of such things as “the layout of streets and their
names,” suggesting both a framework and a socio-political imperative for critical
odonymic studies, while also demonstrating that recognition of the political
implications of naming—and of street naming specifically—date back considerably
longer than much recent work has acknowledged.
Returning to the more recent wave of critical place- and street-naming studies,
a fortunate new trend is that the scholarship on odonymic memory politics is
showing increasing signs of rapprochement with the Gramscian emphasis on the
civic sides of political and societal life. For instance, geographers interested in
socialist and post-socialist street name reforms have stressed the importance of
research into how name changes are perceived by ordinary people (e.g., Azaryahu
2011a; Light and Young 2014; Creţan and Matthews 2016). Also, in theoretical
terms, it has been increasingly acknowledged that “the power of political elites to
reshape urban space and public memory is not absolute” (Light and Young 2014,
682), and it is “important not to reduce the symbolic struggle over street naming
to a binary opposition between the ‘elite’ and the ‘marginalized’” (Rose-Redwood
2008, 447). Equally productive approaches have featured in studies that have
sought explanations for “odonymic inertia” that apparently jars with a society’s
ruling ideology (e.g., Gill 2005; Light and Young 2014), or reflected on the
relationship between revolutionary and restorative naming strategies (Giraut and
Houssay-Holzschuch 2008, 2016). For this Gramscian-inspired study, aiming to
take seriously both overt and covert political motivations in the street toponymy
of East Berlin, these new research directions are promising points of departure.
Variations of medal naming and odonymic indigenization in socialist

East Berlin
The establishment of state-socialist political systems in East-Central Europe after
the Second World War was essentially a relationship between hegemonic and
subaltern polities: a geopolitical situation in which one center (the Soviet Union
with its Russian heartland) exerted its influence on different peripheries (the
Sovietized territories and satellite states of Europe’s Eastern Bloc). The early
decades following the Bolshevik revolution saw the birth of distinctively socialist
street naming discourses in the Soviet Union (e.g., Murray 2000; Marin 2012;
Nikitenko n.d.; Puzey and Vuolteenaho 2016), which authorities across the
“national democracies” of East-Central Europe and beyond recycled in decades to
come. One of the archetypal street naming discourses was faithful to the classic
“nationless” ideals of Marxism and working people’s heroic role in world history,
epitomized by “internationalist” commemorations of revolutionary thinkers and
fallen dissidents, or ideals themselves, with street names such as улица Розы
Люксембург (“Rosa Luxemburg Street”) and мост Равенства (“Equality
Bridge”). After Lenin’s death in 1924, another influential discourse was that of the
Stalinist “cult model” (Murray 2000, 17), representing the apex of the self-
aggrandizement of the one-party state and its living and late leaders (e.g.,
Кировский проспект, “Kirov Avenue”). Thirdly, not all previous national heroes
were expunged from the Soviet namescape. As writers such as Pushkin and
Dostoevsky could be associated with anti-Tsarist attitudes or making a case for
the “humiliated and insulted,” they characteristically remained untouchable. In
the otherwise subaltern non-Russian territories annexed to the Soviet Union in the
inter-war period, a policy of “local rooting” or “indigenization” (коренизация)
was also adopted to instill “a socialist consciousness in the non-Russian peoples
of the Soviet Union in so far as possible rooted in their own linguistic and cultural
media” (Murray 2000, 75–76). In this section, we will trace variations of these
three street naming discourses in the eulogizing of socialism and the first
communist state on German soil in the street toponymy of East Berlin.
The immediate post-war years
After the Second World War, Berlin was divided ideologically. The de-Nazification
and democratization of social and political life was a vexed task, not least due to
the relative autonomy of the city’s twenty boroughs in local planning and naming
matters (Azaryahu 1986, 2011b; Fuchshuber-Weiß 1994, 1473). Nonetheless, a
fragile initial consensus existed among the city’s new rulers on the urgency to rid
the namescape of Nazi-era inscriptions, seen as incongruent with the founding
ideals of the emergent democratic Germany. For instance, Herman-Göring-
Straße, which had been named after the notorious Nazi Field Marshal, reverted to
Ebertstraße in honor of the first President of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich
Ebert. The borough Horst-Wessel-Stadt, which had been dedicated to a Nazi
martyr and propaganda symbol, took back its monarchical name Friedrichschain
(“Friedrich’s grove”). It was, however, disputed whether it was sufficient to
obliterate the legacy of the Third Reich by reinstating such earlier names, or
whether a more thorough reform should be enacted. Right-wing politicians
generally insisted on a return to the Weimar situation (Azaryahu 2011b, 486). In
lieu of this limited purge, advocates of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei
Deutschlands, Communist Party of Germany) and its successor, the SED
(Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party of Germany)
suggested a much more radical anti-Fascist, anti-militarist, and anti-monarchist
approach. In the view of many communists, the task ahead was to “accomplish a
‘true’ democratization of public space” through a new array of progressive street
names (Azaryahu 1997, 483).
Even before the city’s official partition in November 1948, the Moscow-backed
SED sought to take sway over political life in the eight boroughs of the city’s
Soviet occupation zone. Interestingly, however, the number of honorific
inscriptions related to the victorious Soviet forces remained moderate. One
explanation for why these names would be a delicate issue among Berliners was
related to recent and all-too-well-recalled wartime atrocities by Soviet soldiers
against civilians. In Berlin alone, approximately 100,000 women had been raped
in the final days of the Third Reich (Beevor 2003, 410). Even so, the name Platz
der Befreiung (“Liberation Square”) was given, as a reminder in the suburban
landscape of the encirclement of the Nazi capital by Soviet forces, as well as
Bersarinstraße in Mitte and Bersarinplatz in Friedrichschain. In the case of Soviet
Colonel General, Nikolai Berzarin (1904–1945), the first commander of occupied
Berlin, responsiveness to local sentiments apparently mattered, as he “had become
a surprisingly popular figure, credited with vigorous efforts to feed the starving
Berliners” (Ladd 1997, 213; Beevor 2003, 409).
The commemorations of the former leaders of Germany’s workers’ movement
and martyr communists appeared frequently in the Soviet sector. Among the
exalted communists in key historical inner-city locations were Karl Liebknecht
(1871–1919; Horst-Wessel-Platz reverted to Liebknechtplatz in 1945) and August
Bebel (1840–1913; Bebelplatz replacing Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Platz in 1947). Of
particular symbolic significance for the forthcoming, distinctively German “road
to socialism” was the naming of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, swiftly replacing the
aforementioned Liebknechtplatz in 1947. In contrast to Liebknecht, together with
whom she was assassinated in Berlin in January 1919, Luxemburg was an
“independent” Marxist theoretician who had criticized Lenin, Trotsky, and other
early Soviet leaders for turning the revolutionary cause into a brutalization and
bureaucratization of public life (Luxemburg 1961 [1918], 48). Alongside
politicians, artists such as Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), a committed pacifist and
sympathizer of the working class, were also memorialized in the namescape of
East Berlin just before the city’s official division.
Archetypal cult names on the German road to socialism

After the city’s de jure split in 1948 and the founding of the GDR in 1949,
“reactionary” ingredients in the namescape were increasingly extirpated and
“progressive” symbols added, with “a kind of minor revolution, a ‘street-sign
revolution,’ carried out from above” (Azaryahu 1986, 591). As a 1949 prelude to
a flagship socialist construction project, the Stalinist order was manifested by the
bestowing of the name Stalinallee (until then Frankfurter Allee or Große
Frankfurter Straße)—a new “medal name,” to use Gramsci’s terminology—for
the city’s major artery (Colomb 2012, 62).1 In 1950, another cross-district eastern
avenue, Landsberger Allee, came to bear the name of Lenin, the brightest of
bygone Soviet luminaries. Odonymic reminders of cultural and artistic bonds
between the GDR and Soviet Union also proliferated around the turn of the 1950s
(Azaryahu 1986, 590). A case in point was a newly renamed cluster of
Ossietzkystraße (after the pacifist German writer and artist martyr hero Carl von
Ossietzky, 1889–1938), Tschaikowskistraße (after the Soviet-esteemed classical
Russian composer), and Majakowskiring (after the legendary Soviet revolutionary
poet), located next to one another in an upper-class northern suburb. In its own
way, the honoring of the legendary German-Soviet spy Richard Sorge in 1969
also celebrated a cultural brotherhood between the two states. In the early-1970s,
Allee der Kosmonauten added an internationalist-futurist aspect to the street sign
propaganda, by eulogizing the space travelers of the Soviet Union and its allies.
In a more genuinely Marxist spirit, discontinuity with the past was occasionally
manifested through names redolent of the socialist ideals of universal peace. One
iconic expression of this was Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft (“Fountain of
Friendship between Peoples”) in Alexanderplatz. Nonetheless, inscriptions
honoring leading socialist politicians from particular countries became more
common signifiers in the East German capital, reminding us that these naming
practices still took place in the territorialized world of nation-states. This “solidarity
cult” was made manifest via a “French” Jacques-Dudas-Sraße, “Chilean”
Salvador-Allende-Straße, “Vietnamese” Ho-Chi-Minh-Straße, “Indian” Indira-
Gandhi-Straße, and so forth (Sänger 2006, 175). Dimitroffstraße, its name drawn
from the head of Comintern in 1934–1943 and Bulgarian Prime Minister of 1946–
1949, also carried local connotations. While in exile in Berlin in 1933, Georgi
Dimitrov had become a reputed anti-Fascist hero in the Reichstag fire trial for
uncovering a Nazi conspiracy. As a variation of internationalist subdiscourse,
references to revolutionaries from other eras and political-geographical contexts
were also interspersed in the namescape of East Berlin. Names dedicated to Jean-
Paul Marat, the late eighteenth-century publisher of L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend
of the People”), and to Garibaldi, the nineteenth-century hero of the Risorgimento,
exemplify this latter trend. Equally traversing boundaries of time and space through
an evocation of a popular uprising, the Straße der Pariser Kommune marked the
centenary of the rebellious Paris Commune.
More broadly speaking, however, the above types of internationalist street
names were outnumbered by nationally inward-looking appellations. One facet of
the practiced odonymic pedagogy was the domesticization of the Stalinist
personality cult model, as late or veteran SED leaders themselves also began to be
rewarded, especially in high-profile inner-city locations, with their “own” streets.
In one example of the party’s self-aggrandizement in this fashion, the GDR’s first
president Wilhelm Pieck (1876–1960) was elevated onto the street signage of
Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg in 1951, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday.
Alongside medal names in the “classic” Stalinist cult model (Murray 2000, 17),
there existed numerous other nuances in the “German road to socialism,” a
doctrine inaugurated by the KPD leader Anton Ackermann in the mid-1940s
(Azaryahu 1986, 584–585). As the years passed, this policy developed into a
veritable reverse image of “an abrupt post-Second World War suppression of
nationalism and ethnic regionalism” (Czepczyński 2008, 4; cf. Ashworth and
Tunbridge 1999, 105–106). To use the words of Benedict Anderson (1991, 2), the
GDR was grounded “in a territorial and social space inherited from the pre-
revolutionary past.” One emphasis in the domestic rooting of communism was to
co-opt the towering figures of Marx and Engels, the founders of communist
theory, both of German origin. Equally significant for the indigenization of the
new socialist rule were more lately bygone intellectual-political figures, who were
still part of the living collective memory of older-generation East Germans, such
as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, whom Pieck extolled in 1950 as the
“true defenders of the national interests of the German people” (cited in Weitz
2001, 61). By the same token, the regal Doretheenstraße made way for a street
carrying the name of Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), an early figurehead of the
women’s movement in Germany and beyond, who united socialism and feminism.
Continuity-seeking and spirit-enhancing pedagogic thrusts worked in tandem
behind the profusion of such names:
The most difficult hurdle facing the KPD and SED was how to project this
counter-memory onto the wider German population in a way that might cultivate
a new sense of historical consciousness. Thus, the KPD/SED set out to educate
the masses about these events and propagate a specific politicized interpretation
in an attempt to gain loyalty and win over supporters for their cause.
(Olsen 2015, 21)
The GDR’s endeavors to underline its organic links with the communist hero
martyrs and the German workers’ historical struggles evidently mirrored a
prominent reciprocal relationship between the rulers and the ruled in the state-
controlled politics of memory, and in street naming discourses in particular.
Intriguingly, at no stage were East Berlin’s street signs reserved only for the
highest-ranking SED dignitaries (Azaryahu 1986, 1991).
Evoking folk heroes and intra-national bonds

Broadening the historical scope of the state narrative was quintessential for the
interlinked goals of indigenization and legitimatization of communist ideology in
East Germany (Sänger 2006; Olsen 2015). Indeed, many honorific street names in
East Berlin would perhaps be better described as “encyclopedia-drawn”
commemorations of distinguished Germans from various vocational fields. For
whatever particular reasons,2 from the advent of the GDR until its eventual
demise, name-givers occasionally chose names such as Steinbachstraße (after the
architect Erwin von Steinbach, c. 1244–1318), Dörpfeldstraße (after the
archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, 1853–1940), Nipkowstraße (after the inventor
Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, 1860–1940), Max-Herman-Straße (after a twentieth-
century drama scholar), or Lea-Grundig-Straße (after a twentieth-century
designer). The honoring of artists and creative practitioners was especially
favored, with exaltations of non-communist modernists such as Corinthstraße,
after the painter Lovis Corinth, and Alfred-Döblin-Straße after the author of
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). Older generations of German artists were similarly
commemorated, provided that their oeuvres entailed traces of anti-militarism, or
even better, sympathy for the poor. As if to guarantee a broad “organic”
representation of the national past in the street nomenclature, East Berlin’s city-
text exploited evocations of figures that were part of the living memory of East
Berliners as well as name paragons of older origin.
Most commonly by far, however, this expedient historical repository for
enhancement of national spirit was tailored by commemorating rebellions of the
lower classes at various moments in German history. Almost as a plea for ordinary
citizens to acknowledge the GDR’s status as the legitimate heir of a long national
trajectory of struggles against feudal, capitalist, and Fascist oppressors, there was
a strong tendency to honor courageous revolutionaries, resisters, and victims of
oppression. In this vein, Käthe Niederkirchner, a female resistance fighter tortured
and murdered by the Nazis, was doubly commemorated, first in Mitte in 1951,
then in Prenzlauer Berg in 1974 (De Soto 1996, 38). A homage to Joseph Moll,
one of the first acknowledged urban revolutionary proletarians active in the mid-
nineteenth century tumults across Central Europe, contributed to the co-presence
of multiple temporalities in Mitte’s “egalitarian” neotoponymy (De Soto 1996).
The revolutionary actions of radicalized folk heroes and trade-unionists in 1848
were one source of inspiration, as was the German Peasants’ War of the mid-
1520s. Even if the quantitative emphasis in (re)naming practices was on more
readily recalled anti-Fascist struggles, different episodes in “the people’s history”
were utilized as odonymic raw material to underscore the GDR’s self-image as the
culmination of the German people’s “national emancipation” (Mevius 2013, 3).
The overt and covert forms of namescape propaganda were not restricted only
to high-profile historical areas. In extreme cases, as with the “new town”
Fennpfuhl, in the Lichtenberg district, nearly all coinages (eighteen out of twenty)
conjured up somewhat lesser-known communist anti-Nazi freedom fighters in the
style of Ernst-Reinke-Straße, Paul-Junius-Straße, and Judith-Auer-Straße
(Sandvoß 1998). In most suburbs, the re-forging of pre-existing street toponymy
took place in a more modest and diversified manner. In Adlershof, in the Treptow
district, eighteen street name alterations (one-sixth of all local streets) were carried
out between 1948 and 1984, two-thirds of these in 1951 in line with the East
Berlin Magistrate’s stipulation that “monarchical,” “military,” and “Fascist”
names were to be axed. At this point, Argonnenweg (after a First World War
battlefield in France), Metzestraße (a reference to the French city of Metz, annexed
to Germany in 1871–1918), and Bismarckstraße (one of several evocations of the
“Iron Chancellor” across the districts of Berlin) vanished and were replaced by
evocations of meritorious workers, professionals, and resistance fighters from
different historical eras (e.g., Florian-Geyer-Straße, after a knight who led a
rebellious peasant army in the German Peasants’ War). As for commemorations
of deserving citizens who had ended up living in the neighborhood, streets were
dedicated to Peter Kast (a metal worker, editor of the KPD party organ Die Rote
Fahne, and a Spanish Civil War veteran, 1894–1959) and Anna Seghers (a pacifist
novelist and the founder of an anti-Fascist Heinrich-Heine-Klub for German
exiles in Mexico, 1900–1983).
Overall, the balance in naming practices in East German cities moved from the
representation of power towards a motivation through Heimat-based education
(Sänger 2006). This shift can be seen in suburbs built later in the GDR period,
which were equipped with seemingly more “apolitical” street names in comparison
to the East Berlin norm. Cases in point are Marzahn and Hellersdorf, two adjacent
high-rise estates on the city’s eastern outskirts urbanized in the 1970s and 1980s.
Out of a handful of KPD or SED politicians honored in them, there are Karl-
Maron-Straße, Martha-Arendsee-Straße, and Waldemar-Schmidt-Straße. Even
so, protagonists of resistance movements figured more abundantly in the street
signage of the suburbs, such as Stephan-Born-Straße, paying homage to a working
people’s spokesperson in the 1848 uprisings. However, even these archetypal
GDR-era “rebel names” were dwarfed by a thematic naming convention inherited
from the area’s pre-urban and pre-socialist past, with references to “ordinary”
towns, municipalities, neighborhoods, and even mountains in the surrounding
Brandenburg region and elsewhere in the East German territory dominating the
naming of the mega-suburbs, as if reflecting the socialist nation in microcosm.
Whereas the Nazi era had seen a westward expansion of local street name
references to the Rhineland-Palatinate, the place identities of Marzahn and
Hellersdorf were now developed in a more limited territorial sense, with genuine
domestic underpinnings. A very conventional tool of homeland-making—the
symbolic socialization of an urban population towards “spatial identification with
the territorial state as home” (Kaiser 2009; see also Paasi 1996)—was thus
employed here for odonymic-pedagogic purposes.
Un-renamed streets and other ambiguities
The above vignettes testify that the political system of the GDR and its local
cultural intermediaries across East Berlin (potentially organic intellectuals in the
Gramscian sense) did not only issue “medal names” in the strict Stalinist pattern.
Much more commonly, name-givers harkened back to earlier periods and civic
uprisings in the national past. Although posterity has often portrayed the socialist
era as a demise of nationalism, this view rang true in the namescape of East Berlin
only in a narrow sense. The city’s political-odonymic identity was diffused and
ambiguous, notwithstanding occasional large-scale renaming waves (Azaryahu
1986, 601). Socialist name-givers also left a range of conventional naming models
and national symbols intact (see similar observations from other contexts: Foote
et al. 2000; Saparov 2003). Even in the historical inner-city areas, Prussian
dynastic commemorations such as Friedrichstraße persisted in the streetscape
throughout the existence of the GDR. Given that the GDR had proclaimed itself
“the legitimate heir of everything which is progressive in history” (Schmidt 1978,
cited in Azaryahu 1997, 483), why were these and other ideologically non-
representative street names tolerated in the East German capital?
We are inclined to give a “Gramscian” answer: one key undercurrent in East
Berlin’s odonymic script mirrored a will to guarantee popular consent for the
threatened regime at stake. Essentially, a Soviet-style indigenization policy
(Murray 2000; Saparov 2003) was abundantly applied in the first communist state
on German soil (Mevius 2013). For another “external” factor behind the
prominence of a consent-seeking stance in street naming practices, the dual-state
city of Berlin was the epicenter of Cold War propaganda (Colomb 2012). GDR
rulers sought to show citizens the state’s independence from Moscow through an
array of recognizably German historical and cultural symbols (Olsen 2015). Both
the Federal Republic and the GDR sought for historical continuity based on
national heritage, while making a break with its Nazi-tarnished, undemocratic
variations. Just as “West Germany laid claim to the democratic traditions of 1848
and the Weimar Republic” (Olsen 2015, 10), East German politics of memory
relied on Marxist interpretations of these and other episodes in the national past.
Compared to its Eastern European allies, the GDR faced an extra challenge to
the legitimacy of communist rule, due to the close geographical proximity of the
economically prosperous West (Colomb 2012, 50–70). In East Berlin, in
particular, people’s perceptions of their fellow (West) Berliners, with more
economic and individual liberties, were a constant dimension of everyday life.
Both explicit and implicit traces of the ideological struggle between the rival
political systems emerged in the street toponymy on both sides of the new intra-
urban state boundary, indicating that a veritable “toponymic Cold War” was at
stake. A poignant example in West Berlin was the renaming in 1953 of the
prestigious Charlottenburger Chaussee as Straße des 17. Juni, a reminder of the
brutal crushing of the construction workers’ uprising by Soviet tanks on
Stalinallee in that same year. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1960,
the GDR authorities sought to win round the East Berliners by renaming three
streets in memory of police officers who had died on duty when guarding the
“anti-Fascist protection fence” (Marjomäki 1993, 87). It may also be that a
comparatively high presence of female freedom fighters in East Berlin’s street
signage—especially since the 1970s—was partly motivated by the propagandist
competition with the West.
All in all, evocations of recent and time-honored struggles between the powerful
and the suppressed played a pivotal role in the party-state’s attempted construction
of legitimacy. Remarkably, from the standpoint of Gramscian hegemony theory,
street names drawn from heroes and martyrs of liberation struggles (proletarian or
otherwise), more or less “bi-directionally” bestowed with an eye to popular
sensibilities, were the archetype of GDR-era street naming. Nevertheless, the
believability of the GDR counter-narrative gradually weakened as the state-
socialist experiment proved incapable of redeeming its emancipatory and
economic promises in the eyes of increasingly disillusioned East Germans.
Symptomatic of Berliners’ talent for dark humor even under forced consensus, the
monumental Karl-Marx-Allee (in 1949–1961 Stalinallee) was nicknamed Stalins
Badezimmer (“Stalin’s Bathroom”) in the late-GDR (“Das längste Baudenkmal
Europas” 2011). More crucially for the subsequent march of events, the GDR
name paragon Rosa Luxemburg’s rebellious dictum, namely that “freedom is
always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently,” was brought
into sharp relief as the unifying slogan of the opposition movement that conquered
public spaces with increasing frequency in East Berlin and other East German
cities in 1988–1989 (Philipsen 1993; Saunders 2011, 38, 42).
The afterlife of socialist street names in post-socialist (East) Berlin

In the terminology of Henri Lefebvre (1991 [1974], 54), the GDR regime managed
to alter “ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses”—and
consequently a substantial portion of Berlin’s former street toponymy. Even so, the
state-socialist system remained a silently questioned “minimal” hegemony for very
many East Berliners throughout its existence, or at least degenerated into a “decadent”
hegemony over the decades. Eventually, latent popular discontent towards the
regime culminated in the Wende of 1989–1990. Seen through a Gramscian lens, at
stake was an extreme, revolutionary expression of a reciprocal power relationship in
which the ruled ultimately overthrew their rulers. Henceforth, the reciprocity of
power relations in the capital of unified Germany has pluralized into an ideologically
polyvalent field between multiple political parties, the federal-, metropolitan-, and
district-level tiers of governance, and different groups of Berliners. In this section,
we will consider the more recent fate of different GDR-era street naming discourses—
from Stalinist cult names and odonymic internationalism to street names resonant
with the indigenization of socialism—in post-socialist East Berlin.
The initial wave of eradication and local protests

A considerable number of socialist-era street names were axed within a few years
of Berlin’s (re)unification. In the mid-1990s, it even seemed that “the last residues
of the GDR past” might soon be effaced from street signs in the historical center
of Berlin (Azaryahu 1997, 492). By 1993, however, the volume of de- and
re-commemorations had remained deplorably moderate in the eyes of many right-
wing advocates of a new “purified” Germany (Eick 2013 [1995], 37). A key
reason behind the slow pace of change was that the former East Berlin districts
were in charge of making the odonymic transition. In the two years that followed
the election of district assemblies in December 1990, only sixty streets were
renamed (Azaryahu 1997, 484-7). In this phase, it was mainly glorifications of
functionaries and collaborators of the socialist state that were expunged. For
instance, Otto-Nuschke-Straße was purged (regaining its pre-socialist name
Jägerstraße), the Red Army-associated Bersarinstraße became Petersburger
Straße (a re-adopted reverence to the newly renamed Saint Petersburg), Karl-
Maron-Straße became Poelchaustraße (a post-socialist commemoration of an
anti-Nazi freedom fighter and socialist prison chaplain), Peter-Kast-Straße
became Radickestraße (after a nineteenth-century spirits manufacturer), and the
street names dedicated to killed GDR border guards were also changed (Ladd
1997, 212). The eight districts of East Berlin were largely inclined to ideological
compromises, mainly limiting themselves to replacing SED-aggrandizing or
otherwise explicit tokens of the GDR regime itself, and the district authorities
“were careful not to de-commemorate the mainly communist martyrs of anti-Nazi
resistance movements who were prominent heroes of the anti-fascist mythology
of the GDR” (Azaryahu 1997, 487).
However, the Berlin Senate, run by the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich
Demokratische Union Deutschlands, CDU), was dissatisfied with the pace of
renaming. On the one hand, right-wing hard-liners drew parallels between the
GDR and the Third Reich as two successive dictatorships, holding that the whole
anti-democratic inheritance of the GDR was to be anathematized (De Soto 1996,
44–45). On the other hand, the district mayors and councils with an electoral
mandate generally believed that decisions on the replacement of street names
should be “discussed with the citizens of each district” (Flierl 1991, quoted in De
Soto 1996, 34). In 1993, the Senate nominated an Independent Commission for
Street Name Changes, tasked with seeking compromise and arriving at scholarly
and prudent renaming proposals, rather than merely politically motivated ones
(Azaryahu 1997; Ladd 1997). Once the Commission’s list of recommendations
was made public in 1994, neither the anti-communist conservatives nor the leftists
complied (De Soto 1996). Tensions between the Senate and the lower tier of
government were further exacerbated after the 1995 district elections, when the
negative repercussions of privatization, high unemployment, and escalating living
costs in the eastern jurisdictions resulted in growing support for the Party of
Democratic Socialism (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, PDS), the SED’s
successor party (Azaryahu 1997, 490). It was at this point that the CDU’s Herwig
Haase, the sitting Senator of Traffic and Public Works, resorted to the Capital
Contract of 1993 to enforce renaming a number of streets in the old inner-city
neighborhoods. During this “anti-communist street name offensive,” Haase
overruled the democratically chosen district councils’ will and altered the
Independent Commission’s renaming suggestions in several cases (De Soto 1996,
43; Ladd 1997, 212–214). In an essentially coerced way, he decreed the changes
such as reverting the “socialist-feminist” Clara-Zetkin-Straße to Dorotheenstraße,
changing Artur-Becker-Straße to Kniprodestraße (returning from a martyr of the
Spanish Civil War to a fourteenth-century Teutonic knight), and Dimitroffstraße
to Danzigerstraße (a re-adopted reference to a formerly Prussian city now in
Polish territory), despite outbursts of dissatisfaction in the media and on the
streets. Haase also intended to abolish Bersarinplatz, yet the CDU Mayor Eberhard
Diepgen vetoed this particular change in the face of opposition from the Russian
Embassy and angry Berliners (Ladd 1997).
Azaryahu (1997, 490–491) largely dismisses the local protests as “a ritual of
resistance” by PDS district politicians, if not a case in which dissonant voices were
“artificially multiplied” by local newspapers such as the Berliner Zeitung, in a way
described by Gramsci as typical for generating popular consent in the exercise of
hegemony (Gramsci 2007, 1638). Other researchers have placed more emphasis on
the protests as a genuine civic matter (De Soto 1996; Ladd 1997; Huyssen 2003;
Lisiak 2010). In any case, a multi-front opposition emerged in the face of the
conservative hard-liners’ coercive renaming campaign, as the policy would not
only have rendered the whole symbolic inheritance of GDR-era socialism and its
hero(in)es as “non-presentable” in the official collective memory; to rephrase
Huyssen (2003, 54), the strict anti-communist policy would also have marginalized
a whole range of domains of experience among “an East German population that
felt increasingly deprived of its life history and of its memories of four decades of
separate development.” Seen from this perspective, there was an intriguing
mismatch between what historians of memory politics have conceptualized as
national collective memory versus mass personal memory (Snyder 2002).
De Soto’s (1996) account of the afterlife of East Berlin’s socialist street names
further illuminates civic and feminist aspects of the controversy over the CDU-led
street naming purification policy. Through her implicitly Gramscian framework,
De Soto underscores the embeddedness of post-socialist street naming practices in
a wider “politics of culture,” including, alongside the institutional political sphere,
“processes of conflict and manoeuvring that go on … internal to communities”
(Verdery 1991, 12; cited in De Soto 1996, 30). One example was the street named
after Clara Zetkin, in which case the emotional intensity of popular resistance
against a single renaming proposal escalated to proportions rarely witnessed in
European urban history. A group of women from East and West Berlin founded
an Independent Women’s Commission for Street Names to oppose the projected
rescinding of Clara-Zetkin-Straße and the overall under-representation of women
in Berlin’s odonymy with at that time only 130 out of the approximately 10,000
streets in Berlin named after women (De Soto 1996, 42). Even though the battle
over Clara-Zetkin-Straße was lost by Haase’s decision in November 1995, the
commemoration of distinguished women has increased considerably, not least in
the former East Berlin (Hobrack 2007), as part of a salient civil society-influenced
turn in the design of post-socialist street nomenclature. In light of the tendency to
try to rectify gender inequalities in the male-dominated odonymic pantheon, it is
also symptomatic that even Clara Zetkin herself made a swift return to Berlin’s
namescape around the turn of the millennium, when a park and adjacent road were
named after her in Hellersdorf.
“Ostalgic” traces in the pluralized namescape

A close look at the city map reveals that most GDR-era street names have survived
unchanged, notwithstanding the eradication of several communist “medal names”
in the 1990s (Sänger 2006, 10). It can be confidently argued that the overwhelming
bulk of these surviving names belong to the “popular” rather than “elite” side of
the preceding regime’s odonymic pantheon. Most East Berliners have silently
accepted the presence of socialist symbols in the streetscape (Schulz zur Wiesch
2007; also, see Colomb 2012, 279). Consequently, many of the city’s contemporary
street names may strike an average Western visitor as “out of place” (Olsen 2015,
1), as “ideological leftovers” (cf. Czepczyński 2008; Light and Young 2014), or
as perplexing mnemonic curiosities. The most blatant cases in this regard are the
commemorations of Marx, Engels, Bebel, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Thälmann
(even though some public references to these figures have been removed) in the
touristic inner-city areas of Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, and Friedrichshain. As a
whole, however, the former East Berlin embraces many other odonymic vestiges
less often highlighted by city guidebooks as socialist relics. Names commemorating
artists and writers with sympathies for the poor, such as Heinrich-Heine-Platz,
Käthe-Kollwitz-Straße, Majakowskiring, Anna-Seghers-Straße, and Alfred-
Döblin-Straße, have stood the test of time with hardly any casualties. A chapter of
its own is the resilience of names drawn from insurgent folk heroes and anti-Nazi
martyrs, once the odonymic archetype of the indigenization of socialism in the
GDR. Imparting “ostalgic” overtones to almost every single neighborhood of
contemporary East Berlin, the folk heroes of socialism have only rarely been
purged from the post-socialist toponymy. In very many ex-GDR suburbs the
pervasiveness of rebel and martyr names is clear for anyone with a decent
encyclopedic source to hand. In Friedrichshain, for instance, various top-down
efforts to gentrify and westernize the city’s image into a “colourless and tasteless
cosmopolis” (cf. Gramsci 1982, 184) have also more generally nurtured
oppositional stances towards further de-commemoration of the socialist past
(Huyssen 2003; Colomb 2012). Other naming instances elude easy categorization
along the dichotomy of communism versus anti-communism, such as Silvio-
Meier-Straße, commemorating a squatter of the late-GDR period who was the
victim of a neo-Nazi stabbing in 1992 (Merrill 2015).
Hence, in lieu of the early-1990s zeal “to defeat Communism anew every day”
(Ladd 1997, 214), and to the continuing astonishment of external right-wing
observers (e.g., Unzensuriert.at, 2012; Wieliński 2012), the preservation of
remaining GDR street names seems to be broadly accepted, even by many of
those locals who have no nostalgia for the GDR as such (Schulz zur Wiesch 2007;
Colomb 2012). In Gramscian terms, it appears that the surviving socialist
discourses in the street toponymy have been increasingly re-interpreted as vestiges
from an “organically representative” phase in the history of the city and its
inhabitants, along with multiple other pasts that contemporarily figure in the
memoryscape of Berlin.
Conclusion
The overarching aim of this chapter’s explorations of East Berlin has been to use
Gramsci’s specific and relatively unknown writings about street naming, together
with his more general writings on hegemony, to make sense of the tendencies and
ambiguities of socialist and post-socialist street naming. As such, this study has
brought into sharp relief a number of populist and resilient aspects of odonymy. In
the socialist period, an ideological-pedagogic perennial in street naming was to
equate communist rule with the rule of the people, in an attempt to fuel popular
belief in the GDR as the culmination of national emancipation and the German
road to socialism. Most archetypically, this took place through the evocation of
mainly communist anti-Nazi martyrs as well as insurgent folk heroes from
different historical eras, and much less frequently through the toponymic self-
aggrandizement of the SED and its leaders. Despite the lip-service paid to
egalitarianism and popular empowerment through street toponymy and other
cultural media, the believability of this rhetorical counter-narrative weakened
towards the regime’s final demise. As for the post-socialist period, we noted the
initial escalation of tensions over the meanings of “democracy” in street naming
matters between the metropolitan government (then led by right-wing politicians
who saw the entire communist legacy as antithetical to democracy) and East
Berlin districts (in which democracy was cherished as autonomous local decision-
making). Beyond this dichotomy are civic and authority initiatives to fight the
under-representation of female figures in the city’s honorific landscape, as well as
a somewhat unexpected mutation of GDR-era and GDR-style “rebel” street names
into symbols for post-socialist identity discourses among disillusioned East
Berliners. As a kind of Gramscian reverse image of a top-down repudiation of the
entire socialist past, attitudes towards which historical eras, ideological
worldviews, and vernacular symbols are entitled to be publicly commemorated
have been considerably pluralized in (East) Berlin.
In distilling more general lessons based on our findings, we must acknowledge
the specificity of (East) Berlin both as a socialist and post-socialist city. Local
idiosyncrasies such as those related to the proximity of the West during the
socialist period, Berlin’s reputation as a city whose population is “more politically
invested in the vexed issues of city space and planning than elsewhere” (McRobbie
2013, 995), and not the least the relative autonomy of its boroughs in street naming
matters (Gill 2005), are likely to have produced street naming practices in the city
that are pronouncedly more “reciprocal” in nature than in, for example, an average
East-Central European city. Nonetheless, East Berlin has definitely not been the
only urban landscape in which ideological continuities, populist rather than elitist
overtones, and other ambiguities have been at least fleetingly observed by street
naming scholars (see findings parallel to this study: e.g., Azaryahu 1986; Gill
2005; Therborn 2006; Bodnar 2009; Šakaja and Stanić 2011; Stiperski et al. 2011;
Marin 2012; Light and Young 2014).
As a noteworthy commonality between the fundamentally different political
and societal circumstances under scrutiny, distinctive attempts to ground naming
practices in existing socio-cultural forms and popular mindsets—and hence efforts
to seek a balance between coercion and consent—surfaced again and again in our
material. In both periods analyzed, a whole “encyclopedic” array of
commemorations of vocations other than politicians emerged, albeit with varying
emphases, with “organic” local and national traditions as well as folk heroes from
different historical periods gaining increasing salience in street signage.
Conversely, the tempo of overtly elitist honorific naming decelerated as the
political systems matured. Neither the socialist nor post-socialist name-givers
entirely revoked the street toponymy inherited from previous regimes. Seen from
a Gramscian angle, this all indicates that legitimacy-seeking and persuasive
attitudes towards civil society have tacitly guided street naming practices from the
immediate post-war context up to the post-socialist present.
This chapter’s investigations point towards the importance of acknowledging
the complexity of toponymic power relations by looking beyond the oversimplifying
dichotomy that often steers scholars to assume that top-down (official) and
bottom-up (popular) naming are somehow totally separate processes or
phenomena. In addition to more general prospects that Gramsci’s thinking can
open up for theorizations of toponymic power, we contend that two Gramscian
notions in particular—those of organicity and reciprocity—ought to play more
pronounced roles in the understanding of the power of street naming. Very
significantly, the notion of the organicity of a political culture (or lack thereof)
directs analytical attention to socio-cultural inequalities of power in terms of the
presence or absence of diverse forms of the popular in the toponymic city-text.
Given that Gramsci (1982 [1917]) himself called for more sensitive, considered,
and authentic street naming, we believe it is instructive for any contemporary
toponymic analysis to reflect upon the representation of different social (especially
subaltern) groups in the odonymic canon, and indeed in any realm of naming or
related language practices. En route, critical questions as to which segments of the
local population and which social histories are symbolically privileged and
marginalized enter the research design as a matter of course. In this way, a
Gramscian approach to organicity can sensitize research with a nuanced
understanding of multiple temporalities at play in naming practices, as the
analytical-historical interest no longer concerns only elite interpretations of the
national past (national collective memory), but also pasts lived and remembered
by various groups of “ordinary” people (mass personal memory). In our study of
Berlin, the methodological focus on organicity highlighted gender imbalances and
associated political intricacies—a power issue rarely addressed rigorously in
politicized street naming research until recently (yet see exceptions: e.g., De Soto
1996; Dwyer 2000; Rose-Redwood 2008; Niculescu-Mizil 2014).
We believe that a Gramscian approach underlines the importance and relevance
of critical place name scholarship, while fulfilling the aim set out by Gramsci himself
to “inculcate the habit of assessing the forces of agency in society with greater
caution and precision” (Gramsci 2007, 333; translation in Gramsci 1996, 53). While
“official” street naming is by definition a prerogative of nominated authorities (cf.
Azaryahu 1997, 481), our Gramscian-inspired explorations have accentuated how
naming practices simultaneously mirror often covert cultural strategies to win
popular consent for the prevailing political order. We would even go so far as to
argue that entirely neglecting this aspect of toponymic power borders on a view that
people are mere pawns in the conceptions of power apparatuses “out there.” Even
elitist projections of ideological worldviews hardly ever develop in a socio-cultural
vacuum. This is exactly why there is an urgent need for culturally enriched
(Gramscian-inspired or otherwise) understandings of street naming in a variety of
political and societal settings, together with similar studies examining other kinds of
naming or related language practices. Neither rulers nor street name scholars should
ignore the impact of civil society, or take for granted people’s reactions to the
hegemonic operations of power over language and space.
Notes
1 Stalinallee was again renamed Karl-Marx-Allee during the subsequent de-Stalinization
process in 1961.
2 Street name encyclopedias on German cities typically provide scarce information on
the grounds on which “politically neutral” street names were given (Sänger 2011,
personal communication).
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6 Building a new city through a
new discourse
Street naming revolutions in
Budapest
Emilia Palonen
Introduction
Street names establish a particular discursive universe for those strolling through
the city, locating themselves simultaneously in urban space and in local discourses.
This chapter challenges existing research on urban toponymy through a discourse-
theoretical reading that explores the discursive and interconnected character of
street names. Viewing street naming regimes as constituting a “discursive
universe” draws attention to the fluid and contradictory qualities of street names
as a “discursive set.” The chapter builds upon the discourse theory of Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) to examine street names as discursive nodal
points, or “guards,” and street renaming as an act of “changing the guards.”
Changing this set of nodal points is essentially a political operation. Here
“political” is understood in terms of relationality and (dis)association, the
contingency of the decision on an undecidable terrain (c.f. Norval 2005),
generating a common basis and/or a political frontier through the naming process,
and an ontological connection or ethical investment in the name (Laclau 2005).
Beyond theory, the chapter discusses the changing city-text in Budapest from
the nineteenth century to the present. This implies looking at the renaming of
streets as transforming sets of discursive elements, where the identity of the names
is entangled with the rest of the set, and marked by the past. In some street naming
cultures, change in the street names takes place in an evolutionary manner through
the vicissitudes of daily usage. In others, street naming is embedded in traditions
of revolution, producing what we might call “street naming revolutions.” In
Budapest, we witness a symbolic “changing of the guard,” when the new power-
holders decide what aspects of the past deserve to be articulated in the new
discursive universe of the city’s streetscape. This is enhanced by a feature of the
city: a municipality composed of districts, where the same set of names repeat as
nodal points of the street naming discourse. This occurred most recently in the
2010s, when, after two electoral periods in opposition, the right-wing parties had
a landslide election victory with a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which
offered possibilities for both law-making and changing street names.
Behind the discursive approach adopted here is an attempt to read the city-
text—that is, examine the discursive act of street naming as constituting the
landscape as a text. City-texts interweave meaning into the urban landscape and
Street naming revolutions in Budapest 99
also offer a point of identification and contestation. As Azaryahu (2009, 66)
argues, “the city-text does not provide its readers with a chronological narrative,
but rather with an authorized index of putative narrative, notwithstanding the lack
of historical villains.” Commemorative street naming seeks to inscribe a particular
vision of the past into the streetscape, thereby transforming “history into local
geography” (Azaryahu 2009, 67). Naming arrests the potentially continuous
interpretation of the past by offering a political reading of it that aims to establish
this interpretive framing as a dominant and durable one.
Public memory-work is a political operation, a value-laden task that seeks to
establish a hegemonic viewpoint. In other words, although street names are
inherently part of cultural memory (Ferguson 1988; Alderman 2002), dealing
with commemorative street names involves actually engaging in a street politics
of the present, not just with the past (e.g., Foote and Azaryahu 2007). As Alderman
(2002) maintains, street names can be seen as “arenas” for the politics of memory.
As the metaphor “arena” entails battle, it follows Gillis’s (1994) observation that
physical symbols of power offer an opportunity to identify oneself as being against
the status quo: openness to contestation and rearticulation is the democratic asset
of the city-text (c.f. von Henneberg 2004).
Street names speak to the past as a means of generating a vision for the future,
captured in the moment when the mundane is transformed into something more
historical and ideological. The understanding of time in this context can be
kairological rather than chronological: street names talk about the “now,” the
simultaneous presence of the past, present, and future, in a Benjaminian way
(c.f. Lindroos 1998), attempting, in other words, to regulate their multi-
layeredness for envisioning a future.
The poststructuralist discourse-theoretical perspective indicates how street
names are relational and acquire their meanings through associations with
neighboring elements and the urban milieux more generally. Street names may
resonate with us and our beliefs, grow on us, or irritate us. The meanings of new
names, introduced at a given moment, are shaped by the entire set of street names.
The discarded names also gain their meaning from the other names and substitutes.
Street names are important pointers in the cityscape but they also are a discursive
set. Often we grow to know them without realizing we are subjected to a particular
discourse, whether we endorse or reject it. As Levinson contends:
organizers of the new regime must decide which, if any, of the heroes of the
old regime deserve to continue occupying public space. And the new regime
will always be concerned if these heroes might serve as potential symbols of
resistance for adherents among the population who must, at least from the
perspective of the newcomers, ultimately acquiesce to the new order.
(1998, 10–11)
Levinson shows how these commemorative figures have potential to remain

accessible as political symbols of the past or the opposition. Officials decide what
is changed, where, and why. Reading street names, we are indeed reading the
100 Emilia Palonen
political (K. Palonen 1993; also, see K. Palonen, this volume). Naming involves
political choices in the public domain. However, the institutional processes and
struggles are not the only political aspects of street naming. As Rose-Redwood,
Alderman, and Azaryahu (2010, 466) point out, “we must broaden our analysis by
considering how the ‘political’ is related to other relatively unexplored questions
in place-name studies.” In this chapter, I am concerned with how the political is
related to the generation of discursive sets, nodal points, and frontiers, marking
urban space with new decisions in the moments of (re)naming as well as all the
paradoxes which encompass the process of fixing meaning into an uneven
discursive space. We will see below how, in the moment of renaming, not all the
names will be changed and the new names do not necessarily constitute a
harmonious set. They can be read differently and their meanings may change over
time. Their existence or disappearance from the map enables public discussion
regarding their values, which often draws attention to the contested politics of
urban space.
Street names can be regarded as indicators of political changes or tools for
sedimenting particular meanings and ideologies––or contesting them. Street
names indicate a larger discursive political change, but also mark continuity and
unevenness in the face of that change. The exclusion or inclusion of new
commemorative elements to the list of street names may have crucial effects on
the way in which meanings are made and sedimented more generally. Thus, the
act of rewriting offers potential for a wider change and discursive production of
meaning, even as the name changes signal a material transformation in the daily
lives and landscapes of people (Alderman 2002).
The making of a discursive universe and the naming of the guards

This study explores particular moments of street naming in the political history of
Budapest. In particular, I consider street naming not only as indicative of the
ideological transformations in that period (Azaryahu 1992, 1996) but also as
generating a discursive universe. It is important to talk about discourse in the
context of a universe. Past studies of street naming frequently treat revolutionary
change in naming regimes as hard and fast breaks and transitions in power and
discourse, and, of course, in a general way this is correct; however, as Yeoh (1996,
304) reminds us, revolutionary change in nation-building is “more akin to an
uneven, negotiated process of constant mediations rather than a static consensual
once-and-for-all translation of a monolithic ideology into material form.”
Approaching the urban streetscape as a discursive universe does not discount the
revolutionary quality of writing the city-text through renaming, but it does
recognize that this renaming happens within broad, and ever expanding sets of
multiple, sometimes contradictory, and sometimes allied, discursive meanings.
Alderman (2002) draws upon discourse analysis to study the production of
meaning in the context of commemorative street naming. Specifically, he explores
the engagement with particular street naming struggles and analyzes public
dialogues associated with renaming. The approach I take here is slightly different
although it shares the same premise of the relevance of discourses. For Laclau
(1996), discourse is not reducible to public speech or writing. It is an articulated
set of elements on a discursive field that is conflictual, fluid, and heterogeneous,
and where discourses emerge to offer structure. The production of meaning takes
place relationally through connections in space. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) see
hegemony as the fixing of meaning on an undecidable, uneven terrain. In this
process, particular understandings, relations, and contrasts are made commonplace.
Street naming is precisely such an operation.
From this poststructuralist perspective, identities do not pre-exist the moment of
articulation: the way in which we tie the name to a field of references lends to the
identity of the name. Laclau (2005, 2014) has particularly explored the rhetorical
dimension that he considers ontological: naming constitutes the named as an object.
Names can work as “empty signifiers” that provide a reference point for many ideas
and groups so that they become overburdened and emptied out of particular
meanings at the same time. This takes our attention to the process of naming, the
contextual references of the name, and what identity or range of references is
generated by (re)naming.
Street naming emerges as a hegemonic practice: an attempt to establish
particular relations and orders of meaning. Hegemonic operations seek to provide
fixation of a discursive field that is always in flux. For example, a naming process
repoliticizes a seemingly smooth space, and reorganizes it, introduces new
relations and meanings. Those naming streets also seek to establish closure and
permanence in the names—perhaps to articulate the people or the nation. When
there are numerous names to be introduced into a streetscape, we can try to trace
the specificity of the particular discourses introduced into the city-text. The
multiplicity of names also shows an attempt to regulate the whole terrain: to
establish a new hegemony.
Following discourse-theoretical thinking, street names constitute a discursive
set, and to be a set, there is always something outside it that for its part defines
the set. Each street name constitutes one or multiple elements––as they may be
carrying different and potentially contested meanings to the set of meanings or
names attributed to the streets. Naming processes, and “the renaming of the
guard” in particular, make visible the “in” and “out” of the set, calling forth the
political frontiers dividing “us” and “them.” The set is also internally structured
through nodal points that play the role of providing cognitive-historical
references, or pointers. The psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan considered
that these points de capiton had a privileged role in the fixing of meaning (e.g.,
Stavrakakis 1999, 263–265). A set of new “guards” on the street names would
offer pointers that would be subsumed to the everyday. Particular nodal points of
the city-text are used in the discursive play of street naming politics. Some streets
have particularly celebratory, politicized, or commemorative names, which give
a specific flavor to the city-text of the municipality or neighborhood. Key street
names or themes introduced in the city-text also highlight a given historical era
of the past as well as the ideological orientation of those making decisions in the
present.
102 Emilia Palonen
Reflecting on urban space, we could consider how “street names designate
locations and pronounce certain thoroughfares as distinct urban units” (Azaryahu
2009, 53), and how those major streets or boulevards, central squares, metro
stations, or other nodes of transport hold a privileged position in the city-text. As
such, a city’s street names can indeed work as a set of elements, or as interconnected
and overlapping sets. Typically, in the layered linguistic landscape of a city these
would be sets according to the naming moment—often coinciding with the moment
of (re)constructing an area. We could also explore which wider and potentially
contradictory or conflictual discursive elements make up the discourse(s) in the
city-text at a given time (e.g., Kearns and Berg 2002). When they are contested
between political groups, we can view the act of street naming as producing a
“political frontier” through processes of spatial and temporal Othering. Over time,
multiple discourses often come to inhabit a city-text, and the agonistic politics
(Mouffe 2000) of naming is rendered visible through the streetscape itself.
Street naming revolutions as a tradition in Hungary

In postcommunist countries such as Hungary, commemoration and public symbols
have proved an important means of politicking, making ideological distinctions
and constructing new identities, thereby repositioning Hungary after the fall of the
Iron Curtain (Foote, Tóth, and Árvay 2000; Bodnár 2009). Attempts to build a
new community by de/recanonization differ from one period to another. The
contestation itself can be seen as constituting community and space (Massey
2005). These communities can also be multiple. Naming can be a conflictual
process at different levels of governance (E. Palonen 2008). In the postcommunist
era, as during other crucial historical moments, the transition from the old to the
new was made tangible in the changing of street names: guards of the past and
newly celebrated heroes. In Hungary, the “us” and “them” were symbolized in a
deeply political process. Indeed, generating two opposing political camps, this
oppositional framing of the political terrain became the dominant trend in
Hungarian politics. Lately, however, the situation has fragmented somewhat but
the governing political forces aim to produce a strong sense of national unity.
Foote, Tóth, and Árvay (2000, 329) maintain that Hungary was a forerunner in
the matters of dealing with the past:
The causes and consequences of World War II and the Holocaust have been
discussed for decades, but debate has hardly begun over the war’s legacy of
Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe. The Hungarian landscape
records the first steps in coming to terms with the postwar period.
Nevertheless, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the past was again in its
place—at least in the street names. More recently, it has become clear that dealing
with the past as a political operation was only beginning. A new phase could be
added to the classification of eras of street naming. And it brought with it both
new and recycled discourses.
Layering political discourses upon the Hungarian landscape is done by
powerful social actors and groups with relational ties to past and future eras. I
propose here that we try to discern the discourses over the whole history of street
naming in Budapest, where renaming is more a reoccurring trend than a truly
extraordinary event. The renaming process involves both aporias and nuances,
since discursive operations always take place on an uneven terrain and discourses
have incompatible elements.
Researchers are able to transform a seemingly smooth, yet layered, city-text
into periodized classifications. Bodnár (2009), for instance, explores the history of
street naming in Budapest. Similarly, Ráday (1998, 2003, 2013) has compiled a
comprehensive encyclopedia of Budapest’s street names, which I draw upon in
the current chapter. Others have considered postcommunist transformations
thematically (E. Palonen 2008). In this chapter, I take a periodized perspective
through the moments of major changes: from nineteenth-century Budapest under
the Habsburg empire and during the formation of the Hungarian Kingdom as an
automous area; the interwar period that included the brief Soviet Republic and
authoritarian era as well as the postwar state socialist period with its changes
particularly around Stalin’s death, the 1956 revolution, and its aftermath; and the
postcommunist period that witnessed changes in both the early-1990s and 2010s.
In countries like Hungary, where the city-text transforms in a major way, street
naming revolutions are, paradoxically, part of an established tradition (E. Palonen
2011). One thing that becomes tangible in the changing street names is the
manifestation of a new, particular era. Given the way in which, in Hungary,
names have often changed in the past, always in accordance with political trends,
street name politics offers prospective salvation to those who do not identify with
recent changes. They may think that one day these street names will change
again. People do not simply identify with the street names and adopt them
mundanely: we can see that the names offer a point of contestation from which
to build an oppositional identity.
The Hungarian nineteenth-century metropolis

The early street names and statues in Budapest were locative rather than
commemorative. They were also more spontaneously named. Later, they gained
political, celebrative, commemorative, and institutional value from the perspective
of the power-holders. Budapest was a multicultural city with a German-speaking
administration, and the urban toponyms on official maps showed German names
irrespective of the usage. The locals in Budapest, however, used a number of
different languages in their daily activities (Bodnár 2009).
Metropolitan growth was accompanied by nation-building, culminating in the
failed revolution of 1848/49. In the 1840s, some 37 names were translated from
German into Hungarian and 20 additional streets renamed. Still, the physical
street signs posted in German under Maria Theresa and Joseph II were not
transformed overnight into Hungarian ones. The city constructed the Chain
Bridge, the first permanent bridge between Buda and Pest in 1849, its corresponding
104 Emilia Palonen
tunnel under the Castle Hill, and an expanded railway network, turning Budapest
into one of the most important points in Europe’s trade network. It was also the
fastest-growing city on the continent in the late-nineteenth century, with the total
population doubling between 1869 and 1896 (Gerő and Poór, 1997; Bácskai,
Gyáni, and Kubinyi 2000). This rapid transformation and modernization swept
away much of the old Pest-Buda. Budapest became the third centrally planned
European capital, after Vienna and Paris (Nagy 1998), and the street naming
authorities had not only to pay attention to translation but also needed to name a
significant number of new streets. After the Compromise of 1867, Budapest
became the official capital of the Hungarian Kingdom.
The independence fight (1848–49) brought with it revolutionary street names;
already in 1846, officials in Pest named the first square after Szechényi, a moderate
Hungarian revolutionary leader and the initiator of the Chain Bridge. During the
revolution of 1848, streets in the Castle Hill gained names after St. Stephen and
two of the revolutionary leaders (Batthyány and Kossuth), and Pest got its Free
Press Street (Szabadsajtó utca), Freedom Square (Szabadság tér), and March 15
Square (Március 15. tér) was named in honor of the Hungarian revolution.
Additionally, the terms “Fraternity,” “Justice,” “National,” and “Unity” were
included in the city-text, although the exact location of these streets remains
unclear (Bodnár 2009).
When the revolution was crushed, pre-revolutionary names were restored and
two more squares were named after the Habsburg rulers Franz Joseph and
Elisabeth (“Sisi”) in 1858. Furthermore, city districts gained Habsburg names
such as Leopold, Theresa, Joseph, and Franz, later also Elisabeth. When the dual
monarchy was restored in the Compromise of 1867, the Hungarian reformer
Ferenc Deák was unofficially commemorated in the streetscape, and the name was
officialized ten years later posthumously (Ráday 1998).
Street names were introduced in Budapest as sets (Habsburg, anti-Habsburg/
revolutionary) to generate a basis for the new discursive universe and the
establishment of the “guards.” Even today these names are present in the map of
Budapest, as the late-nineteenth century was the set that was restored in the 1990s.
They are the discursive and structuring nodal points of the city-text in Budapest,
“floating signifiers” being replaced and restored time and again.
Interwar: from the Soviet Republic to “Berlinization”

The next political conflict that contributed to transforming street names took place
in the aftermath of the First World War. During the short-lived Hungarian People’s
Republic led by Béla Kun in 1919, old statues were wrapped and gypsum statues
erected but street names were easier to change to a socialist vocabulary: Queen
Elizabeth was replaced with Ilona Zrínyi (1643–1703), the mother of Ferenc
Rákóczy II, an anti-Habsburg national hero, already commemorated in the 16th
district’s street names in the 1910s. Commemorative street names celebrated local
and national history (e.g., the Hungarian Jacobins), while the statues and
memorials embraced internationalism (E. Palonen 2014).
One of the key traumas of the interwar period was the reduction of Hungarian
territory by two-thirds in the Trianon treaty of Versailles in 1921. There was
another influx of immigrants to Budapest from the lost territories: now
predominantly peasantry and unskilled workers to the overcrowded working-class
areas or the suburbs. Political populism was emerging as a strong source of hope.
During the interwar period, irredentist names began to appear on the streets of
Budapest (Bodnár 2009). Irredentism here refers to the calls for returning the lost
lands, as this was the ethos behind commemorative naming. This era of street
naming was marked by former right-wing politicians like István Tisza—named
once in 1920 and again in 1999 on different streets. The power-holding admiral
Miklós Horthy also became a veritable nodal point in the interwar city-text,
getting 23 mentions on the street map in 1929.
Commemorative street naming was geopolitical: like much of Central and
Eastern Europe, Hungary was tied to the German economy, and the cultural links
to the German-speaking world were strong. Characteristically, the square in front
of Nyugati (Western) Railway station had been called Berlini tér since 1913, until
it was renamed Marx tér in 1945 (a name which it retained until 1992). During the
interwar period, the political direction was south-west: Mussolini tér was first
proposed in 1928; the renaming took place only after Mussolini’s speech on
November 6, 1936, in Milano, where he expressed a need to solve Hungary’s
territorial claims. Afterwards, two more squares and two streets were named after
Mussolini (Ráday 2003). Finally, the squares of Andrássy witnessed changes:
Oktogon was named after Mussolini (1936), and Körönd (Circus, today Kodály
körönd), the next central square on the same Boulevard towards the Heroes’
Square, became Hitler tér (1938). In contrast to the plethora of places named after
Horthy, only one street throughout Budapest was named after Adolf Hitler.
Interwar naming sought to produce a new hegemonic order in the discursive
universe through the establishment of discursive nodal points.
Socialism
During the socialist period, both street names and other memorials witnessed a
series of transformations. Pótó (2001) divides the socialist period into three eras:
the destruction of the irredentist memorials, the removal of the aristocracy and the
Habsburgs, and socialist commemoration. After the Second World War, the
irredentist statues and fascist, royalist, and aristocratic street names were replaced
by new anti-fascist and later socialist ones. It started with the geographical-
ideological nodal points in the city-text. The central squares commemorating the
Habsburgs were renamed after the victors of the Second World War—adding the
same vocabulary as elsewhere in Eastern Europe and even beyond. Budapest got
its first Stalin square as early as 1946 when, in the heart of Budapest, Erzsébet tér
(after the Habsburg Queen Elizabeth, “Sisi”) was renamed Sztálin tér, while
Frankfurter Allee in East Berlin was renamed Stalinallee in 1949 (Azaryahu
1986). Roosevelt’s square also took over Franz Joseph in 1946, where the US
president was commemorated until recently. Churchill, the British war leader, lost
106 Emilia Palonen
his post as the Prime Minister during the naming process, and was never
commemorated in Budapest (Nyyssönen 1992).
In the political center of Budapest, Grof. Tisza István utca (Count István Tisza
Street, 1925) became József Attila utca in 1945. Heroes of the 1848 revolution
were considered progressive and took key positions in the socialist Hungarian
canon, which was reflected in the street names. The poet Miklos Rádnoti was a
suitable example as a victim of the fascists, as was Maxim Gorky. Martyrs of the
Second World War, left-wing, anti-fascist resistance also became prominent.
Szabó Ervin tér was named in 1948 after the nineteenth-century Hungarian
socialist/social democrat intellectual. In most cases, these anti-fascists stayed on
the map after 1949 when the Soviet-style administration was established. For
example, Raoul Wallenberg’s street in the former Swedish quarter remains, while
Wallenberg himself perished in Soviet Russia.
After the establishment of the Soviet-style system in 1949, the russification of
names intensified (for a similar discussion in the context of East Berlin, see Azaryahu
1986). The aristocratic Eszterházy utca was renamed Puskin utca in 1949, and
Király utca (King St.) gained a name after another Russian writer, Mayakovski, in
1950. Of this Russian culture, Pushkin still remains. Lenin replaced the female
Habsburgs Theresa and Elizabeth on the Nagykörút (Great Circular Boulevard), but
the male rulers Ferenc and József were allowed to remain. The Soviet military
leader Molotov was commemorated on one street. The new “guards” were adapted
well, as by the 1980s, 75 percent of Hungarians were able to identify by name one
or more members of the Hungarian resistance in a survey (Csepeli 1997).
The new elements came to define each other. Russian literature and social
democrats were politicized. The postwar names were taken as one set, and this
also contributed to the removals. As discussed below, between 1945 and 1989, the
myriad renamings resulted in a city-text composed of a heterogeneous set.
Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Sztalin tér was renamed Engels tér. The failed
Hungarian revolution of 1956, led by Imre Nagy, demanded more national
sovereignty and more Western socialism. The protests in front of the Parliament,
and reversing the statue of Stalin, were crucial nodal points for the discourse of
independence for the Hungarian state and communism. Andrássy was again
renamed twice during and after. Although the revolution was brutally crushed
with Soviet tanks, the military leader Molotov’s name was removed, and the
original name Vigadó was returned in 1957.
The “counter-revolution’s martyrs” who supported the status quo were
subsequently elevated in the city-text. In 1968, Ferenc Münnich, the post-1956
era’s first Minister of the Interior was also poshumously commemorated both in
statues and street names as a symbol of the post-1956 era. He became a nodal
point among the “guard”: the revolutionaries in 1989 reversed his statue and in
1990 renamed his street. Some reconciliation can be seen in the commemoration
of other left-wingers in the street names. The communist László Rajk, rehabilitated
and reburied in 1956 during the failed revolution, was again rehabilitated and
commemorated on the streets in 1969 by the Kadarist regime. Both the Marxist
philosopher György (Georg) Lukács (1979), who took part in the 1956 revolution
but remained communist, and perhaps surprisingly interwar “populist” writer
László Németh (1978), were posthumously commemorated in the streets of
Budapest during the late-1970s.
Eventually, socialist internationalism replaced Hungarian-Soviet friendship:
Hanoi park (1968) was named during the Vietnam War, where Hungarian troops
also took part (Hajdú 2005; Lóderer 2008), although few know about it. Budapest
got its Allende park in Kelenföld (1973) and Nehru park in 1987, during the visit
of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to “validate the domestic credibility of the
guiding political ideology” (Bodnár 2009, 145). The Goulash communism of
János Kádár focused on the economy rather than nationalism.
In the 1980s, the discursive universe of street names in Budapest started to
move in a different direction. With the return of one of the nodal points, the
Habsburg Queen Elisabeth, Hungarians’ favorite “Sisi,” appeared again in
Budapest’s city-text in 1986. Her statue was also returned to the city in the 1980s,
similarly to the rehabilitation of the “national” monarchy that occurred in Berlin
when Frederick the Great was commemorated in 1983 (Nyyssönen 1992). Naming
Elisabeth in the streets during the mid-1980s was a sign of a transition that had
already begun before 1989. The guard on the street names was changing slowly
through adding and removing some nodal points from the discursive universe.
Despite the popular events and reversal of statues, there was no violent overthrow,
sudden revolt, or revolution but a negotiated transformation of the regime. The
revolutionary character and the changing hegemony was nevertheless established
by changing street names.
Postcommunist street naming in Budapest

The Hungarian tradition of street naming is intensive: bringing in a new “set” of
discursive elements at a given time. The transition to democracy from a one-party
system started in roundtable talks where the power-holding state socialist party
met the opposition. This led to the articulation of the new system with a
constitutional court, electoral laws, parliamentary elections, and so on. The local
term for the revolution is “system change” (rendszerváltás).
Since discourse refers not to textuality alone but also to practices, there were
also discursive differences between the political forces in the ways in which the
guards have been treated. The streets were changing in Budapest already before
the parliamentary and local elections in 1990. On January 23, 1990, the street in
the heart of Budapest named after Ferenc Münnich, was renamed Nándor utca
(Palatine St.). It was important to make the change visible. Still, it was not a
homogeneous and smooth process. The Hungarian government and the Municipal
Council of Budapest represented different political forces, and their actions
generated further dispute.
In April 1990, the City Soviet (the municipality still in the Soviet-style institution)
called for the citizens to be patient with the statues, which it regarded as “innocent.”
It decided to change 38 street names in Budapest and urged those districts that were
willing to change names to make their decisions about street renamings by the
108 Emilia Palonen
deadline of June 30, 1990. The subsequent two years witnessed a constant
modification of the street names and ten moments of putsch, when the city council
decided to change a great number of names at once. These did not remove all
commemorative street names introduced during the years of state socialism. Many
of the removed names were contested: defining the communist canon was not
straightforward. “Ultra-left” as well as broadly speaking leftist or anti-fascist
names were decanonized and the changes were largely completed by 1993.
Hungarians were also divided over the preferred course of action towards the
city-text (Foote, Tóth, and Árvay 2000). In 1988–89, three points of view emerged
(Pótó 2003). The radical position of the minority consisted of socio-political
critique. The “preservationist” or “phlegmatic” position, expressed in the
surveys as the majority position, claimed that a change of statues would be too
expensive and too complicated. The museum position was adopted by those who
wanted to remove the statues but place them in a statue park. In short, there were
(a) those who wanted to get rid of all the statues, (b) those who did not want to
bother dealing with them, and finally (c) those who wanted to preserve statues in
a museum of sorts (Boros 1998). Opinions on street names followed a similar
pattern: removing all the communist-era street names; supporting minimal, if any,
removals; or saving some of them by way of a layer of memory in the city-text.
The new power-holders could not simply remove unwanted names, they also
needed an immediate substitute for them. The new names were marked by
victimhood, commemorating the 1956 uprising, and the Holocaust—even though
the underlying issues were not universally neutral. The late-nineteenth century
was appropriated as the golden era (e.g., Pribersky 2003) as a way to avoid dealing
with the present, since this was seen as the most neutral period in the Hungarian
past with which to return, yet, at the same time, one both raising national feelings
and a return to Europe (E. Palonen 2008).
The compromise, amnesia, and unwillingness to build a particular new era were
visible in the return of the Habsburgs to the main boulevards of the city. After the
pragmatically chosen golden era of the late-nineteenth century, the Hungarian
right turned to the celebration of the interwar period. Commemorating Admiral
Horthy or Trianon were perhaps demands beyond the mainstream on the right.
The postcommunist revolution was a negotiated one in Hungary, and the renaming
of streets articulated a return to the nineteenth century as a commemorable past,
even though there had been calls for returning to the era that had ended when the
Second World War had begun.
The first postcommunist government and city council were strongly involved
with renaming. This renaming effort was led by the Hungarian Democratic
Forum (MDF), the umbrella party of the national opposition forces. They were
eager to change the street names. During the mid-1990s and 2000s, the left-
liberal governments and Budapest Municipal Council did not carry out many
political renamings. The next elections in 1994 were won by the Socialists, who
joined government with the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz). In 1998,
the elections were won by the national right, Fidesz, focused on architecture and
urban space (E. Palonen 2014). In 2002, Fidesz narrowly lost to the Socialists
who again formed government with SzDSz. Politics was marked by polarization
and the government changed at each election, from one side of the political
spectrum to the other—until 2006, when the Socialists won but riots broke out
when the PM admitted to lying. Under the new right-wing government, renamings
began again in 2010.
A new revolution against communism

In 2010, the population was dissatisfied with the previous Socialist-led
governments and the right-wing government won in a landslide. The party leader
of Fidesz, Viktor Orbán, a young rebel politician of the 1989/90 generation and
later a fan of Berlusconi, called for a “revolution at the polls.” It was enacted in
the Hungarian fashion when in power: the symbolic “guard” on the streets was
changed. On November 19, 2012, parliament passed law CLXVII, which decreed
that the names referring to the “20th century dictatorships” must be changed.
Indeed, not all street names related to the Workers’ Movement and not all the
personalities who were celebrated during the period of 1948–1989 had been
removed in the early-1990s. The Academy of Science introduced a list of names
to be removed. Heroes such as Endre Ságvári and Anna Koltói, who had become
part of the socialist canon of street names, were now to be replaced.
Nevertheless, well-established names may continue to persist through the
inertia of habit (Light and Young 2014): in the district of Óbuda, where a citizen
consultation was conducted, the locals did not want to remove the former names.
Among those to be removed were the Square of the Republic, Köztársaság tér,
which was renamed after the Polish pope John Paul II. Religion replaced
republicanism, it seemed, but in fact “republic” was tied to communist discourse—
particularly as the headquarters of the Communist Party was there. This was one
of the key locations of the bloody 1956 revolution. Additionally, Hungary’s
official name was shortened by removing “Republic.”
One of the most visible renamings was that of Moszkva tér, a major transport
hub in Budapest (Hungarian exonym for Moscow). The name of the square and its
metro station bore witness to the era of its naming in 1951 and when the Soviet-
style metro lines were built in Budapest in the 1960s. Finally, by 2016, the square
was refurbished, so the surroundings would also evoke a sense of a new era rather
than post-war heritage. It was renamed in 2011, by “returning the guard”: the pre-
First World War politician Kálmán Széll’s name was restored to the square. Széll,
a prime minister and minister of finance, became the hero of the Orbán government
to the extent that it named the national austerity package after him. The new
“guard” in the city-text would be absorbed as a nodal point into the public
discourse by becoming a household name. The central transport junction would
simultaneously promote the austerity package.
The government has adopted an anti-liberal populist stance. Populism has
featured in different forms in the list of new street names (Table 6.1). On the
Budapest map, other types of names were also visible. In the Lower Banks of
Buda and Pest were personalities active in saving Budapest Jews during the
110 Emilia Palonen
Table 6.1 “Populist” elements of Budapest’s city-text in the 2010s
Commemorated Reputation (Type of Populism)

Public Figure
Bauer, Sándor Anti-communist martyr, sim. Jan Palach (anti-communism)

Bibó, István Dissident political theorist (anti-communism)
Dalnoki, Jenő Hungarian footballer from the 1950s (popular culture)
Domján, Edit Actress (popular culture)
Görgey, Artúr Hero of the 1849 revolution (revolutionary)
Illyés, Gyula Interwar populist writer (literary/political populism)
Kocsis, Sándor Hungarian football’s “Golden Team” of the 1950s
Mansfeld, Peter Hero of the 1956 revolution (anti-communism)
Nemeth, László Populist writer
Presley, Elvis American musician (popular culture)
Romhányi, József Actor (popular culture)
Zakarias, József Hungarian football’s “Golden Team” of the 1950s
Antal, József (sr.) Interwar politician small-holder
Second World War and the Nazi occupation, including Carl Lutz, Jane Haining,
and Raoul Wallenberg, among others. Another example is that of Count János
Eszterházy, a Slovak Hungarian-Polish interwar politician who voted against
expelling the Jews and remains a controversial figure in Slovakia. Lacking in the
new street names were Jews themselves. This amnesia could be seen in the
memorials: the state-funded German Occupation Memorial gained a counter-
memorial by active citizens focusing on the victims of the Holocaust in 2014. First
on the building site and then in making the now permanently maintained counter-
memorial, protesters asserted that the Hungarian Holocaust was not just a
consequence of foreign occupation but also a tragedy in which Hungarians
themselves were on both sides.
Politicians and religious activists were also commemorated: the first interwar PM
József Antall Sr. (an interwar small-holder politician, minister in 1945–46, and
father of József Antall, the first post-communist prime minister), and Margit Slachta
(the first woman to be elected in the Hungarian diet in 1920 and a strong Protestant
activist). The religious-rebellious discourse was strong overall with different nodal
points or “guards,” including pope John Paul II—a Polish Roman Catholic priest
and activist in the Solidarity movement, and the Protestant, Wittenberg-educated
reformer and translator of the Hungarian bible, Gáspár Károli.
Other key sites were Hungarianized: the American president Roosevelt had to
go in 2011 to be replaced by István Széchenyi, “the Greatest Hungarian,” a
moderate nineteenth-century reformer and a hero of the power-holding Fidesz,
whose heritage is visible in the Chain Bridge, which starts from the square and
heads to the tunnel passing through Buda Castle Hill. His life had been made
tangible in 2002, in a state-sponsored costume drama.
As always, Fidesz communicated a new era through symbolic politics. They
had promised a “revolution at the polls” in 2010. When in office in 1998–2002,
Orbán’s government focused on memorials and architecture (E. Palonen 2014).
Orbán gained another victory in the elections of 2014. Fidesz, as populist party
did not have a clear ideology or vision for the future, but reacted to political strife
by generating a counter-discourse. Still, heterogeneous elements and interwar
nostalgia have been brought to the fore with the surroundings of the parliament
being restored to their pre-1945 condition, including a reproduction of a large
statue of Tisza. Orbán has claimed to introduce an “illiberal democracy,” and the
government has among other things introduced controversial media laws and
restricted activities of foreign-sponsored foundations. Immigrants have emerged
as the new “Other.”
Removing the past was a way to name an enemy, generate the political
frontier, and constitute a political “us” of the nation. Nationalism in Hungary
has been transforming into a set of subcultures (Feischmidt et al. 2014), and this
seems to fit the logic of the city-text, too. Thus far, the Fidesz government has
not offered a ready set to implement in every district and town. It has mainly
recognized the Other through the set to be removed, those beyond the limit of
the government’s discourse.
Conclusion
There are multiple overlapping discourses that inhabit the city-text. Rose-
Redwood (Rose-Redwood vs. Smith 2016, 372) has recently asked: “what
effects do our discourses and practices have in constituting the worlds in which
we live, and how might we reconstitute them to foster a more equitable
co-existence?” Laclau’s point about the way in which discourses include
disparate elements is concretized in the naming of streets. Treating street names
as a set enables us—surprisingly perhaps—to consider them as a fluid,
incomplete, transforming, and contradictory set. The “political” in street naming
may be about making visible what is past and what is now, or to offer points of
contestation, as something ultimately democratic (Mouffe 2000).
In Budapest, there are both ideological and spatial nodal points: for example,
the naming of the main squares after the Second World War victors or religious
leaders, the main Boulevard Andrássy, sections of the Ring Road, and ultimately
the stations and squares became significant focal points of renaming. The renaming
of the Moszkva tér metro station, and its long-planned refurbishment, demonstrates
how certain names and places hold a special value for both citizens and politicians.
On the other hand, the names of the banks of the Danube, which are seldom used
for postal addresses but can be made visible on the map, offer another angle to the
discursive universe of Budapest’s street names.
Although the power-holders of a city may have planned to establish a hegemonic
reading of the past through the naming of streets, the interpretive act of reading
the city-text need not abide by the officially sanctioned narrative of the past. In
pluralist societies, introducing many different claims and heritages in the streets
may very well enable the new set to better resonate with a larger population.
Following Laclau (2005), we might say that, in the moment of naming, the
inherent multiplicity of the “people” becomes one—if only temporarily.
112 Emilia Palonen
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7 Locating the geopolitics
of memory in the
Polish streetscape
Danielle Drozdzewski
Introduction
In the streets, urban inhabitants encounter semiotic reminders of cultural events,
people, and places, whether consciously or unconsciously. Streetscapes are more
than just names on a map; in any settlement, one might walk along a street, have
coffee in a town square, arrange a meeting, or visit a museum in a historical
building. The street, town square, and building could be named after figures of
national importance, or commemorate an important event, or serve as a reminder
of some traditional (national) ritual. Street names are “ostensibly visible,
quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious” (Azaryahu 1996, 311).
Simultaneously, they are sites for the manipulation of memories. Unlike purpose-
built commemorative monuments and memorials, street names “have an
immediate practical reality for the populace” as spatial and historical markers
(Gill 2005, 481). Street name changes accord with, and give material expression
to, a regime’s sanctioned versions of history and ideology, weaving narratives of
historical longevity into the streetscape. As Azaryahu (1996, 321) has asserted,
the potency of street names lies in “their ability to make a version of history an
inseparable element of reality as it is constantly constructed, experienced and
perceived on a daily basis.”
This chapter examines how history has been used as part of the spatial politics
of memory of Nazi and Soviet regimes, inculcating their histories and traditions in
the Kraków streetscape in Poland. Moreover, and in a parallel process of (de)
commemoration, street and place names that did not support their invented
histories were erased. Unlike much other research on street naming, this chapter’s
significance is its temporal analysis of the changes to one bounded area over time.
Such analysis is important for political geographers as it exemplifies the street as
a site of political contestation, where memory is manipulated and embedded
within the ordinary landscape. Furthermore, it shows how representations of
identity and history have been (re)inscribed in the landscape in a process of
politicizing space. During the twentieth century, street and town square names in
the Polish city of Kraków were changed, enacting a critical geopolitics in which
territory and space were used as forms of control over an occupied Kraków
streetscape. This chapter’s example is emblematic of a critical geopolitics that
examines the division and marking of space as a contest between “us” and “them,”
The geopolitics of memory in Poland 115
and as crucial in the mitigation of threats to sovereignty and to the security of
discourses of political domination (Sharp 2009).
This chapter’s key contribution in locating the politics of the urban streetscape
is its spotlight on how history and geography are combined in the act of street
naming, thereby legitimizing authority over urban space. In tracking the
spatialization of geopolitics in the Krakówian streetscape, I undertake a textual and
chronologically sequential analysis of historical maps, examining Nazi, Soviet,
and Polish governmental uses of the streetscape in Kraków to make evident the
purpose for each government’s preferred version of history. In undertaking that
process it becomes clear that some particulars of the name changes were obfuscated
by Poland’s history of foreign occupation, and especially the destruction of lives
and documents in the wake of the occupations. The chapter’s focus, then, is on
establishing a narrative that makes clear the sense of purpose in the actual name
changes themselves, rather than on the minutiae of specifying who nominated,
approved, and instigated changes, or on levels of local resistance to these changes—
as interesting as these details may be. In the following sections, I first review the
literature on cultural memory and its relation to street naming. I then detail how I
have used this scholarship to inform the textual (de)constructions of Kraków’s
streetscape. Next, I discuss these readings of street name changes in chorological
order from WWII through the post-war period to the post-Socialist era.
Geographies of memory in the everyday streetscape

As this volume is dedicated to the political life of urban streetscapes and to the
connections between naming, politics, and place, scholarship on toponomy and
the politics of memory is a common theme across each of the chapters. Thus,
rather than rehearsing this literature here again, I draw out how parallel scholarship
on “memory” and the “everyday” critically intersect into the political life of the
streetscape. I take this approach to positioning the scholarship informing this
chapter because street naming involves the dual process of shaping memory and
the shared space of everyday life (Hebbert 2005). First, the “everyday” focus is
important because streets are basic elements of orientation in, and through,
everyday landscapes. The “everyday” takes the form of the “ordinary landscapes
in our daily routines,” such as streets, shopping centers, parks, and public squares
(Winchester, Kong, and Dunn 2003, 35). Second, memory is articulated in public
spaces through a variety of media. Sites of memory include, but are not limited to,
monuments, memorials, commemorative rituals, and street names. These sites of
memory can become “landmarks of a remembered geography and history [which]
… form the intersection between official and vernacular cultures” (Johnson 2002,
294). Such remembered geographies and histories in urban spaces have
increasingly been the focal point of research on street naming and toponymy
(Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010;
Azaryahu 2011, 2012a; Rose-Redwood 2011; Alderman and Inwood 2013).
While memory is routinely imagined as something personally experienced and
felt, the urban fabric of the city also holds memory, since “it can act as a witness to
116 Danielle Drozdzewski
the vicissitudes of everyday life—the mundane and the catastrophic” (Drozdzewski
2016, 20). In public spaces, memory is expressed in the built form and layout of the
city: in the city’s houses, its street names, and curvatures as well as in the
commemorative atmospheres permeating postwar cities (cf. Anderson 2009). A
city’s memories can be personally and collectively remembered, (re)produced, and
transmitted—in part—to maintain narratives of (national) identity. Because
memories are informed by experiences, events, and stories that are culturally
specific, they reveal connections between past and present (Connerton 1989;
Assmann 1995), and, thus, the story of a city can be told by reading and moving
through its landscapes. Streetscapes are often taken for granted as receptacles of
memory because of their mundanity, yet, as this volume attests, they are sites
where power is wielded to assert a preference for the depiction of certain memories
in place. Consequently, recent scholarship on street and place naming has drawn
attention to naming as a “contested spatial practice” (Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009;
Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010, 455).
The geopolitics of memory is a complex process determining “who gets
[representation], in what way and with what political outcomes” (Edkins 2003,
135, italics in original). In the case study considered in this chapter, negotiating
the geopolitics of memory in Kraków’s streetscape involved different regimes
manipulating street names to reference the past with the purpose of reaffirming
their existence (and occupation) in that place in the present. As sites of memory in
the public sphere, street names are a palpable example of how memory is mobilized
to serve political ends (Edkins, 2003) and to inscribe political agendas into the
streetscape. Thus, the geopolitics of memory (of the street) relates to whose
version of a nation’s past is made more visible in the public arena. As a potent
force for popularizing political agendas, street names are both visible and
accessible to large audiences and extensive geographic scales (Alderman, 2003).
Building on Alderman’s work, I would also contend that its quotidian context
means that not only is the street a key focal point for expressing control and power,
but its everydayness escalates the frequency by which a populace encounters a
new name and memory planted in the streetscape. The power of commemorative
choice is therefore tantamount to controlling the consolidation of memory in
public spaces. Moreover, control of the street is a more straightforward task for an
occupying regime who may instill a fear of reprisal as an instrument for the
reinforcement of new names.
Memory’s usefulness as a tool for those in power relates, then, to the
determination of what is represented materially, how it is portrayed, and where it
is positioned. A new regime will seek to assert its version of national identity in
public landscapes “through the creation of an urban landscape that demonstrates
and affirms the values and ideology of the regime” (Light, Nicolae, and Suditu
2002, 135). The successful transference of ideology to the street involves
“signification” using semiotic markers and, as Baker (1992, 4) argues, is associated
with a “quest for order,” “an assertion of authority,” and the projection of
“totalisation.” In geographical scholarship, attention is readily focused on the (re)
production and transmission of public memory discourses in post-war and
post-totalitarian states, and on the use of repression, suppression, and power
(Argenbright 1999; Till 1999; Foote, Toth, and Arvay 2000; Forest and Johnson
2002; Nagel 2002; Forest, Johnson, and Till 2004; Ward, Silberman, and Till
2012). Interestingly, within this work, less attention has been paid to the role of
non-totalitarian governments in changing street names back to their pre-totalitarian
names, or the inculcation of new names, democratically selected or otherwise.
More often writers have been especially concerned with how memory narratives
in post-Soviet states have been (re)defined and publicly articulated following a
return to autonomy. These new narratives of identity are drawn from the previously
repressed or under-represented personal and experiential narratives of nations’
other histories. In the next part of this chapter, I discuss the case study of Kraków’s
streetscape and contextualize its temporal and cultural settings. Following that, I
detail my methodological approach.
Memory in the Polish streetscape

Over the past two centuries, the sustained presence of foreign regimes in Poland
has created contested memoryscapes. Throughout the twentieth century, the
importance of maintaining collective narratives of Polish identity was amplified
by three periods of foreign occupation in Poland. From 1793 to 1918, the Tsarist
Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires partitioned Poland. Between
1939 and 1945, the Nazi (National Socialist/Fascist) and Soviet (Socialist) regimes
occupied Poland. After WWII, with the initial support of Allied governments, the
Soviet regime remained in Poland until 1989. Most recently, the fall of that regime
saw the restoration of an autonomous Polish Republic, the current Rzeczpospolita
Polska. It is in this setting of cultural and political suppression and occupation that
Polish identities have been antagonistically positioned in relation to foreign
occupation and oriented to autonomy (Drozdzewski 2008, 2012). Crucially for
my purposes, memory narratives of places, events, and people that are synonymous
with Polish identity have been, and remain, important forms of cultural (re)
production, providing potent reminders of the nation’s quest for freedom. To track
how foreign occupation marked the Kraków streetscape, five maps of Kraków,
dating from 1934, 1943, 1964, 1985, and 1996, were sourced from Jagiellonian
University Library for this analysis. In each map, a section of the Śródmieście, the
city center, was examined. Suburb boundaries for Dzielnica I Stare Miasto
(Suburb I, The Old Town) have changed since the 1934 map, so major ring roads
around the Old Town and bordering the Planty (the former medieval moat) were
used as boundaries for the analysis.1
In approaching research on a post-war landscape such as Kraków that had
undergone not only successive name changes, but sequential periods of war and
occupation, it was clear from the outset that the names on maps were only part of
that place’s wider story of occupation and struggle for autonomy. In Poland,
WWII and the Soviet occupation were especially destructive and authoritarian
and, in the case of the latter, “without the clear division of responsibility and
accountability” (pers. comm., July 23, 2010). In this context, ascertaining who
Table 7.1 Street name changes within the Planty in Kraków, Poland
Polish Name German Name Soviet Name Post-Soviet Name
1934 1941 1964/1985 1996
ul. Basztowa Werhrmachstr. ul . Basztowa
ul. Pijarska Bastel Str ul. Pijarska
ul. Reformacka Kloks Str. ul. Reformacka
ul. Św. Marka Markus Gasse ul. Św. Marka
ul. Dunajweskiego Westring. 1. Maja ul. Dunajweskiego
ul. Sławkowska Hauptstr. ul. Sławkowska
ul. Św. Jana Johannis gasse ul. Św. Jana
ul. Floriańska Floriang. ul. Floriańska
ul. Św. Tomasza Thomas g. Ludwika ul. Św. Tomasza
Solskiego
ul. Szpitalna Spitalgasse ul. Szpitalna
Pl. Św Ducha Theater Pl. Pl. Św Ducha
ul. Św. Krzyża Hans von Kulmbach Str. ul. Św. Krzyża
Pl. Szeczpańska Stephan Pl. Pl. Szeczpańska
ul. Szeczpańska Stephang. ul. Szeczpańska
Rynek Główny Adolf Hitler Platz Rynek Główny
ul. Andrzeja Potockiego Ostring. ul.Westerplatte
ul. Podwale Westring. ul. Podwale
ul. Mikołajska H Dürerstr. ul. Mikołajska
na Gródku
Mały Rynek Kleiner Markt Mały Rynek
Pl. Marjacki Marien Pl. Pl. Marjacki
ul. Szewska Schusterg. ul. Szewska
ul. Jagiellońska Matheus str. ul. Jagiellońska
ul. Św Anny Annag. ul. Św Anny
ul. Sienna Marketgasse ul. Sienna
ul. Stolarska Tischlerg ul. Stolarska
ul. Dominikańska Dominikanerg. ul. Dominikańska
Pl. Wszystkich Rathaus Pl. Pl. Wiosny Pl. Wszystkich
Świętych Ludów Świętych
ul. Gołębia Murner Str. ul. Gołębia
ul. Wiśnla Weichselstr. ul. Wiśnla
ul. Bracka Kasinostr. ul. Bracka
ul. Grodzka Burgstr. ul. Grodzka
ul. Franciszańska Franziskanerg. ul. Franciszańska
ul. Straszewskiego Westring. ul. Straszewskiego
ul. Olszewskiego Celtisgasse. ul. Olszewskiego
ul. Poselska Viet Stoβ str. ul. Poselska
ul. Senacka Wirsingstr. ul. Senacka
ul. Kanonicza Bonerstr. ul. Kanonicza
ul. Św Gertrudy Gertrudenstr. ul. Ludwika ul. Św Gertrudy
Waryńskiego
ul. Podzamcze Unter der burg. ul. Podzamcze
Pl. Św Magdaleny JörgHuber Pl. Św Magdaleny
Pl. Św Idziego Burg Pl. Pl. Św Idziego
ul. Św Idziego Agidiusgasse ul. Św Idziego
Notes
‘g’ denotes gasse, which means alley.
‘ul.’ denotes ulica, which means street.
‘str’. denotes strasse, which means street.
Table 7.2 Street name changes on main roads outside the city center of Kraków, Poland.
Polish Name German Name Soviet Name Post-Soviet Name
1934 1941 1964/1985 1996
ul. Zwierzyniecka Hansestr. ul. Zwierzyniecka
ul. Marszałka Józefa Universitetstr. ul. Manifestu ul. Marszałka Józefa
Piłsudskiego Lipcowego Piłsudskiego
ul. Karmelicka Reichstr. ul. Karmelicka
ul. Długa Johann Haller Str. ul. Długa
ul. Pawia
ul. Lubicz Bahnhofstr. ul. Lubicz
ul. Starowiśnla Alte Weichselstr. ul. Bohaterów ul. Starowisnla
Stalingradu
ul. Stradomska Komunandturstr. ul. Stradomska
made names changes, who was responsible for the initial research on street names,
what were the instances of local resistance, if any, and so on were unobtainable
elements of research—in some cases this type of document no longer exists. After
substantial archival research and following consultation with Polish academics
and a historical curator in Kraków about the likelihood of finding original
documents detailing the provenance of street name changes, I made the decision
to focus solely on the textual (de)construction of the name changes. Indeed, Gross
(1979, 42) has also confirmed that there are “extreme difficulties connected with
obtaining reliable data on almost any subject during this [WWII] period” and
noted that it is nearly impossible to find materials of “irreproachable veracity” for
such research. Nonetheless, I have sought to reference departments or people
conceiving of, and authorizing, street renamings where possible though such
details are incomplete.
The Kraków street name changes on successive map editions were recorded
and synthesized with archival and contemporary secondary sources, and with
personal communications about the regimes and their modes of governing in
Kraków during the two most recent periods of foreign occupation. In particular,
I drew on three Polish chronicles detailing the two periods of foreign occupation
in Kraków and two volumes of the comprehensive and encyclopaedic Dzieje
Krakówa (The History of Kraków, volumes five and six). I also used a publication
compiled by the Kraków State Archives that described life in Nazi-occupied
Kraków (Bez Zaciemnienia: Codzienność Okupawnego Krakówa a Materiałach
Archiwum Państwowego w Krakówie), along with secondary sources on Polish
history and the foreign occupation of Poland. Other historical sources have
strengthened the analysis (Papritz and Sappok 1940; Polish Ministry of
Information 1942; Hitler 1953; Krausnick and Broszat 1970; Rich 1973; Garliński
1985; Burleigh 1988; Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001; Davies 2005b; Zamoyski
2009). Tables 7.1 and 7.2 detail all street names in the study area and their names
in the pre-WWII Polish republic (1934), the German names in the
Generalgouvernement (1941), the Soviet names (1964, 1985) and the post-Soviet
Polish republic names (1996).
(Re)naming Kraków’s streetscape
The following sections of this chapter explore the naming of streets in Kraków,
using the 1934 map as a starting point as that year marked the start of national
street name standardization and the creation of a “Commission on Establishing
the Names of Localities.” The commission used the substantial 15 volume
Geographic Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and Other Slavic Countries,
published between 1880 and 1902, as its reference point in the standardization of
street names (Zych 2011).
WWII and the Generalgouvernement (Government-General) (1939–1945)

Following its capture on September 6, 1939, Kraków was established as the
capital of Generalgouvernement with Hans Frank appointed as the General-
Governor on October 26, 1939. The Generalgouvernement was not formally
incorporated into the Reich but designated as a distinct administrative unit to
house the remnants of the Polish and Jewish populations, who had been forcibly
displaced from the other territories destined to be solely populated by Reichsbürger
(Reich citizens) (Rich 1974; Burleigh 1988). Following this mandate, it was
important for Kraków to be German in character and outlook, an intention
expounded by Hitler (1940, 588) in Mein Kampf: “a Germanisation can only be
carried out with the soil and never with men” alone. As the capital of the
Generalgouvernement, Kraków underwent a process of Germanization, where
history was used to ensconce ideology and identity in the landscape.
It was the Nazis’ intention, and indeed part of a wider Nazi Geopolitik, that the
persons exiled to the Generalgouvernement would form an interim workforce and
eventually become an illiterate serfdom. With the ratification of the “final solution,”
the Generalgouvernement would extend the German lebensraum and Kraków would
“be peopled by Germans” (Hitler 1953, 405). Kraków was “imagined” (cf. Anderson
1991) as “a perfect example of continuity of the German culture and civilisation on
the banks of the Vistula river” (Chwalba 2002, 41). In Karl Haushofer’s Geopolitik,
this process of Germanization was termed “earth-boundedness” (Ó Tuathail 1998)
and involved the inscription of German character into the land- and streetscape. Nazi
propaganda promoted a view of Kraków as primordially German; publicists showed
that Kraków was “settled in a location deed based on German law (Magdeburg law)”
according to which “Polish people could not become citizens and it was German
clans who were encouraged to settle” (Chwalba 2002, 47).
To effect these changes, guidelines on (re)naming streets were issued on August
22, 1940 by Gerhard Sappok, a professor of history, enlisted by Frank to work in
a sub-branch of the Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem (PuSte) in Kraków
(Burleigh, 1988).2 While this sub-branch produced maps and statistics about
Germandom in Kraków, including a German guide to Kraków and “studies of
German culture and art in Polish history” (Burleigh 1988, 190–191), Sappok
instructed staff in the history department of the Institut für deutsche Ostarbeit
(IdO) (Institute for German Work in the East) to “work out” and “check” newly
proposed street names.3 Existing Polish street names were checked for references
to “anti-German personalities, events [or] Jews”; newly proposed names were
mandated to be “closely bound up with the history of Germandom or German
cultural achievements”; and, if the new name was a direct translation it “should be
as complete and grammatically accurate as possible” (Sappok 1940, cited in
Burleigh 1988, 195).4 The PuSte was responsible for authorizing street name
changes, which were proposed by local commissions comprising IdO researchers,
local government officials, and local German bourgeoisie.
The 1943 map depicts the outcomes of Sappok’s mandate that focused on
“fixing” the past in place by elongating and exposing distant or longstanding
German historical associations into the present (Figure 7.1). Of the 51 streets and
place names examined, only two street names remained unchanged.5 Name
changes can be categorized in four ways, each of which is elaborated below: street
names changed to reflect German cityscapes; others directly translated into
German; those changed to refer to the ruling Nazi party; and those changed to
remember German historical and/or cultural personalities.
Figure 7.1 Kraków’s Old Town in 1943

First, the names of streets and squares were changed to invoke a city structure
reminiscent of major German settlements. As such, Westring (West Ring) and
Ostring (East Ring) identified the ring roads around Kraków’s Old Town.
Similarly, Pl. Wszystkich Świętych (All Saints Square) became Rathaus Platz
(Town Hall Square), and the road adjacent to the Kraków’s main train station
became Bahnhofstr (Station Street). Second, other street names within Kraków’s
Old Town were kept and the names directly translated to German. For example,
ul. Spzitalna (Hospital Street) became Spitelgasse. Streets named after professions
were also Germanized such that ul. Szewska (Shoemaker’s Street) became
Schusterg, and ul. Stolarska (Joiner’s Street) became Tischlerg. In the 1943 map,
some streets had the reference to “saint” omitted from the new German name, for
example, ul. Św. Marka (Saint Mark’s Street) became Marcus Gasse (Marcus
Alley), and ul. Św. Jana (Saint John’s Street) became Johannis Gasse (John’s
Alley). Yet other maps produced during the Nazi occupation have retained the
reference “saint” in the same street names. Nonetheless, the decision to keep
Catholic street names is pertinent given longstanding and strong linkages between
Polish Catholicism and Polish nationalism (Porter 2001). One explanation could
be that Frank, knowing that “German officials were thinly spread” in the
Generalgouvernement and that Poles were employed in lower ranks of the
administration, on railways and other utilities, saw this as a conciliatory move
(Burleigh 1988, 187; also, see Gross 1979). It could also be the case that Germany’s
longstanding historical roots in the Holy Roman Empire were as influential as
Nazi ideology.
The third category of street name changes instituted more poignant reminders of
the presence of the Nazi regime. Azaryahu (1996, 321) has argued that the main
virtue of street names is to introduce “history into social communication” to make
“a version of history an inseparable element of reality.” A striking example was the
substitution of “Rynek Główny” with “Adolf Hitler Platz,” which was instituted in
1940 to celebrate one year of victory and occupation in Poland. Further examples of
referencing the ruling elite include: ul. Basztowa to Wehrmachstr. and ul. Karmelicka
(a major thoroughfare out of the city center) to Reichstr. Both Wehrmachstr. and
Reichstr. illustrate overt “statement(s) of the regime’s agenda” (Light, Nicolae, and
Suditu 2002, 135–136). Moreover, the term “Reich,” denoting kingdom or empire in
German, provided connection to the longevity of German rule and power back to the
Holy Roman Empire. As Hobsbawm (1972, 3) has pointed out in this regard, “the
past is … a permanent dimension of the human consciousness.”
The fourth category of street (re)naming was perhaps the most instructive and
involved the rewriting of Kraków as a German city and “cultural centre that once
exercised a strong and lasting influence” (Sappok 1940, v–vi). Exposing material
links to a Germanic past, by referencing Germans who had been active in the
development of Kraków’s cultural landscape, etched a sense of German entitlement
to the city. As Rudolf Pavlu, Starost (Chief Administrator of Kraków, April 1941
to April 1943) stated: “what our ancestors created here as farmers, colonisers,
burghers, craftsman and artists should not go down in history as a futile effort”
(Pavlu 1942, page unknown, cited in Kluczewski 2009, 33).
The Nazis were shrewd in their choice of which historical periods to represent
in Kraków, with name changes primarily emphasizing figures from the
Renaissance, regarded in Poland as the Golden Age (c. fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries). Then, the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty (1385–1572) controlled the
largest ever Polish and multi-ethnic state, and the period is considered one of great
wealth, culture, and influence. Some of Kraków’s key cultural artifacts date from
the Renaissance including the altar in Kościół Mariacki (St Mary’s Bascilia) and
Wawel (The King’s Castle), which was rebuilt following a fire in Renaissance
style by Zygmunt Stary I (King Sigismund the Old).
To emphasize the German contribution to Kraków’s cultural landscape, well-
known German artists, and their works, were named in the streetscape to show
that Kraków “was once a pioneer of German art” (Pavlu 1942, cited in Kluczewski
2009, 32). This was a classic illustration of what Alderman (2003, 99) refers to as
history being etched “into the geographic fabric of everyday life,” with streets
named after: Hans von Kulmbach, a German artist who painted three altarpieces
for churches in Kraków; Hans and Albrecht Dürer, the former being the court
painter of Zygmunt Stary I; Jörg Huber, a German sculptor who fashioned a tomb
for a Polish King in Wawel’s crypt; and Viet Stoss, who was responsible for the
most well-known artifact within Kościół Mariacki, the triptych altarpiece.
The Nazis were vigilant about the geography of their street naming exercise,
renaming streets in close proximity to key cultural symbols, such as the university
and Wawel. Two streets in close spatial proximity to Jagiellonian University, a key
marker of Kraków’s cultural development, were renamed after Conrad Celtes and
Thomas Murner, two German scholars who studied in Kraków. The placement of
these streets adjacent to the university indicates the Nazis’ attempts to expose
material links to Kraków’s intellectual and artistic past. Similarly, two streets
closer to Wawel were changed to emphasize deliberate associations to Kazimierz
Wielki (King Casmir III the Great) (1333–1370). Kazimierz Wielki—the last king
of the Piast Dynasty, preceding the Jagiellonian dynasty—was responsible for the
eastward expansion of the Polish state. During his reign, Kraków grew from “a
wooden town into a city of brick and stone” (Davies 2005a, 78). Social and cultural
infrastructure such as the Gothic Cloth Hall, Jagiellonian University, and numerous
churches exemplified the nation building focus of the era. Azaryahu (1996, 322)
has argued that historical street naming involves an “artificially fabricated unity
between history … and location.” As such and near to Wawel, ul. Senacka became
Wirsingstr. to commemorate the German treasurer to Kazimierz Wielki, and ul.
Kanonicza became Bonerstr. to honor a member of his court. The sagacity of these
changes was cunning; their proximity to Wawel—regarded as the cultural center of
Kraków where Poland’s kings lived and were buried alongside famous Polish
writers, actors, and clergyman—flaunted the acquisition of the castle while also
seeking to diminish its Polish relevance. Moving past the link between name and
location, these changes typify the astuteness of Nazi efforts to emphasize German
influence in Kraków. By using historical and national narratives associated with
the Polish Renaissance (notably during periods of nation-building under the Piast
and Jagiellonian dynasties), the Nazis sought to weaken significant connections to
Polish nationalism by expunging reminders of such narratives and showing that it
was Germans who contributed significantly to Kraków’s cultural status.
There was but one strong political purpose of name changes during the Fascist
occupation of WWII, which was to show that Nazis were reclaiming a city they
thought was theirs. The re-inscription of the streets using the German language
further emphasized their “identity politics and nationalist policies” (Azaryahu
2012b, 462). Additionally, Burleigh (1988, 194) has argued, the work of German
researchers in Kraków showed that “by judicious selection, history could be made
to conform with the dictates of … [Nazi] ideology.”
Post-WWII: Soviet-led Socialism in Poland (1945–1989)

After WWII, and at the end of Nazi occupation of Kraków, the Soviet regime
sought to cement its authority and remove traces of the Nazi regime and Kraków’s
Polish republican past. Referring to place naming during the Socialist occupation,
Domański (1998, 33) maintains that “new names had a double purpose of
conveying Socialist ideals and/or eradicating old improper identities—capitalist,
religious or non-Polish.” During the postwar period, a Committee for Establishing
Place Names had the primary aim of renaming western territory from Germany.
Name changes would have been instituted by local (town) authorities with
penultimate decision-making belonging to the Polska Zjednoczona Partia
Robotnicza (the ruling Polish United Workers Party) (pers. comm. July 23, 2010).
Of note, renaming was completed in Polish; Soviet tactics had a political focus
distinct from the cultural preferences shown by the Nazis.
Between 1945 and 1989, seven strategic and compelling name changes occurred in
the study area (Figure 7.2). The constitution of a new Soviet-collective history sought
to perpetuate certain narratives of class struggle by commemorating Soviet battle
sites and individuals, and selecting street names significant in the Soviet calendar. As
Young and Light (2001, 944) observe in a similar context, such “re-writing of history
sought to emphasise (or invent) long-standing links with the USSR.” In Bucharest,
Light, Nicolae, and Suditu (2002) found that the Soviet regime generally did not
rename streets that already had religious references. In Kraków, however, two streets
and a town square named after religious figures (ul. Św. Gerturdy, ul. Św. Tomasza,
and Pl. Wszystkich Świętych) were renamed, presenting a curious anomaly given that
the majority of religiously named streets remained unchanged. Two of the three were
renamed to commemorate Soviet individuals; the third commemorated a Soviet
calendar ritual, indicating that both the previous religious name and the new (Soviet)
name played a role in this decision. A Polish Socialist, Ludwik Waryński, was
commemorated in place of ul. Św. Gerturdy. Waryński was regarded as Poland’s first
Marxist and founder of Poland’s first Socialist magazine. In 1885, he was captured
and sentenced by Tsarist authorities and died in prison. The street name change
served several purposes: it emphasized Waryński’s martyrdom, denounced Tsarist
Russians, and accentuated the longstanding existence of Polish Socialism.
Furthermore, the Soviets sought to highlight that the “struggles of men like Waryński
aroused the hatred of industrialists and other exploiters” (Ferro 2003, 256).
Figure 7.2 Kraków’s Old Town in 1964
Then in 1955, the conversion of Pl. Wszystkich Świętych (All Saint’s Square) to
Pl. Wiosny Ludów (Spring of Nations) signaled further Soviet attempts to remind
the local Polish population of the power and rights of the workers. In the Spring
of Nations (1848), Polish insurrectionary forces had planned to face Russia with
Prussian forces but they reneged; an ill-fated uprising in Poznań then resulted in
the Grand Duchy of Posen being ceded to Prussian forces. Read from a Soviet
perspective, the politics of this uprising is symptomatic of Prussian (read German)
deceit. Wiosny Ludów thus presents as a prudent selection and reinforces the
Soviets as a trustworthy collaborator.
After WWII in Soviet-occupied Europe, the commemoration of the war was
dominated by a common narrative highlighting the Fascist failure (Judt 1992).
This narrative extended to street names, with ul. Starowiśnla becoming Alte
Weichselstr., then changing to ul. Bohaterów Stalingradu (Heroes of the Battle of
Stalingrad), a change that emphasized German defeat and Soviet victory.
Highlighting German fallibility was also evident in renaming ul. Andrzeja
Potockiego to ul. Westerplatte. Westerplatte is the location where WWII began
and pertinent for the maintenance of anti-Nazi narratives. For Poles, Westerplatte
is deeply entrenched in cultural memory as a site symbolizing suffering and the
struggles of the Polish nation. These examples typify Azaryahu’s (1997, 481)
assertion that name changes can transform “history into a feature of the natural
order of things,” concealing its contrived character. There is, however, an
additional rationale behind this particular name change. The former name, ul.
Andrzeja Potockiego, refers to Andrew Potocki, a member of the Polish nobility,
and was deeply inconsistent with Socialist ideology to champion the worker.
To visibly bolster ideology in the streetscape, the Soviet regime also used
propaganda and were judicious in the choice of locations for name changes. The
conversion of ul. Marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego to Universitetstr. and then to ul.
Manifestu Lipcowego (July Manifesto) is an example of propagandist street
naming and of purposefully positioning a semiotic marker. Piłsudski was the First
Marshall of the Second Polish Republic, formed after WWI and the 123 year
partition of Poland. His actions led to the reformation of the Polish State, and he
also led Polish forces to victory in the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921)
(Stanisławska-Adamczewska and Adamczewska 2000). He was demonstrably
disliked by both Russians and Germans. Thus the Soviets chose neither to keep
the Nazi name “Universitetstr” because it referenced Jagiellonian University, an
anti-communist bastion, nor to revert to the pre-WWII name because it referenced
Piłsudski. Rather they chose the July Manifesto, which “according to the official
mythology of the Communist regime” signified the beginning of post-war political
control of Poland by the Soviet-led Polish Committee of National Liberation
(Davies 2005b, 413).6 It outlined the provisional social, political, and economic
reforms to be installed by a Soviet-led government in Poland, in opposition to the
London-based Polish government in exile. The aim here was to show that the
Polish nation had emerged as a true Socialist entity after WWII without force or a
Soviet-led invasion, effectively “turn[ing] the landscape into a world structured
by the legitimising myths and symbols of the regime” (Gill 2005, 481). The choice
of location for this renaming was decisive. Ul. Manifestu Lipcowego runs
perpendicular to Jagiellonian University, which remained in defiant intellectual
opposition to the Soviet regime. The “construction of any message designed to
represent reality” involves decisions about how to locate those realities (Galasiński
and Skowronek 2001, 53). By invoking the July Manifesto close to the university,
the regime was able to ensure that university academics and students would have
contact with that street name.
Post-Socialism: a return to the Rzeczpospolitia Polska

With the return of the Rzeczpospolitia Polska in 1989, all but one of the previously
renamed streets reverted back to its name on the 1934 map. Polish authorities
chose to keep one name from the Socialist era—ul.Westerplatte—as a
commemoration of WWII. The street name changes “indicated which values
were to be recognised as defining the nation and what kind of present and future
was envisaged for the country” (Ochman 2013, 32). In the only other Anglophone
study on street naming that included Kraków in its analysis of Central European
toponyms, Kraków (along with Graz and Prague) had the least number of changes
in “city toponymy between 1935 and 1985” (Stiperski et al. 2011, 190).7 This
similar result suggests an overriding importance to revert to the pre-WWII
nomenclature. The use of the street to display nationally important cultural
memories in the public sphere is not restricted to foreign regimes; the autonomous
Polish government also exercised its power to remove references to previous
regimes. In Poland more generally, since 2007, the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej
(IPN) (The Institute of National Remembrance) began a process of
de-communizing public space, sending requests to local councils to change street
names that “glorified communism” (Ochman 2013, 82). To support this agenda,
IPN cited Article 13 of the Polish Constitution and Article 256 of the Polish
Penal Code that relate to the prohibition of the propagation of Nazism, Fascism,
and Communism.
Conclusion
By means of the sign—a seemingly commonplace, fixed, spatial marker—street
names “impose a legitimate vision upon the social world” (Galasiński and
Skowronek 2001, 52). While “urban spaces and architecture often give the
impression of permanence,” this chapter’s temporal analysis of street names
shows how this component of urban space conveys narratives that are indeed
“dynamic, contingent and malleable” (Hagen 2010, 397). Through time,
Kraków’s street names have provided visible, distinctive, and daily reminders
of the historical and socio-political intentions of those governing the city. The
names on the street signs are much more than proper nouns. They are expressions
of power and politics, each marking the nation-building intentions of the
occupier—whether executed in overt or subtle ways. The efficacy of street
names as geopolitical tools of memory and contested identities has been
demonstrated by the fact that some Polish street names were absent from
Kraków for fifty years, from 1939 to 1989, and then reinstated as soon as that
became feasible.
Toponymic studies investigate this link between identity and power: thus, much
can be ascertained about political and ideological convictions motivating each
occupying regime by critically examining its renaming practices. For example,
the extent of the name changing in the 1943 map confirms a key tenet of critical
geopolitical discourse to lessen the security threat of difference to the Nazi state
by making clear divisions between Nazi space and Polish space: German place
names in German, in newly conquered German space. A critical geographical
approach to examining the geopolitics of memory in this research returns to a key
medium of the discipline, the map, to draw attention to how street names augment
the relationship between power and identity. The street gives the name a place; it
fixes it to a locale in the city, to someone’s street of residence, to where someone
shops. Foregrounding the spatiality of street names changes as an integral part of
a triadic relationship of “where,” “whom,” and “what” has revealed that purposeful
selection extends to the selection of historical events and personalities and to the
location of the street name changes. Inserting and narrating particular versions of
history in strategic locations was, therefore, critically important for both Fascist
and Socialist regimes.
A key contribution of this chapter has been to invite more than passing reflection
on the ways in which Kraków’s urban façade exemplifies wider geopolitical shifts
in memory and identity struggles. Given Nietzsche’s (2006 [1874], 3) contention
that “we wish to use history only insofar as it serves the living,” if the past has
been effectively layered over by sets of street names both new and paradoxically
longstanding though absented, what contemporary purposes do now-silenced
names serve? I contend that the Nazi and Soviet regimes used the street to
demonstrate power and transcribe that power spatially because street names are
easily changed, readily accessible, ubiquitous markers in everyday urban space.
Yet this propensity for changeability also imparts impermanence. Returning to the
question of contemporary relevance of analyzing historical name changes, I
proffer two suggestions that are also agendas for further work. The first is that
scholars interested in toponymy engage present day audiences’ opinions about
living in streets with contested pasts, which have had multiple names. The second
is that by investigating how, why, and when names changed in the past, we
construct better topographies for understanding the importance of geopolitics to
everyday spaces, especially those which are silent witnesses to trauma.
Notes
1 These ring roads are F.Straszewskiego, Podwale, J.Dunajewskiego, Basztowa,
Westerplatte, Św. Gertrudy, Św. Idziego, and Podzamcze.
2 Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem (PuSte) was established on December 18, 1939, to
conduct research on the territories of the Eastern Front, namely the historical German
linkages in these places.
3 The Institut für deutsche Ostarbeit (IdO, Institute for German Work in the East) opened
in Kraków on April 20, 1940, and had a mandate of pursuing research on ethnic
Germandom in Poland.
4 In detailing the PuSte memorandum on street renaming, Burleigh (1988) references the
Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Article No R153/951 (Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem) G.
Sappok, “Richlinen für die Umbenennung von Strassennamen in den Städten dea
Generalgouvernments,” 22.8.40. The memorandum provides further detail on possible
German personalities for street renaming lists of exclusions and references of certain
personalities to be removed from the streetscape. It also urges administrators to ensure
that those streets with direct translations did not have a suitable German name in the
Middle Ages.
5 Two street names remained unchanged over the duration of all three regime changes: ul.
Pawia and na Grodku. Neither represented anything anti-German; nor were the names
anti-Socialist. The name ul. Pawia dates back to 1878 and possibly relates to a peacock
farm (“paw” being the Polish word for peacock); na grodku translates as “on the park,”
as the street is adjacent to the Planty parkland (Supranowicz 1995).
6 Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation issued on July 22, 1944, at
Chełm in eastern Poland.
7 This study did not specify the actual streets that were changed or map the area of streets
included in the analysis, it only indicated that the streets were in each city’s Old Town.
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8 Toponymic changes as
temporal boundary-making
Street renaming in
Leningrad/St. Petersburg
Anaïs Marin
Introduction
Renaming processes discursively demarcate borders between a selected past and
a desired future, thereby producing—or destroying—meaningful referentials for
self-identification in the present. Paraphrasing Mikhail Bakhtin, who coined the
term chronotopos to designate the spatio-temporal matrix governing narratives
and other linguistic constructions, I suggest that toponymic changes erect
“chronotopic” borders in the cityscape.
This will be exemplified in studying place renaming in St. Petersburg, a city
that emperor Peter the Great designed to be Russia’s “window onto Europe” in
1703, and which subsequently became a beacon of post-Soviet reforms in the
early-1990s (Joenniemi 2003). Meanwhile it was renamed twice: in 1914 it
became Petrograd—a Russification of its German-connoted name, superstitiously
decided by Tsar Nicholas II in the wake of the war. After Lenin’s death in 1924,
the Soviet regime renamed it Leningrad. Lenin himself was “purged” from the
city’s name in a popular referendum held on June 12, 1991—the day Russia
(then, still the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR)
democratically elected its first president, and St. Petersburg its mayor, Anatoly
Sobchak. This was seen as a radical shift in the city’s self-identity, one that
alienated it from its other founding myth—Leningrad as the “cradle of the
October Revolution.” In recovering its maiden name, St. Petersburg reconnected
its life story to some imagined Golden Age. In artificially putting the Soviet past
into parenthesis, however, the 1991 name-change “walled in” part of the heritage
constitutive of its identity.
The rival ideologies mobilized at the time have already been widely documented.
Most studies insisted on the largely symbolic nature of the rupture between “old”
(Soviet) and “new” (post-Soviet, or so it was thought) that renaming Leningrad
embodied (Orttung 1995; Hellberg-Hirn 2003; Marin and Morozov 2004). Some
romantically interpreted the return to St. Petersburg as a process of identity-
recovering that put the city “better in tune with time” upon entering the era of
market reforms and “returning” to Europe (Creuzberger, Kaiser, and Mannteufel
2000). According to others, however, renaming did not solve the schizophrenic
contradiction implied by the subsequent dichotomization of historical time that
returning an old name encapsulated. Joenniemi (2003, 606), for example, insists
Street renaming in Leningrad/St. Petersburg 133
on the paradox of trying to build anew from the old entailed by choosing a
renaming prism “burdened by a historical legacy containing powerful expressions
of statism, centralism and securitization.”
Changing street names, adding commemorative plaques, and tearing down
monuments has often accompanied revolutions and regime transition, especially
in Eastern Europe (Azaryahu 1997; Bell 1999; Robinson, Engelstoft, and Pobric,
2001; Hrytsak and Susak 2003; Light 2004; Gill 2005). Yet few scholars have
analyzed toponymic changes—that is to say, the renaming of a city’s districts,
streets, and other landmarks of public space—in post-Soviet cities (Murray 2000).
By defining the act of renaming as a temporal boundary-making practice that
demarcates Soviet and post-Soviet space, this chapter adopts a constructivist
viewpoint. It sees borders as processes composed of a dynamic set of discourses,
symbols, and institutional practices aiming to produce meaning for self-
identification (Paasi 1998). Following geographers who imparted a critical shift to
place name studies (Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and
Azaryahu 2010), I argue that toponymic changes can be analyzed as an effort to
erect temporal borders in the shared collective memory to (re)orient the way people
situate themselves in the whirl of regime change. Methodologically, the proposed
framework implies adding a fourth, temporal dimension to the traditional two- or
three-dimensional cartographic interpretations of urban toponymies in order to
consider the cityscape as a multi-layered chronotopos for selective memory-
building (Rose-Redwood 2008a).1 In drawing normative borders to alienate the
Soviet past from the “new” St. Petersburg, the ongoing de/re-commemoration of
selected historical figures “maps” ideological oppositions (conservative/reformist,
autocratic/democratic, collective/individualistic) and geopolitical dichotomies
(Us/Them, East/West, Russian/European, etc.) that serve the interests of competing
political elites—more than those of ordinary citizens.
Toponymic changes: a theoretical framework

A rather marginal field of research within political geography and even urban
studies, onomastics and more specifically the study of toponymy (literarily—
place names) and odonymy (street names) is a valuable instrument to understand
how a polity memorializes its past and envisages its future.
Deciphering the city-text

Originally, toponymists and cartographers made inventories of place names to
study their etymological origins or standardize topographic appellations. Cultural
studies and research on the “toponymic silencing” of indigenous cultures in
colonial contexts later popularized textual approaches of place name changes
(Yeoh 1992). This approach proved pertinent to study the waves of renaming that
followed the establishment and the demise of the Soviet Union: in most ethnically
non-Russian republics, renaming obviously amounted to an ideological (de)
colonization of memory (Murray 2000; Saparov 2003; Sereda 2009).
134 Anaïs Marin
Other case studies showed that in urban contexts the sum of commemorative
street names forms a specific “city-text” that can be “read”—hence, the metaphor
of the cityscape as a “palimpsest” (Parkhurst-Ferguson 1988, 392). In the footsteps
of Walter Benjamin, a flânerie type of ethnographic investigation can help
decipher the various archaeological layers of meanings superimposed over time in
the cityscape. This way the “official memory reservoir” displayed on street signs
reveals how the past is selectively constructed as a narrative in which only figures
deemed heroic by the acting regime are “canonized”—at least until their names
are eventually “purged” by the successor regime or occupant, thus spatially
disrupting the linearity of historical time (Azaryahu 1992, 353–354).
Toponyms are signifiers of wider societal trends that mirror the ideological
purposes of a dominant culture: odonymic changes can thus be interpreted as a
purposeful way of institutionalizing an official narrative legitimizing authority.
Discursive methods can therefore be mobilized to analyze how place names, like
any other textual artifact, effectively appropriate and organize semiotic spaces.
Specific to post-communist Europe in this respect is that instead of helping situate
people in space, sequences of name changes—in 1918, 1945, and 1989—altogether
produced a contradictory “text” that confused dwellers and set generations against
one another.
Renaming as temporal boundary-making

Although it touches upon the procedural aspects of renaming, the main focus of
this chapter is on the boundary-making dimension of renaming. It departs from
the Bourdieusian assumption that power struggles are inherent to the very process
of naming social reality (Bourdieu 1982). If the performative character of naming
is the precondition for any hegemony, place naming is in essence “a political
practice of power over space” (Pinchevski and Torgovnik 2002). Place-name-
givers struggle to embed cultural signification in the political geographies of
public memory, manipulating founding myths to produce dominant cultural
understandings of cityhood. If, as Bourdieu puts it, “the language of authority
never governs without the collaboration of those it governs” (Bourdieu 1991,
113), then social actors ultimately set the border between the acceptable and the
unacceptable in terms of memorialization. In other words, new place names must
be incorporated and reiterated in popular linguistic practices in order to fulfill their
political mission of rooting new ideologies in the mindset of citizens.
The cityscape of St. Petersburg is an interesting “realm of memory” in this
respect, because the text inscribed on its physical map in the form of place names
catalyzes the space and time segments of its multi-layered identity. All through
the twentieth century, the city faced implacable contradictions between its self-
representations as the (dethroned) European capital of imperial Russia and the
iconic “cradle of Revolution” of the (now bygone) Soviet Union. In other words,
renaming waves made the city’s soul sway between the “Northern Venice” myth
and the “Leningrad city-hero” myth. Similar to other cities affected by renaming
and where contested inscriptions are rearticulated “through the reiterative
processes of subsequent performances and counter-performances” (Rose-
Redwood 2008b, 882), in St. Petersburg attempts at imposing new hegemonic
toponymies face popular resistance. Elderly people who still call themselves
“Leningraders” are the most unwilling to use official names in their daily practices:
many state their political attachment to the values of the communist past in
continuing to call places by their Soviet-era names. In ongoing debates over
toponymic changes, the time boundary erected to materialize the latest regime
change is therefore still under challenge.
In Russia’s second capital, toponymic changes in the 1990s restaged St.
Petersburg as the European capital of a new Russia eager to catch up with the
historical time from which it was disconnected in 1917. Hence renaming can be
seen here as a rite of institution or, using the terminology coined by Maoz
Azaryahu for East Berlin, as a ritual of revolution (Azaryahu 1997, 479). And as
Bourdieu has argued, one of the significant aspects of name changes “is not so
much the ritual transition (rite de passage) as the line itself, because the latter
assigns social properties to the categories ‘before’ and ‘after’ that it defines and
tries to legitimise” (1991, 118, emphasis added). Chronotopic boundary-making
is thus inherent to any ritual of toponymic inscription in that renaming also implies
legitimizing borders between “Us” and “Them” in time (old/new regime) as well
as in space (colonial/indigenous, national/foreign, East/West, etc.).
The following section provides a chronological account of the shifts that affected
the discursive construction of normative borders between “old” (conservative/
imperialistic—deemed bad) and “new” (reformist/cosmopolitan—i.e., good) in the
city’s toponymy over the twentieth century. In highlighting the political background
of these changes, it illustrates how successive regimes attempted to outcast the
founding myths and heroes of the previous regime from official history records.
Renaming was therefore a strategy to legitimize the artificial cordon sanitaire that
each new regime erected to abstract itself from time (the past, be it Tsarist or
Soviet) and situate citizens in geopolitical space (Europe/USSR).
Toponymic cleansing in Leningrad

The history of Central and Eastern Europe, with its frequent regime changes and
border shifts, is rich in place name changes. The most radical waves of renaming
occurred twice in the twentieth century: with the establishment of communist
regimes (after 1917 and after WWII) and following their collapse in 1989–1991.
Each swing of the pendulum amounted to a normative attempt at reconfiguring
people’s relations to historically embedded ideologies and geopolitical self-
representations. As this section will highlight, waves of toponymic “cleansing”2
in Russia’s second capital followed a rhythm of their own.3
The red wave (1918–1924)

In his landmark studies on the politics of street naming, Azaryahu has shown how
“in a revolutionary context the renaming of streets … is an act of political
136 Anaïs Marin
propaganda with immense proclamative value and public resonance” (1996, 318).
The movement is a dialectic one, he claims: renaming is both “a celebration of
triumph and a mechanism for settling scores with the vanquished regime”
(Azaryahu 1996, 318). New national histories are constructed, while the
achievements of the previous regime are discredited and thrown into the dustbin
of history. The re-invention of history was part of the scientific mythology of
communism. Rewriting city-texts was but one of the “rituals of revolution” that
accompanied and attempted to institutionalize the proclaimed beginning of a new
era (Young and Light 2001, 944).
The Soviet regime was particularly good at erasing past names from the
toponymic landscape, and it even invented an “anthroponymous Newspeak”:4 by
the end of perestroika half of the country’s pre-1917 place names had been
“Sovietized.” Although most renamings occurred between 1918 and 1924, Murray
(2000) contends that other phases in the construction of communism furthered the
“toponomycide”: deportations under Stalin (of Caucasian peoples, Crimean
Tatars, and ethnic Germans, among others); the “incorporation” and Russification
of territories seized during WWII (such as Königsberg/Kaliningrad); and under
Khrushchev “rural consolidation” (the amalgamation of collective farms). With
de-Stalinization (1953–62) and the end of the cult of personality after Brezhnev’s
death, a reverse trend at “de-Sovietizing” place names occurred that culminated
with perestroika (Murray 2000).
St. Petersburg was particularly affected by the name-giving mania of Russian
leaders. Built from scratch on an untamed landscape, as goes the legend, in
1703 the city was like a white page, void of socially embedded place names.
Two centuries later, its status as the “cradle of three revolutions” predestined it
to be a laboratory for the Bolsheviks to implement their materialistic
refurbishing of history. By Lenin’s death in 1924, at least a third of the city’s
1,500 place names had been changed. The city-text was purged of its imperial,
aristocratic, and religious toponyms, which were replaced by names
commemorating the founding fathers and myths of the Bolshevik Revolution.
As elsewhere, the new regime imposed its rhetoric in a multitude of slogan-
type toponymies (Socialist, Equality, Proletariat dictatorship, etc.), glorified
famous anti-monarchist terrorists (Khalturin, Kalyaev), and communist
ideologists (Marx, Bakunin, Kuybyshev). In 1918, the “Field of Mars”
(Marsovoe pole) was re-baptized as the “Square to the Victims of the
Revolution.” Several landmarks of the imperial past followed suit, such as
“Garden street” (Sadovaya ul.) renamed “Third of July Street” in memory of
the violent events that took place there in 1917, whereas the “Palace
embankment” (Dvortsovaya nab.) was renamed “Ninth of January embankment”
in memory of the victims of the 1905 uprising.
As Hellberg-Hirn (2003, 125) maintains, such a “fever of renaming was pure
word magic, firmly rooted in the belief that a new name would help exorcise the
old evil and bring closer the desired radiant future.” This holds true as well for the
second wave of toponymic changes that affected Leningrad and other “martyr”
cities at the height of the Stalinist era.
The catharsis wave (1941–1952)
The Nazi invasion prompted a wide upsurge against individuals and toponyms
of German origin throughout the USSR. In Leningrad, place names given in the
imperial times after a German home owner, merchant, or scientist were thus
“purged” from the city map. The first victims of this de-Prussianization were
“Palmenbach square,” named after a headmistress of the Smolny institute, and
“Rosa Luxemburg street.” Russianization later targeted Peterhof (and its derived
toponymies), renamed Petrodvorets in 1944. This inaugurated a “catharsis-
type” wave of name changes, whereby erasing negatively connoted place names
was thought to ward off bad luck, or at least lift up the spirits of the besieged
Leningrad population.
On January 13, 1944, almost simultaneously with the launching of the final
counter-attack that two weeks later would lead to the full lifting of the Leningrad
blockade, the executive committee of the city soviet of workers’ deputies decided
to remove from the city map 20 toponyms given after 1918. The justification for
“restoring previous appellations” was that the pre-Revolution names “were tightly
linked with the city’s history … durably rooted in the habits of the population,
and, as such, better suited to ensure swift urban circulation.”5 The square named
after revolutionary Moisey Uritsky (Ploshchad’ Uritskovo) thus became “Palace
square” (Dvortsovaya pl.) again, while other prominent communist figures that
had become personae non grata in official collective memory (such as Jaures,
Vorovsky, Plekhanov, Mussorgsky, and Nakhimson) were de-commemorated.
The most symbolically loaded name restitution was that of Nevsky prospekt,
which Leningraders apparently never got accustomed to calling “October 25th
avenue” anyway.
The suffering blockaders endured during the 900 days of siege and bombings
may explain why place names remindful of painful events (July 3, January 9) were
on this list. Purging Leningrad from “bloodstained” labels resulted in crossing-out
many names of high ideological resonance, such as “Proletarian Victory street” or
“Square in memory of the Victims of the Revolution.” The colour red itself suffered
from toponymic cleansing: “Red Commanders’ avenue” recovered the name
“Izmail prospekt” that it had until 1923 (reconnecting it with the nearby Izmail
Church) and “Red Square” was renamed “Alexander Nevsky square” in 1952.
This “catharsis-type” wave of name changes can be interpreted along the same
lines as Stalin’s wartime decision to lift the ban on churches: it helped to galvanize
the Soviet people around the war effort, by disavowing some founding landmarks
and symbols of Bolshevism. In other words, this war-time wave of name changes,
which was the appendage of “martyr-cities” (Leningrad, Stalingrad, Brest), can be
seen as a first step towards toponymic de-Sovietization. The fact that it occurred
in the 1940s explains why Leningrad did not experience as massive a
de-Stalinization of place names as other cities did in the Soviet Union following
Khrushchev’s November 1961 decree and in the rest of the socialist camp already
after Stalin’s death (Colton 1995, 813; Light, Nicolae, and Suditu 2002).6 In
Leningrad, the next major wave of de-commemoration and name-restitution
therefore came only with perestroika.
138 Anaïs Marin
The third wave: popular claims for de-Sovietization (1989–1990)
This wave affected the whole country, especially Union and ethnic republics
where name-change claims were presented as a legitimate decolonization
(“de-Russification”) of public spaces. It all started in 1987 when linguists, editors
of literary journals, writers, and academics began to express their anger over the
“loss” of Russia’s cultural and religious heritage to Sovietized names. In one of
the rare monographs dedicated to renaming in the USSR, Murray (2000) details
how these activists gained official status in forming the Toponymic Council
(1988) and organizing two All-Union Toponymic Conferences (in April 1989 and
June 1991) where demands for place name restoration, couched in the official
rhetoric of Gorbachev’s new thinking, were made.
In Leningrad, renaming claims were voiced by the reformist and democratic
opposition, which had become dominant in the local political arena. The trend was
simultaneous with the awakening of an embryonic civil society ready to defy local
authorities to defend St. Petersburg’s pre-revolutionary cultural heritage, such as
the Hôtel d’Angleterre, the planned destruction of which was prevented in 1987 by
the first ever popular mobilization of its kind in the USSR (Orttung 1995, 44–47).
The inhabitants of the Zhdanov district on Vassilievsky Island followed suit
and succeeded in having their district recover its original name, Primorskij rayon
(Maritime district) on February 20, 1989. This was a turning point in the political
history of renaming, since it amounted to a victory of the people’s will,
democratically expressed in petitions relayed by Leningradskaya Pravda over the
previous weeks. The change was accepted by the executive committee of the city
soviet (Lenispolkom) and formally endorsed ex post by the Supreme Soviet of the
USSR on March 30. This precedent actually triggered the third wave of renaming
in Leningrad: a week after the symbolic anti-Zhdanov putsch of Primorskij rayon
dwellers, the city soviet gave in to popular pressure and issued a decision “On the
naming of streets and objects of local subordination” that gave back their historical
name to several streets, bridges, and districts of Leningrad.
Leningrad thus started “reconstructing” its toponymy several years before the
idea of renaming the city itself was aired. By 1991, the debates were closely
intertwined and nourished each other. However, whereas the romantic idea—and
Sobchak’s winning campaign slogan—of “returning to St. Petersburg its maiden
name” was popular mainly among the middle-class intelligentsia close to the
spheres of arts, culture, and literature, claims for odonymic changes emerged
earlier and from the grassroots on the initiative of inhabitants themselves.
The fourth wave (1991 and onwards): towards a politicization of renaming

Street renaming accelerated from Spring 1990 onwards, following the first democratic
election of the municipal soviet of people’s deputies. Until 1993, the local legislative
assembly was competent for handling popular requests. It issued a number of
favorable decisions that substantially “re-peterburganized” the city-text (Table 8.1).
In September 1991, the newly elected mayor Anatoly Sobchak appointed a
Toponymic Commission to define basic renaming principles and channel propositions
submitted by local dwellers, associations defending the local architectural heritage,
and district representatives. The task of this consultative body was immense, and
many claims could not be satisfied without simultaneously depriving other inhabitants
requiring the same place name. In October 1991, the Toponymic Commission
positively met popular suggestions brought to its attention via the local press regarding
the most urgent cases: de-commemorating the 23 remaining People’s Commissars,
prioritizing the most cruel of them (Dzerzhinskij, Rakovskij, Tolmachev).
After July 1993, the tempo of renamings slowed down. Out of the 40 name
changes that the Commission submitted to the city hall in 1997, only nine were
endorsed, and by 2001 this figure was down to only one renaming.7 According to
some critics, the main reason for this deceleration is that issues relating to
commemorative renaming became more politicized. Many argue that they were
“captured” by Smolny (the headquarters of the municipal administration) after the
1994 institutional crisis that virtually made the local assembly impotent in front of
the new executive (the city governor).
Interestingly enough, toponymic changes came back on the agenda in the second
half of the 2000s, apparently following the creation, on the initiative of publicist Yurij
Bondarenko, of the “Vozvrashchenie” (Restitution) Foundation. Its aim is to lobby
the return of historical place names, notably those given after Orthodox churches,
throughout the whole country. Out of the 32 proposals that this Foundation submitted
to the Toponymic Commission of St. Petersburg in 2007, the authorities endorsed
only four. In September 2010, then governor Valentina Matvienko rejected all
renaming proposals on the ground that name changes would be too costly (Table 8.2).
Legend for Tables 8.1 and 8.2
TIME OF RENAMING PLACE RENAMED

The year in parenthesis in Tables 8.1 The abbreviations used in the tables are
and 8.2 refers to these dates of transcribed and translated as follows
name-changes (when known)
1918 October 10, 1918 bul. bul’var bd. boulevard
1924 January 22, 1924 lin. linija la. lane
1944 January 13, 1944 mo. most br. bridge
1952 unknown nab. naberezhnaja emb. embankment
1989 February 27, 1989 per. pereulok imp. impasse
1991 October 4, 1991 pl. ploshchad’ sq. square
1993 July 7, 1993 pr. prospekt ave. avenue
1994 September 8, 1994 ul. ulitsa st. street
2007 August 14, 2007

In both tables the first column provides a transliteration of the Russian place-name (in italic), and the
second its literal translation in English.
Table 8.1 The fourth wave of street renamings in Leningrad/St. Petersburg (1991–onward)
COMMUNIST NAME IMPERIAL AND POST-SOVIET NAME

Sad Trudiashchikhsya (1920) Workers’ Garden Admiralteyskij sad (1989) Admiralty Garden
→ Sad im. Gor’kogo (1936) → (named after Gorky) → Aleksandrovskij sad (1997) → Alexander Garden
Komissarovskaya ul. (1918) Commissar st. Gorokhovaya ul. (1991) Gorokhov st.
→ Ul. Dzerzhinskovo (1927) → Dzerzhinsky st.
Krasnaya ul. (1918) Red st. Galernaya ul. (1991) Galley st.
Bul. Profsoyuzov (1918) Trade Unions bd. Konnogvardeyskij bul. (1991) Horse Guard’s bd.
Most Ravenstva (1918) Equality bridge Troitskij most (1991) Trinity bridge
→ Kirovskij most (1934) → Kirov bridge
Ul. Krasnykh Zor’ (1918) Red Dawns st. Kamennoostrovskij pr. (1991) Stone Island ave.
→ Kirovskij pr. (1934) → Kirov ave.
Pr. Maiorova (1923) Major’s ave. Voznesenskij pr. (1991) Ascension ave.
Proletarskij per. (1923) Proletarian’s imp. Grafskij per. (1991) Count imp.
→ Ul. Marii Ulyanovoy (1964) → Maria Ulyanova st.
Pr. Ogorodnikova (1923) Gardener ave. Rizhskij pr. (1991) Riga ave.
Pl. Revolyutsij (1923) Revolution sq. Troitskaya pl. (1991) Trinity sq.
Pr. Karla Marksa (1923) Karl Marx ave. Bol’shoy Sampsonievskij pr. Grand Samson ave.
Ul. Krasnoy Konnitsy (1923) Red Cavalry st. Kavalergardskaya ul. (1991) Horse Guardsman st.
Pr. Maksima Gor’kovo (1932) Maxim Gorky ave. Kronverkskij pr. (1991) Crownwork st.
Pr. Yunogo Proletariya (1923) Young Proletarian ave. Staro-Petergofskij pr. (1991) Old Peterhof ave.
→ Pr. Gaza (1933) → Gaz ave.
Ul. Brodskovo (1940) Brodsky st. Mikhailovskaya ul. (1991) Michael st.
Pl. Mira (1952) Peace sq. Sennaya sq. (1991) Hay sq.
Ul. Gogolya (1902) Gogol st. Malaja Morskaja (1993) Small Maritime
Ul. Gertsena (1920) Herzen st. Bol’shaya Morskaja (1993) Grand Maritime
Nab. Krasnovo Flota (1918) Red Fleet Emb. Admiraltel’skaya nab. (1994) Admiralty emb.
Ul. Plekhanova (1923) Plekhanov st. Kazanskaya ul. (1998) Kazan st.
Ul. Saltykov-Shchedrina (1932) Saltykov-Shchedrin st. Ul. Kirochnaja (1998) Pickaxe st.
Mo. Leytenanta Schmidta (1918) Lieutenant Schmidt br. Blagoveshchenskij most (2007) Annunciation bridge
Pl. Dekabristov (1923) Decembrists’ sq. Senatskaya pl. (2008) Senate sq.
Table 8.2 The wave that was not: un-renamed places with imperial or religious connotations in Leningrad/St. Petersburg
IMPERIAL TIME NAME SPARED COMMUNIST TIME NAME (CURRENT NAME)

A. Consensual name
Kalashnikovskij pr. (1871) Kalashnikov ave. Pr. Bakunina (1918) Bakunin ave.
Panteleymonovskaya ul. (1777) Panteleimon Ul. Dekabrista Pestelya (1923) Decembrist Pestel st.
B. Selected for renaming by the Toponymic Commission (change not endorsed by the City Administration)
Bol’shaya Dvoryanskaya ul. Great nobleman st. ul. Derevenskoy Bednoty (1918) Poor Peasants’ st
→ ul. Kuybysheva (1936) → Kuybyshev st.
Blagoveshchenskaya pl. (1830) Annunciation sq. Pl. Truda (1918) Labour sq.
Voskresenskaya nab. Resurrection emb. Nab. Robesp’era (1923) Robespierre emb.
Znamenskaya ul. (1845) [Prophet’s] Banner st. Ul. Vosstaniya (1918) Insurrection st.
1-10aja Rozhdestvenskaya ul. 1st-10th Nativity streets 1-10aja Sovetskaya ul. (1923) 1st-10th Soviet streets
Bol’shaya Spasskaya ul. (1720) Grand Saviour’s st. Ul. Krasnogo kursanta (1923) Red Cadet st.
Preobrazhenskaya ul. (1858) Transfiguration st. Ul. Radishcheva (1935) Radischev st.
Voznesenskij per. Ascension imp. Krasnogradskij per. Krasnograd (Red city) imp.
Matveevskaya ul. Matthew st. Ul. Lenina Lenin st.
Vozdvizhenskaya ul. (1821) Holy Cross Day st. Ul. Tyushina (1923) Tyuschin st.
Preobrazhenskaya Polkovaya ul. → Transfiguration Regiment st. → Ul. 27ogo Fevralya (1917) 27th of February [1917] st. → Marat st.
Nikolaevskaya ul. (1856) Nicholas st. → ul. Marata (1918)
C. Additional renaming proposals made by the “Restitution Foundation” (suggestion not endorsed by the Toponymic Commission)
Ofitserskaya ul. (1740s) Officer’s st. Ul. Dekabristov (1918) Decembrists’ st.
Nikolaevskaya nab. (1855) Nicholas emb. Nab. Leytenanta Schmidta (1918) Lieutenant Schmidt emb.
Uspenskaya pl. (1739) → Assumption [Dormition] sq. → Pl. Turgenieva (1923) Turgenev sq.
Pokrovskaya pl. (1822) Intercession sq.
Voskresenskij pr. Resurrection ave. Pr. Chernyshevskogo (1923) Chernyshevskij ave.
10-aya Roty ul. (1770s) 10th Squadron st. 10-aya Krasnoarmeyskie ul. (1923) 10th Red Army st.
Estlyandskij most (1914) Estland bridge Most Stenka Razina (1923) Stepan Razin bridge
Tserkovnyj per. (1836) Church imp. Per. Radishcheva (1925) Radischev imp.
Simbirskaya ul. (1858) Simbirsk st. Ul. Komsomola (1927) Communist Youth st.
Lichtenbergskij most (1914) Lichtenberg bridge Krasnooktyabr’skij most (1958) Red October bridge
142 Anaïs Marin
Patterns of renaming in post-Soviet St. Petersburg
Building on the findings presented above, the purpose of this section is to examine
in which cases the most ideologically loaded place names of St. Petersburg were
de-Sovietized, when, and where—and if they were not, to try explaining why a
place retained its Soviet-era denomination. Three patterns emerge from this analysis.
A democratic process
Renaming is usually a matter for political elites: a “battleground for control over
political space and symbols,” the city-text is seldom affected by the preferences of
regular citizens (Palonen 2008). This arguably makes toponymic changes in post-
perestroika St. Petersburg all the more exceptional.
In the 1990s, street renaming unfolded in a bottom-up way: initiatives came
from inhabitants and were almost always accepted by the Toponymic Commission
which lobbied the name change with city authorities. The fact that changes
resulted from a civic mobilization democratically expressed through opinion
polls, local referenda, or readers’ letters in newspapers is a pattern typical of
Leningrad/St. Petersburg. In the second capital, toponymic changes were therefore
initially decided more democratically than in Moscow, where most Soviet-era
toponyms were changed by the municipal authorities overnight and almost without
prior consultations (Gill 2005).
Petersburgans successfully mobilized to also oppose changing names given in
Soviet times, but which had acquired a positive connotation to their ear. For
instance, the legislative assembly and the Toponymic Commission were in favor
of giving back their original, eighteenth century appellations to some streets
named after Decembrists. Popular protest led to maintaining the names given in
1918 by the Bolsheviks to glorify these early revolution-makers: “Decembrists’
square” (ploshchad’ Dekabristov), called “Senate square” in the imperial times,
was therefore spared—at least until 2008 when the above-mentioned Restitution
Foundation succeeded in having its name returned.
In suburban areas where new streets were baptized in the 1970s with relatively
neutral or positive slogan-type names such as the “Avenue of Enthusiasts” (Pr.
Entuziastov) or the “Courage square” (pl. Muzhestva), inhabitants did not claim
any name changes, nor did the municipality impose any. One can therefore assess
that toponymic changes, similar in this to the renaming of St. Petersburg city itself,
were the result of a fairly democratic decision-making process, at least initially.
Back to the future: the pre-Soviet past as a horizon

In Russian, the term used for name change claims is usually vozvrashchenie
(restitution) and not pereimenovanie (renaming)—the latter qualifying cases
when Soviet-era names are replaced by totally new ones, which seldom happened
in Leningrad.8 The use of a term meaning “returning” or “coming back to” has an
important psychological and legal sub-text: vozvrashchenie also refers to
restitution claims of the Orthodox Church, Soviet successor states, and victims of
cultural lootings. It implies a notion of rehabilitation to right a past wrong. It also
indicates a rather conservative stance in relation to the kind of future that claimants
want to build.
The question of which restoration point to choose when visiting the past, whom
to honor and whom to disgrace, was not a bone of contention in post-Soviet St.
Petersburg: most toponymic changes amounted to a “de-Sovietization” and a
“re-Petersburganization” of the city-text. Upon “ousting” the remaining red
heroes and slogans, name-givers did not display much imagination or desire for
innovation. They usually favored a return to traditional, imperial-era designations.
In the city center, about half of the contested street names were changed already
in October 1991 and almost all recovered their pre-1917 appellation. One of the
paradoxical implications of this trend is that even famous figures of St. Petersburg’s
buoyant nineteenth-century literary life such as Gogol and Herzen were purged
from the city-text in 1993, when streets named after them (in 1902 and 1920) were
given back their imperial-era names—Malaya and Bol’shaya Morskaya (Small
and Grand Maritime streets), respectively.
One explanation for this dichotomization of debates is that the 1990s wave of
toponymic changes was greatly influenced by the air du temps of the campaign
preceding the 1991 referendum over the city’s name. Disputes articulated then
around two antagonistic discourses opposing the partisans of Lenin(grad) and
Peter(burg), in other words two irreconcilable ideologies incarnated by the rival
“fathers” of the city.9
For the partisans of renaming, such as mayor Anatoly Sobchak, associating the
name “St. Petersburg” with Europeanness was a very useful slogan in support of
reforms. It offered an ideal semiotic “packaging” for the city’s proclaimed post-
Soviet identity at a time when authorities were ambitious to attract foreign
investments, Western tourists, and international attention. However, choosing
Peter the Great as a “marker” for the city’s rebirth, and maintaining the prefix
“Saint” that linked it to its patron the Apostle Peter, determined the tracks of time
and space within which the “new” St. Petersburg could evolve (Morozov 2002).
In limiting the horizon of possibilities, it risked the city becoming “trapped in
time” (Joenniemi 2003).10
One manifestation of this “entrapment” is the dispute regarding the Marinsky
Theater (built in honor of Empress Maria, the wife of Alexander II), which in
1934 had been renamed Kirov Theatre of Ballet and Opera (Joenniemi and
Morozov 2003). When in the summer of 1990 prominent representatives of the
local cultural scene started calling for the Kirov’s renaming, a polemic emerged.
Many criticized the choice to return the theater its maiden name, which was
eventually officialized in 1992, for furthering the aristocratic elitism of early
ballet traditions. The wishes of inhabitants, who advocated honoring the more
popular figure of composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, were also left unsatisfied.
The breach with the Soviet era performed by place name changes after 1991 is
thus far from consensual or complete. As Hellberg-Hirn (2003, 140) argues, “the
city’s toponymy on the whole sways betwixt and between historical periods, thus
creating imaginary islands where imprints of a bygone Imperial civilisation
144 Anaïs Marin
amalgamate with remnants of the Soviet past.” These different periods coexist and
sometimes confusingly overlap on the cityscape, especially when local dwellers
keep using the old place name—a conservative “counter-performance” that limits
the political scope of renaming.
The wave that was not: un-renamed toponymies

Strangely enough, several ideologically loaded names given during the Soviet era
remained in the post-1991 city-text. Although deriving a clear pattern from this
would require a more in-depth analysis, some hypotheses as to why these
toponymies were not “de-Sovietized” can be proposed.
The first troubling observation is that despite the fact that the Orthodox Church
has a growing influence in Russian politics—notably on memory issues—most
religious-connoted toponymies were not returned. One notable exception is that
“Trinity” (Troitskaya) was returned in 1991 to the square and bridge that bore this
name before the Revolution. On the contrary, place names referring to the Savior,
the Ascension, the Resurrection, the Intercession, Saints, and so on, have not
found their way back on the city map—yet their “restitution” is a central issue in
the toponymic debates that resumed in 2010.
The issue is far from consensual, as illustrated by the current dispute over
returning the adjective Rozhdestvenskaya (“Nativity”) to the nine consecutive
Sovetskaya (“Soviet”) streets. Most Petersburgans seem attached to this name,
possibly because soviets—workers’ councils that pre-date Bolshevik rule—play a
founding role in the city’s self-image as a modern democratic polity.
Another explanation for this non-choice of pre-1917 religious toponyms is that
the very building after which the place was named does not exist anymore. Hence
Ploshchad’ Vosstaniya (“Insurrection square”) and the adjacent eponymous street
retained the names they were given in 1918: the Znamenskaya church (Banner of
the Prophet Church) after which they had been named was destroyed in the 1930s
and never reconstructed. It could also be that many Russian religious terms are
difficult to read, pronounce, and remember for foreigners. Since in the early 1990s
the city’s development strategy relied on attracting Western tourists, this euphonic
concern might well explain the disdain for old religious names.
The second category of un-changed toponymies is that of district names. Their
resistance to the wind of post-Soviet change actually distinguishes St. Petersburg
from Moscow, where all district names with Soviet connotations were wiped out
already in the early 1990s (Colton 1995). Out of the 15 districts of St. Petersburg, on
the contrary, only five of the ten named after a Soviet hero or slogan were renamed.11
In superimposing the map of city districts on socio-electoral maps of the 1993, 1995,
and 1996 elections, one sees that the un-renamed districts with Soviet ideological
resonance actually host the factories that made the fame of Leningrad (e.g., “Kirov,”
“Bolshevik,” “Red Triangle,” and “Leningrad Metallurgy”). Knowing that blue collar
workers and pensioners were also the most vehemently opposed to de-commemorating
Lenin from the city’s name itself, the fact that they did not fight for de-Sovietizing the
name of their factories or compounds should come as no surprise.
This leads us to the third observation, which concerns the names of metro
stations. With the exception of “Peace square” (pl. Mira), none of the metro
stations was renamed.12 Regardless of the newly constructed stations, the map of
the St. Petersburg metropolitan thus remained almost unchanged: in the central
and northern parts of the city, metro stations bear the name of pre-Soviet toponyms
(Nevskij prospekt, Petrogradskaya, Chernaya rechka). Conversely, in the
southern, blue collar outskirts, they retained the original “red slogan” appellations
given at the time of their construction after (un-renamed) adjacent streets, places,
and factories (Leninskij prospekt, Prospekt Veteranov, Prospekt Bol’shevikov,
Park Pobedy, Kirovskij zavod, Elektrosila, Proletarskaya, etc.). The conservation
of these names with high ideological resonance contrasts, again, with the situation
in Moscow, where eight of the ten “Soviet-labeled” metro stations were renamed.
This finding converges with the conclusions of Gill (2005, 490–491) about
renaming in Moscow that “the closer to the center of the city … the greater the
changes, the further away from the center, the fewer the changes.” As for canals,
by far the most famous landmarks of the “Northern Venice,” it is worth noting that
they were left untouched throughout the renaming waves: apart from the
Griboedov canal, renamed in 1923, no waterway of St. Petersburg has ever
changed name in the past 150 years.
Lastly and quite understandably, very few places were baptized or renamed
after the heroes, myths, or slogans of the perestroika and the painful reforms that
followed. With the exception of Andrey Sakharov, whose name was given to the
square facing the Academy of Sciences’ Library in 1989, none of the representatives
of the reformist wave of the past decades—such as late mayor Anatoly Sobchak—
is commemorated in St. Petersburg.
Conclusion
Recurrent in the history of renamings is the logic of opposing and removing the
past in order to build a brighter future: in proclaiming new truths, which is a
constitutive element of political change, each new regime sets the boundaries of
self/other dichotomies in space and in time. Any place renaming therefore
mobilizes the allegories of murder and rebirth. The materialist-communist belief
that the course of history could be bent by permanent revolution thus pushed the
Bolshevik and later the Soviet authorities to conduct both a physical purge of
internal enemies (deportations) and a semiotic cleansing of aristocratic, Orthodox,
bourgeois, and ethno-national symbols.
In 1991, when Leningrad gave in to St. Petersburg, discourses favorable to the
return of the city’s maiden name oftentimes contained an Oedipian subtext: voters
deceived by the chimeras of communist propaganda had to symbolically “kill”
Lenin, the iconic father of the Revolution, in order for “the city of Peter” to be
“born again.”13 Since Petersburg was reborn for the third time on that occasion,
although not anymore as the country’s capital city, its renaming was also
interpreted as a way of closing the 70-year parenthesis of Soviet estrangement
incarnated by its traditional rival, Moscow (Spivak 1998; Vendina 2000).
146 Anaïs Marin
As we have seen, in Leningrad the first wave of toponymic de-Sovietization
actually started already in 1944 and amounted to purging several places of
negatively connoted names which had failed to penetrate daily linguistic practices.
Name changes decided in 1991 were less consensual: they gave way to heated
debates among citizens and between the intelligentsia and the bureaucracy. Our
archaeological inquiry into the chronotopic layers of the city-text revealed that the
choice was oftentimes a dichotomous one, between maintaining the Soviet name
and restoring its predecessor. In other words, Petersburgans are so attached to the
past that a “third way” was very seldom an option: this chilliness somehow led
them to reject platforms for entering a post-modern age of self-identification, thus
leaving St. Petersburg’s cityhood nostalgically “trapped” in a lost imperial Age
d’Or (Morozov 2002).
The “toponymic” lens indeed provides a fecund frame to analyze ideological
changes imposed onto collective memory in times of regime transition as well as
the “zigzags” of identity-building that result from such shifts. The naming of
places, streets, and other landmarks is probably the most widespread way for
political leaders to situate people in time during radical political changes: name-
givers usually try to construct clearly demarcated identities in selecting toponymic
inscriptions that are “associated intertextually with larger cultural narratives and
stories” (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010, 459). In the case of
Leningrad/St. Petersburg, the competing narratives mobilized for or against street
renaming bear a clear ideological but also a geopolitical subtext, one relating to
the position of the city, and of post-Soviet Russia more generally, within and
towards Western/secular Europe.
This chapter has thus suggested new perspectives for the study of toponymic
change as a symbolic boundary-making practice, whereby the shifting of time
borders between “past,” “present,” or even “future” served the political strategy of
re-assessing a city’s cultural and political identity. The enactment of chronotopic
borders in the semiotic cityscape of Leningrad/St. Petersburg was never free of
contradictions, however.
In erecting time boundaries and putting whole eras in brackets, toponymic
changes in Leningrad/St. Petersburg destroyed as much as they produced meaning:
the original sin of “purging” the past actually resulted in erasing meaningful
landmarks for identification in both time (collective memory) and space (the
public arena). As Hellberg-Hirn (2003, 124) observes, in St. Petersburg “the ebb-
and-flow of naming activities has mirrored the unfolding of the city in space and
time,” but the new pattern emerging from the last waves of renaming looks rather
“inconsistent and fuzzy,” and is usually perceived as such by local dwellers and
foreigners alike.
Following the removal of Soviet markers of identity and their replacement with
landmarks resuscitated from the imperial past, and illustrative of a conservative type
of Europeanity, the temporal boundary-making dynamics inferred by toponymic
changes somehow lost Petersburgans in translation: trapped in old dichotomies,
these “temporal borderlanders” now seem deprived of the symbolic access to post-
modern geopolitics that renaming the cityscape anew could have implied.
Notes
1 Maoz Azaryahu was the first to methodologically address the “shift from history to
geography” entailed by the “semantic displacements effected by using street names for
commemorative purposes,” in his study on concurrent Nazi and Prussian memories in
post-War Berlin (Azaryahu 2009, 53).
2 The term is borrowed from Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu (2010, 460).
3 This archaeological screening of the city-text was conducted by systematically
comparing city maps dating from 1978, 1987, 1993, 2002, and 2008, respectively. For
the content analysis of place names and the historical contextualization of name
changes, two Petersburgan encyclopaedic dictionaries were consulted (Gorbachevich
and Khablo 2002; Sindalovskij 2002) as well as the topography section of the online
Encyclopaedia of St. Petersburg (www.encspb.ru).
4 This Orwellian metaphor was coined by philologists Vladimir Neroznak and Mikhail
Gorbanevsky, who, in 1988, established the Toponymic Council, a body placed under
the auspices of the Soviet Fund for Culture chaired by Academic Dmitry Likhachev
(Murray 2000, 21, 30).
5 Reshenie “O vosstanovlenii prezhnikh naimenovanij nekotorykh ulits, prospektov,
naberezhnykh i ploshchadej goroda Leningrada ot 13/01/1944” [Decision “On the
reestablishment of the previous appellations of some streets, avenues, embankments
and squares of Leningrad city”]—author’s translation.
6 One notable exception was the Stalinskij rajon (Stalin district), renamed Vyborg district
in 1962.
7 Traditsii i novatsii Peterburgskoy toponomiki [Traditions and innovations of Petersburgan
toponymics], report presented at the eponymous conference held in St. Petersburg on
February 14, 2005.
8 The most notable exception is the “square of the Proletarian Dictatorship,” renamed
“square Rastrelli” in 1991, and not “Laffont” (Laffonskaya pl.), as it used to be called
until 1952.
9 In its May 25 issue, the local daily Vechernyj Leningrad visually summarized this
ideological struggle with pictures on facing pages of two famous local statues: the
“Bronze Horseman” (Peter the Great) and “Lenin na bronevike” (Lenin on an armored
car, which stands in front of the Finland Railway Station). Looking in opposite
directions, each leader defies the other in pointing an autocratic finger at “his” city.
10 None of the innovative variants discussed in the salons and the press during the
campaign—such as Svyato-Peterburg, Leninburg, Nevograd, and Svyato-Petrograd
(proposed by Alexander Solzhenytsin)—could compete with the dichotomous choice
between Leningrad and St. Petersburg.
11 These were the Stalin, Zhdanov, October, Lenin, and Kuybyshev districts, currently named
Vyborg (since 1962), Maritime, Admiralty, Kalinin, and Central district, respectively.
12 Ploshchad’ Mira metro station was renamed Sennaya ploshchad’ (“Hay square”)
following the renaming of the eponymous square situated above.
13 On June 14, 1991, independent local newspaper Nevskoe Vremya announced the results
of the vote with the following heading: “Happy Rebirth Day, Russia!” followed by
three names in bold shrift: “Yeltsin, Sobchak, St. Petersburg.”
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9 The spatial codification of
values in Zagreb’s city-text
Laura Šakaja and Jelena Stanić
Introduction
Looked at from the viewpoint of semiotics, a city is a complex semiotic mechanism,
a generator of culture that is able to implement that function exclusively due to its
“semiotic polyglotism.” In that sense, a city represents “a cauldron of texts and codes,
variously organized and heterogenic, which belong to diverse languages and diverse
levels” (Lotman 1984, 13). Various ethnic, social, and style codes become conjunct
in a city, by which they stimulate diverse hybridizations and semiotic translations.
The past is given an opportunity in a city landscape to co-exist synchronically with
the present. The architecture of a city, its street plan, names of the streets, monuments,
and a host of other elements of urban landscape perform “as code programmes that
constantly regenerate texts from the historical past” (Lotman 1984, 14).
This chapter explores a part of this complex topo-cultural structure—street
toponymy, monuments, and plaques in the urban streetscape. We understand the
objects of our inquiry as a “city-text.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the term city-text has become one of the mainstays of works on the geography of
street naming and has acquired “almost canonical status” within the literature in the
field of urban toponymy (K. Palonen 1993; Azaryahu 1996, 2009; Rose-Redwood
2008; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). However, in her account on
the politics of landscape in Budapest, Emilia Palonen (2008) used the notion of a
“city-text” to refer both to street toponymy and urban statuary. It is in that expanded
sense that we use the term in this chapter. We concur with Azaryahu’s (1996)
viewpoint that the notion of “city-text” is not an analogy or a metaphor, nor does it
imply a reduction of the city to a mere text; rather, it emphasizes the manifest and
specific semiotic features of the city. In this way, the city-text is a semiotic structure
with complex social and communicative functions. It participates in communication
between the addresser and addressee of the message, between the public and cultural
tradition, between the text and cultural context, and in the communication of the
reader with his/herself (Lotman 1981). Text performs the function of collective
cultural memory, manifesting the capability of activating certain aspects of history
while forgetting others (K. Palonen 1993; Azaryahu 1996, 2009).
Additionally, text performs the role of the mediator that helps the reader to
orient his/herself within the cultural constructs. As a spatial inscription, a city-text
is enduring but, at the same time, it possesses the ability to re-codify itself in
Spatial codification in Zagreb’s city-text 151
keeping with the situation—in diverse cultural contexts. Therefore, a city-text is a
complex mechanism that contains various codes and is able to transform messages
and generate new ones (Lotman 1981).
As geographers have argued, the hierarchal status of persons and events is
incorporated into the semiotic structure of a city-text. In the ideal configuration of
a city-text, urban and historical significance conform. Persons and events of high
axiological status are positioned, if possible, in the center, while the lower
axiological status is relocated to the periphery or thrown out onto the margins of
the text (Azaryahu 1996, 2009; Light 2004; Dwyer and Alderman 2008).
Thus, values are spatially coded within the topo-cultural structure of the city.
Reading the cultural landscape as a spatial projection of the axiological system,
we use the expression spatial codification of values (Užarević 1997). We have
tried in this chapter to present the discursive practices that combine the register of
values with the register of urban configuration and participate in the translation of
messages and meanings from the language of axiology (high–low) to the language
of space (center–periphery).
In its theoretical aspects, this chapter relies on the works of the Tartu/Moscow
semiotic school, primarily those of Yuri Lotman (1984, 1996, 2001; Lotman and
Uspensky 1993 [1971]). According to Lotman’s (2000 [1996]) approach, self-
description and differentiation from the Other are very important mechanisms of
semiotic space. In particular, Lotman introduces the notion of the “semiosphere”
to describe a semiotic continuum, or semiotic space, characteristic of any given
culture. The semiosphere is the outcome and the condition of cultural development.
The semiosphere is heterogeneous and heterofunctional. It assumes a host of
connected but diverse code structures and regulates itself by differentiation. All
cultures, sub-cultures, and “cultural dialects” commence from division of the
world into an internal (“Our”) and external (“Their”) space. Culture assumes self-
description, the creation of its own model. The very fact of description distorts the
object of description towards its higher level of organization. Some meanings are
canonized and submitted to hierarchical structure, while others are pronounced to
be unstructural. Such “irregular” texts are deleted from one’s own text and
transferred into the space of the “foreign.”
As we see, in understanding the importance of the foreign in shaping one’s own
sense of self, Lotman’s semiotic tradition has a lot in common with the
poststructuralist/postcolonial conception of relational identity and the Other as a
constitutive element in the relation to which identities are measured and
constructed (Said 1979; Todorova 1997). One of our objectives in the present
chapter is to establish the connection between the alteration of memorial
landscapes and the cultural politics of Other(ing) and Self(-defining).
We commence from the stance that each ideological representation assumes, on
the one hand, an internal organized quality and the selectivity of self-definition and,
on the other hand, separation from the “foreign body.” We will try to show that the
discursive practices of Othering and Self-referencing (or auto-referencing), as
systematic acts of articulation, have been involved in the symbolic representation of
the new state in the process of reshaping Zagreb’s streetscape in the post-socialist era.
152 Laura Šakaja and Jelena Stanić
We define Othering as converting into the “Other,” relocation from the
framework of one’s own representation in the process of self-positing and self-
defining. It is manifested in sorting out “irregular” parts of the city-text by the
demolition (or removal) of certain monuments and plaques, and the erasure of
certain street names.
Auto-referencing is the discursive practice of thematicizing characteristics of
the self. These are a systematic series of acts inscribing into the landscape
references to one’s own tradition, ancestry, culture, science, natural features,
cities, or regions. These have been manifested in the Zagreb city-text through
installing new monuments and plaques, and the allocation of new street names.
Although the notion of the Other is well established in cultural geography
(Sibley 1992, 1995; Gregory 1995a, 1995b), there have been few studies on
memorial landscapes that adopt such an approach (Myers 1995; Berg and Kearns
1996). By using the concept of Othering, we aim to show in this chapter how
names and monuments became tools in refiguring relations to certain groups,
nations, and regions as well as their histories in reworking Croatian identity during
post-socialist transition.
Another focus of our work highlights “unresolved meanings.” We use this term,
introduced by Foote (1997), to indicate the condition when different, often opposing,
interpretative traditions co-exist and have a chance to struggle for visibility.
Several studies have explored how dual pasts and discursive rivalries over
unresolved meanings are configured on the ground (Till 1999; Alderman 2000,
2002, 2010; Azaryahu 2003; Dwyer 2004). Such scholarship considers competing
discourses on monuments and street names to show the conflictive nature of
remembering the past, the difficulty of recovering long-repressed identities, and
the dynamic nature of (re)inscribing memory into urban space. All the foregoing
works acknowledge the importance of memorial placement and relative location
vis-à-vis the arena’s mosaic of identity-based antagonisms (Dwyer and Alderman
2008). In this chapter, we wish to show how the negotiations between conflictive
discourses have been transposed and retransposed into the configuration of the
symbolic landscape of the Croatian capital.
In recent years, numerous scholars have contributed to monumental landscape
studies (Johnson 1995; Foote 1997; Atkinson and Cosgrove 1998; Till 1999;
Azaryahu 2003; Dwyer 2004; Hook 2005; Sidaway and Mayell, 2007; Azaryahu
and Foote 2008; Alderman 2010) and critical toponymy (Mac Aodha 1989; Yeoh
1992, 1996; Myers 1995; Azaryahu 1996; Berg and Kearns 1996; Alderman 2000,
2002, 2003; Withers 2000; Azaryahu and Kook 2002; Pinchevski and Torgovnik
2002; Rose-Redwood 2008; Vuolteenaho and Berg 2009; Rose-Redwood,
Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). There is a growing body of literature that
specifically explores the role of memorial landscapes in affirming and legitimating
political identities in post-socialist countries (Azaryahu 1997; Light, Nicolae, and
Suditu 2002; Light 2004; Forest, Johnson, and Till 2004; Robinson and Pobrić
2006; Czepczyński 2008; E. Palonen 2008; Light and Young 2010). Our objective
is to provide an overview of post-socialist transformations from a different angle. In
particular, the current chapter examines the changes in Zagreb statuary and street
toponymy, showing how manifestations of three discursive practices—Othering,
auto-referencing, and negotiating unresolved meanings—have contributed to the
recent transformation of the symbolic landscapes of Croatia’s capital city.
Monuments and street names in Zagreb

The installation and removal of public plaques and statuary as well as the renaming
of streets in post-socialist Zagreb has been a revealing indicator of political change
and an instrument in the recodification of landscape. As the capital of the
Republic—in which both the secession from the former Yugoslav state and the
war for independence intensified the process of building national identity—Zagreb
communicated and mediated a dynamic process of national identity construction.
Similarly to other Central and East-European countries (Mach 2006), discussions
concerning the meaning of the past dominated public discourse and national
politics during Croatia’s early post-socialist era. As the national capital, Zagreb is
a “point of ideological orientation” (Johnson 1995), which is saturated with
messages that indicate official discourses that prescribe new rules for the reading
of history.
The mass relocation of monuments, and numerous renamings of streets and
squares, became both a reflection and a mechanism of the new politics of
landscape. The re-writing of the city primarily pertained to changes in urban
toponyms. In the 1990–2007 period, the working body of the Zagreb city assembly
for nomination of districts, streets, and squares renamed as many as 474 streets
(Stanić, Šakaja, and Slavuj 2009). In regard to monuments, the situation was
somewhat different. The removal of monuments, busts, and memorial features in
Zagreb was conducted mostly outside the control of authorized institutions. There
were only a few officially sanctioned changes in the monument network: that is,
in the first decade of transition, only two relocations of statues to less visible
places in Zagreb were officially approved by authorized city agencies, and only
four busts and eight memorial plaques were removed (moved to museum
collections). Nevertheless, according to the data published by the Alliance of
Croatian Anti-Fascist Fighters in the period from 1990 to 2000, 73 monuments, 61
memorial-busts, and 164 memorial plaques were demolished, damaged,
redesigned, or removed primarily without the official approval of city authorities
(Hrženjak 2002).
For the purposes of this chapter, we studied the change in street names and
monuments on the basis of analysis of data from the City Office for Cadastre and
Geodetic Activities, the City Institute for the Conservation of Cultural and
Natural Heritage, the City Office for Building, Housing and Communal Activities,
Traffic and Communications, and the City Office for Education, Culture, and
Science. We also used public registers of data on memorials of the Revolution
(Ugarković and Očak 1979), memorials in the City of Zagreb (Kožarić 2007),
and on damaged anti-Fascist monuments in Croatia (Hrženjak 2002). Our sources
of information were also city plans from various years and newspaper articles, as
well as our own observations.
The “negative Other” as a referent point of identity
Otherness is the characteristic that belongs to the one who (or which) does not fit
in with the self-representation of a subject (Burzyńska and Markowski 2009).
Otherness is a construct of culture that is subject to an objectifying comprehension.
Although it entered into the repertoire of contemporary theory from hermeneutics
and psychoanalysis, the notion of the “Other” came to be broadly applied with
poststructuralism, and later with postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminist
theory. It would seem that interest in “Otherness” made its way into geography
through the influence of postcolonial theory and resulted from the influential
research on imaginative geographies (Gregory 1995a, 1995b) and geographies of
belonging and exclusion (Sibley 1992, 1995).
We are drawn here to two aspects of the concept. Just as Said documented in his
well-known book, Orientalism (1979), societies create their feeling of identity to a
certain extent through the process of negative definition. Identities on all scales are
defined both by what they are and what they are not. Societies are always constructed
and understood in terms of difference from others. Therefore, all societies are
relational (Crang 1998; Katz 2003). It is precisely that relational stance that we
wish to underscore by using the term Othering. The term points to the discursive
practice of converting into the Other, proclaiming such Other as a non-member,
and by imputing undesirable and negative characteristics to such Other.
The second aspect that interests us relates to borders. All cultures start out from
the division of the world into an internal (“Our”) space and an external (“Their”)
space. On this side of the border, one has “our” space, which is confronted with
“their space” that is “foreign,” “hostile,” “dangerous,” and “chaotic.” That division
can be interpreted in diverse ways in various cultural traditions, but the division
itself remains universal (Lotman 2000 [1996]). Othering—as pressuring away to
the other side of that border, relocation from “one’s own” space into “foreign”
space—is more than mere forgetting (Legg 2007), since, in its very essence,
culture is directed against forgetting. Culture attempts to defeat oblivion,
converting it into one of the mechanisms of memory (Lotman and Uspensky 1993
[1971]). Pressured to the margins of a city-text (e.g., demolition of monuments,
removal of plaques, renaming streets, etc.), the Other continues to remain a
constitutive subject in the unbroken process of self-definition of culture.
So, against whom or against what has Croatia been constructing a border in the
post-socialist period? The answer to this question can be clearly read off from the
Croatian geopolitical code—from groups of strategic assumptions that determined
state foreign policy in the first transition years. Based on statements made by
Franjo Tuđman, the first president of independent Croatia, Klemenčić and
Topalović (1996) reconstructed the Croatian geopolitical code; that is, the
worldview upon which Croatia’s foreign policy was based in the mid-1990s. The
main assumption in that geopolitical code implied “a division of Europe between
the East and the West, in which Croatia had a border position, along the very edge
of western civilization” (Klemenčić and Topalović 1996, 27). Within that
geopolitical code, Croatia was seen as defending itself from Serbian aggression
both in terms of its own territorial integrity and the “value system of western
civilization.” The renaming of streets in the Croatian capital during the 1990s
followed Tuđman’s geopolitical code quite consistently. Furthermore, it clearly
indicated the “Other” in negative relation to whom the construction of national
identity was developed in the first years of the post-socialist period.
Othering the Serbs and Serbia

For Croatia, this “Other” was represented primarily by Serbs and Serbia. Negative
stereotyping of the Serbs was fostered by the 1991–1995 war. The war began
during the early stage of post-socialism and this fact, naturally, increased the
importance of the Serbs as a referential distance factor in relation to whom the
Croatian cultural/political self was measured and constructed. In the early-1990s,
Serbs and Serbia were erased from the names of Zagreb’s streets. Almost all
street names in Zagreb referring to Serbian cities (Belgrade, Niš, Zrenjanin, Novi
Sad) were changed in the early-1990s. Among the first streets renamed was the
one previously named after Vuk Karadžić, a nineteenth-century Serbian
ethnographer and reformer of the Serbian language. Due to the fact that Karadžić
had advocated the concept of ethnicity based on language, and had considered
Croats who spoke the Štokavian dialect to be “Serbs of the Roman Catholic faith”
(Karadžić 1982 [1849]), he was perceived in Croatia as a protagonist of Serbian
nationalist ideology. Karadžić’s study, “Serbs all and everywhere,” was politically
disputed in the Croatian public sphere on the grounds of its Greater-Serbian
concept. The simultaneous elimination of “Karadžić Street” and publication of
the Differential Dictionary of the Serbian and Croatian Language (Brodnjak
1991) testified to the cultural and national differentiation of Croatia from its
south-eastern neighbors.
While the strong national revival in the 1990s was accompanied by a perception
of national identity as primordial (ethnic) (Smith 1991; Sekulić 2003), and of
national culture as mono-ethnic (Ivančević 1999), during the second decade of
transition the primordial understanding of identity, based on the notion of a
common ethnic origin, was discarded in the political discourse. Croatia’s
political aspirations to join the European Union, and its perception of its self-
identity as being European, resulted in the affirmation of European multicultural
values in Croatia’s public sphere. Consequently, this led to acceptance of the
view that Croatian (ethnic) Serbs were part of Croatian national culture. A
symbol of this shift was the relocation of a magnificent sculpture of the inventor
and scientist Nikola Tesla, moved from the poorly exposed courtyard of a
scientific institute in a secluded area to the very heart of the city. This kind of
semantic upgrade of Tesla, an ethnic Serb born in Croatia, would have been
inconceivable in the 1990s.
Othering Yugoslavia
The country from which Croatia had recently seceded was the second negative
referential factor in relation to which post-socialist Croatian identity was
constructed. Many of the changes in Zagreb’s cultural landscape resulted from a
reduction in symbols related to Tito’s Yugoslavia. By the end of the 1970s, there
were over 200 memorial features commemorating the socialist revolution in the
urban core of Zagreb (Ugarković and Očak 1979). During the post-socialist
period, their number was considerably reduced. All street names recalling events
from the history of the Communist Party or Partisan military units were renamed.
Names such as “Proletarian Brigade,” “8th Party Congress,” “Moslavina
Detachment,” “Bjelovar Detachment,” “6th Partisan Division,” and “Conference
of Zagreb Communists” have vanished. Some of the street names and monuments
dedicated to persons who had participated in the Partisan movement and the anti-
Fascist struggle were changed as well (Hrženjak 2002).
The key to understanding the current assessment of the communist past is the
fact that the Yugoslav anti-Fascist movement was born specifically within the
Communist Party and specifically in Croatia. Croatia’s anti-Fascist legacy is
virtually inseparable from its communist legacy. For this very reason, revolutionary
features have not been totally eliminated, either in Zagreb or more generally in
Croatia. Many such features are still part of Zagreb’s urban landscape (Kožarić
2007). Yet some have been removed and others have been rendered less
conspicuous—in accordance with the change in historical importance assigned to
the persons whom the monuments commemorate.
A logical question thus arises: in which form is Marshal Tito—the leader of the
anti-Fascist movement, the long-term president of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav
Communist Party, and one of the founders and leaders of the Non-Aligned
Movement—commemorated? Today, there are no longer numerous plaques on
buildings in which he periodically lived, worked, or held meetings. However, the
name of one of the largest and most beautiful squares in Zagreb—“Marshal Tito’s
Square”—has not been changed. Occasional anti-Tito demonstrations and
initiatives do occur, but the renaming of the square has never seriously come into
question under either right- or left-wing governments, nor has the importance of
Tito as a major protagonist in Croatian history.
Othering the Balkans and Russia

For Croatia, as for other Central European countries, the Balkans and Russia
represented a negative “constituting Other” in the process of post-socialist
identity-building (Todorova 1997). Croatia’s ambiguous borders vis-à-vis the
Balkans made it an important referential distance factor in the early transitional
years. The role of the Balkans as a negative point of reference is more than
obvious in the media and the public sphere in general. It is also confirmed by
Croatia’s continuous refusal to enter into a Balkan association of any kind. Yet
one must note that the perception of Zagreb’s non-belonging to the Balkans is
obviously not exclusively a post-socialist and post-Yugoslav phenomenon—the
only street in Zagreb that was named after the Balkans was renamed as early as
in the 1960s. By the 1990s, the term Balkan had disappeared from Zagreb’s
cultural landscape when the name of the largest cinema in Zagreb was changed
from Kino Balkan to Kino Europa, indicating the shift in the geopolitical
aspirations of the young country.
The specific political position of former Yugoslavia as a non-aligned country,
as well as weaker political and economic relations with Russia, were evident
through minor representation of Russia in Zagreb’s street toponymy. Those that
once existed were renamed after the democratic elections. Thus, in Zagreb today,
there are no longer any streets named after Moscow, Leningrad, or Solovlyev.
Only “Gagarin Lane”—a narrow pathway without any significance for spatial
orientation in the city—survived the wave of renamings.
Othering the international community of communists and revolutionaries

The change in the ruling ideology automatically placed protagonists of Marxism-
Leninism, socialist revolutions, and the international communist movement into
the category of the negative “Other.” Accordingly, shortly after the first democratic
elections in 1990, Lenin disappeared from Zagreb’s street names and soon fell
into oblivion together with many international ideologists, communists, and
revolutionaries such as Karl Marx, Georgi Dimitrov, the Spanish fighters,
Friedrich Engels, Palmiro Togliatti, Ernesto Che Guevara, Karl Liebknecht, and
Wilhelm Pieck. The ladies of the communist movement—Clara Zetkin and Rosa
Luxemburg—were the last to symbolically leave Zagreb’s streetscape. Along
with individuals, symbolic events and dates denoting the class struggle, such as
the October Revolution and May Day, would soon disappear as well.
Auto-referencing: inscribing national geography, history, and culture

Auto-referencing is the dimension by which articulation or text draws attention to
a situation, context, or subject of its own articulation, composition, structure,
code, or belonging—thus, the means by which articulation or text thematicizes
certain features of itself (Biti 2000). As Žižek (1993) observes, a nation finds its
sense of self-identity by revealing itself as already present in its tradition. By
referring to its tradition, descent, culture, science, natural characteristics,
settlements, and “friendly countries,” Croatia has incorporated its own definition
into the Zagreb landscape (Šakaja 2005, 2011).
With change in the political system and geopolitical orientation, national
“imaginative geography” also undergoes transformation. Instead of the toponyms
from the former Yugoslavia, Croatian geographical nomenclature has been
inscribed into the city’s street names. Enclosing the territory into a nation-state
strengthened the role of Zagreb as a metropolis that was meant to unite the country.
The official framework of the term “homeland” now changed and was harmonized
with the new state borders. The role of Zagreb as the capital city of independent
Croatia was symbolically manifested by an increased number of street toponyms
referring to Croatian territory: cities and villages (Našice, Vukovar, Dubrovnik,
Čavoglava, Merag, Lubenice, etc.), regions (Slavonia), rivers (Lonja, Drava, etc.),
and mountains (the Dinaric Range, Bjelolasica). “Vukovar Avenue” is probably
one of the best examples of how defensive nationalism and strong national
identification, produced in conditions of aggression and war, were revealed
through changes in public memorial features. The name “Vukovar Avenue” was
given to one of the main boulevards in the city on November 4, 1991, during the
intense battle for the defense of Vukovar.
The new “imaginative geography” excludes the “East” but includes other
regions of self-identification. These are states perceived as being part of the
common cultural sphere of Central Europe (“Street of the Federal Republic of
Germany,” “Street of the Republic of Austria”) or in common spiritual culture
(“Vatican Street”). The new “geographical” streets have also denoted new
friendships. The new “Street of Iceland,” “Kiev Street,” and “Ukrainian Street”
were obviously named as an acknowledgment of gratitude owed to the countries
that were among the first to recognize Croatia’s independence.
The shift in the public discourse towards Croatian history and culture in
Zagreb’s landscape has resulted in an increased number of streets and squares that
now commemorate Croatian kings and dukes. A grand ceremony in October 1990,
supported by an artistic and musical program as well as a presidential speech,
served as the scene for returning the statue of Josip Jelačić, the viceroy of Croatia
in the nineteenth century, to the city’s main square. The original name of the
square—“Square of Viceroy Jelačić”—was also returned. The statue, originally
erected in 1866, was removed by the communist authorities in 1947, when the
square was previously renamed. Re-installation of the statue in the initial
location—in the most central spot in the urban topography of Croatia’s capital—
was a symbolic act celebrating accomplishment of the dream of a Croatian state,
or the so-called “Croatian dream” (Rihtman-Auguštin 2000, 96). Historians
credited Viceroy Jelačić for the unification, at least formally, of all the Croatian
lands, after many centuries of fragmentation (Srkulj 1996, Šišić 2004; Goldstein
2008). Thus Jelačić played a mythical role in the Croatian national movement
(Rihtman-Auguštin 2000). Both the return of the statue and reclaiming the name
of the square were powerful symbolic acts in the context of national integration
and aspirations toward a free and independent state.
Although it would be an overstatement to speak of a sacralization of public
space, the religious elements, without doubt, have also become much more visible
in the post-socialist era. Numerous monuments and new streets have been
dedicated to saints and priests. However, streets named after Croatian scientists,
musicians, and writers (and even characters from their literary works) undoubtedly
represent the most numerous category in the new renamings (Stanić, Šakaja, and
Slavuj 2009). The same process of symbolic nationalization of public space has
also occurred in the sphere of monuments. During the 1990s, sculptures of
numerous Croatian writers, painters, and scientists were placed in Zagreb’s central
areas. Some of these sculptures have even been subjected to criticism for their
grand scale, and they have evoked public discussion on the new spectacular
monumental undertakings as political and ideological interventions in the urban
landscape, “a splendid memorial to a time of arrogance and violence” and
“primeval destruction of the spirit of the city” (Tenžera 1999, 19).
Negotiating unresolved meanings
There are sites “which await the development of interpretative traditions within
which they can be assessed” (Foote 1997, 294). They reflect the unresolved state
of certain open historical questions with which society has yet to come to terms.
Commemoration of “dual pasts” (Azaryahu 2003) involves negotiation and
struggle over the placement and relative location of memorials that represent
different versions of history. Competition between discourses transposes into
space the struggle for visibility in the landscape. The politically contestable nature
of place is best expressed under unsettled conditions, when some meanings are
still unresolved while no discourse dominates (as yet).
Controversial inclusions and exclusions: communists, anti-fascists, and “the

unspoken victims of World War II”
During the period of transition from a totalitarian state to “framed plurality”
(Gricanov 2001), a series of sensitive questions were opened up in Croatia. They
included the issues of commemoration of World War II and the victims of political
oppression under communist rule. When Croatia entered into its post-socialist
period, previously silenced discourses on World War II and the post-war period
were given access to the public sphere. In 1991, the Commission for Determination
of War and Post-war Victims of World War II was established. Since then, authentic
secret documents have been published in anthologies under the title, Partisan and
Communist Repression and Crimes in Croatia 1944–1946, Documents (Dizdar et
al. 2005; Geiger 2006). Numerous newly published memoirs also cast new light on
the events of that time. Following the reappraisal in the Croatian public sphere of
the wartime and the communist past, the association of war veterans’ “Croatian
Home Guard” and the right-wing Croatian Party of Rights set up new memorials in
Croatia to what they called the “unspoken victims” of World War II (Bakša 2006).
These new memorials honor members of the regular (or official) army of the pro-
Fascist Ustashi state, the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, i.e., the Independent
State of Croatia) and also civil victims of post-war repressions. While such
memorials are numerous in some parts of Croatia, they are quite invisible in Zagreb
and appear only on small plaques in non-prominent places. The reason lies, of
course, in their controversy. Who were the victims during World War II in the
territory of Croatia? Who were the perpetrators? The answers to these questions are
neither unequivocal, nor simple. Given the fact that the initiator of the anti-Fascist
struggle in Yugoslavia was the Communist Party, both the notion of communism
and specifically the Yugoslav communist regime, which is charged today with
many crimes, became historically inseparable from the concept of anti-Fascism—
which is considered incontestable in Croatia.
On the other hand, the pro-Fascist wartime state, the NDH, formally achieved
national freedom and independence, and was opposed both to the idea of
unification with Serbs in Yugoslavia and to the communist movement. It is for
this reason that the stereotype associating the national, anti-Yugoslav, and anti-
communist concept in Croatia during World War II with the Ustashi movement
remains so strong. Another important controversy is whether persons recruited
forcibly into the regular army under the Ustashi state can be defined as perpetrators,
or rather—if they were executed on charges of belonging to the Ustashis—as
victims of the war.
The inability to distinguish communists from anti-Fascists has in part
encouraged the preservation of the communist legacy. The failure to differentiate
Ustashi from anti-communist, anti-Yugoslav, nationally oriented Croats, or
simply from apolitical persons recruited into what was the regular Croatian Army
at that time, has led to the fact that memories regarding the “unspoken victims of
World War II” are still suppressed today. References to the innocent victims of the
communist forces in World War II and in the post-war period can always be
interpreted as reminiscences of the Ustashi movement. This has made Croatian
state authorities extremely cautious when mentioning any World War II national
concept, anti-communism, and anti-Yugoslavism, or when referring to communist
crimes during the war and in the post-war period. It is indicative that even 60
years after the victory over Fascism, it was felt necessary that the Croatian
Parliament distance itself from Fascism and from the Ustashi movement by
issuing a Declaration on Anti-Fascism in 2005, in which, inter alia, it “confirmed
the anti-Fascist democratic foundation and commitment of the Republic of Croatia
and Croatian society” and “confirmed that the fundamental values of anti-Fascism
are unequivocally accepted in the Republic of Croatia.”
Relocation, resemiotization, and “secondary sacralization” as strategies of

competing discourses
A whole series of undefined issues connected with the second half of the twentieth
century—primarily World War II (1941–1945, in Croatia) and the Homeland War
(1991–1995)—are still waiting for their stabilization in the new official
interpretative tradition. Over a decade into the twenty-first century, these issues
are still subject to negotiation between opposing discourses. We were able to
discern three spatial strategies used by competing discourses in the processes of
contestation of previously dominated narratives on Croatian history as well as
processes of negotiation on the meanings of historical events.
First, it is a strategy of relocation—change of place from central to peripheral
areas and vice versa. The above-mentioned Tesla monument was the only case of
relocation in the direction from the periphery to the city core. As we have already
shown, it reflected the loss of power of primordial ideas of identity, extremely
influential in the first decade of Croatian independence. All other cases of
relocation in Zagreb relate to “left-overs” (Czepczyński 2008) of the People’s
Liberation War (PLW) of the time of World War II, which are obviously
considered to be still eligible to remain in the city-text, but have been spatially
degraded, adjusted to a new place in history and the hierarchy of values. Forms
of relocation of “left-overs” that we can see in Zagreb include: a) moving
locations from the center to the periphery: for example, the sculpture of
communist official Moša Pijade, or the street named after the political publicist
and revolutionary, Božidar Adžija; b) transfer from a visible open position to an
enclosed area: for instance, a monument to the prominent communist leader
Rade Končar has been moved from the pedestal in front of the factory bearing his
name to the factory’s yard.
Second, the process of negotiating meanings is also manifested in the
resemiotization of memorials. Resemiotization of memorials can be attained by
appending new elements through the processes of “symbolic accretion” (Foote
1997; Dwyer 2004), and by removal or replacement of some of the elements, on
an already existing monument. The most common form of resemiotization in
Zagreb was removal of the red star from monuments dedicated to protagonists or
victims of the anti-Fascist struggle, which achieved a semiotic separation of anti-
Fascism from communism. Resemiotization of the monument to fallen
anti-Fascists on Piškor Hill was accomplished not just by replacement of the star
with a cross, but also by changing the text on the monument. Namely, a rather
long text on the plaque, referring to “great sacrifices for the sake of freedom and
socialism” and “lives given for freedom and a better future for new generations”
(Hrženjak 2002, 339) was changed to the text commemorating “all those who died
for Croatia”—a short statement that belongs to a completely different discourse
and at least partially satisfies all the options. Resemiotization of monuments as an
act of reconstruction of the symbolic landscape is available to all levels of social
agents—from official policy makers to subversive groups, and even individuals.
As we have seen from geographical research, examples of resemiotization can be
found at various levels of social influence: they vary from modifications of central
monuments that set new rules for reading national history (Till 1999; Azaryahu
2003; E. Palonen 2008; Light and Young 2010) to spray-painting on road signs
(Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010).
Third, we can also speak about a secondary sacralization (Esaulov 2006), or
resemiotization of places. We comprehend this term as covering new signs in a
place that is already “sacral,” which evokes respect because of the already-existing
content and possesses a narrative that upgrades the meaning of the place itself.
“Sacral nature” and the importance of a place are thus transferred to the importance
of the content that is to be incorporated. Resemiotization of places in Zagreb was
achieved, for example, by replacing the monument to fighters of the People’s
Liberation War by sculpture of religious (in Čučerje) or patriotic (in Kustošija
district) meaning. The unsuccessful renaming of the Victims of Fascist Square
best reveals the significance of “secondary sacralization.” The ruling party’s
attempt to recode the square into a “sacral” place of Croatian statehood was met
with a great public opposition. The change of its name into the Square of Croatian
Greats in 1990 transformed the square into a focal point of discussion on the
balance between the guilt of the communists and the fascists as well as an
assessment of the magnitude of their crimes. Differences of opinion on the
approach to World War II were transposed into the urban streetscape. Due to the
regular demonstrations against the new name of the square, the square’s original
name was eventually restored in 2000, a decade after it was renamed as the Square
of Croatian Greats.
Where is a place appropriate for the first Croatian president?
Choices for the location of monuments and the renaming of streets, as we have seen
in some of the above-mentioned examples, are the result of a process of negotiation
and contestation between different social groups and discourses. It is an administrative
process through which different interests compete for symbolic control of the public
sphere, therefore making the process political (K. Palonen 1993; Azaryahu 1996).
One paradigmatic example of such processes in Zagreb was the decision about
the location of a square dedicated to the first president of democratic Croatia. It took
more than eight years after the death of Franjo Tuđman before one of the squares in
Croatia’s capital was named after him. Although the majority of politicians agreed
that the first Croatian president deserved a memorial in the form of a street or a
square, to agree on the “appropriate” location was a problem. Interpretation of the
answer has considerably differed within the public and political spheres. The ruling
elites were aware of the fact that the chosen location would determine the position
of the former president in the hierarchy of Croatia’s pantheon. Right-wing parties
proposed locations in the very heart of the city, while left-wing parties, expectedly,
were in favor of peripheral areas of the city center. The suggestion that the City
Council finally accepted, was the one offered by Zagreb’s mayor, a member of the
political left. The decision of the City Council provoked strong negative reactions
from the right-wing parties. All of them agreed that the selected square was “an
inadequate and undefined space,” “not worthy enough,” “common turf,” and “an
unarranged park” (Stanić, Šakaja, and Slavuj 2009, 110). The duration of
negotiations concerning Tuđman’s square and, above all, its ambiguous final
location on the very edge of the city’s central core, demonstrated that the role of the
first president of democratic Croatia has remained undefined, and interpretations of
recent history are still confrontational and contested.
With many unresolved problems, and under the weight of the past, Croatia is
only now approaching its “point of self-cognition” (Lotman 1992, 30); after the
settling of transitional “explosions” one may expect “an activation of the
mechanisms of history that must explain what happened [to history itself].”
Conclusion
The language of proper names moves like a chain of conscious acts of naming
and renaming that are strictly separated from each other. A new name
corresponds to a new situation. From the mythological viewpoint, the
transition from one state towards another is understood through the formula
“And I saw a new heaven and a new land …” and, at the same time, as an act
of replacement of proper names.
(Lotman and Uspensky 1992 [1973], 70)
If one were to judge by the renaming of streets, the revelation of “a new heaven and
a new land” has occurred often in the history of Croatia. The example that perhaps
shows most comprehensively the general tendency is the main street of the town of
Vukovar. Through a series of renamings during the twentieth century, Vukovar has
changed the name of its main street six times in keeping with states, rulers, and
socio-political orders. With the change of states—from the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Ustashi Independent State of Croatia,
socialist Yugoslavia, and the democratic Republic of Croatia—the name of the
street has changed, too. In that process, the street was named every time after the
then-current highest political authority—the person at the head of the state: from
Emperor Franz Joseph, the Yugoslavian kings, Peter and Alexander, to the leader of
the Ustashi state, Pavelić, followed by Tito and by Tuđman. The sole constant in all
those perpetual changes was the value-spatial code—the ranking of the main city
street corresponded exclusively to the ranking of the leading person in the state.
Thus, the values were consistently spatially coded, in all the changing systems.
In this chapter, we have tried to show how the social values in post-socialist
Zagreb were transposed into the language of space. We hope that we have
demonstrated that the symbolic rewriting of Zagreb’s city-text was organized and
shaped primarily by discursive practices of Othering and Self-referencing, as
systematic acts of articulation in the frame of the politics of landscape. We have
also discerned acts of relocation, resemiotization, and “secondary sacralization”
as spatial strategies used in negotiation of meanings under conditions in which the
definition of interpretative tradition is ongoing.
In the refiguring of identity, post-socialist countries turn back to the past,
seeking their roots in pre-socialist times. The socialist period in Croatia was
preceded by the Independent State of Croatia (the NDH)—a state that was pro-
Fascist but, at the same time, realized “the Croatian dream” of independence. The
impossibility of merging tradition with such a criminal state, along with the fact
that such activation of tradition imposes itself since, from the time of the Middle
Ages, Croatia has been independent only twice—then and now—creates a
schizophrenic situation with which Croatia is currently obliged to deal. Therefore,
World War II is still very much alive in Croatia today, as we have seen in the
wavering accents in the spatial rhetoric of memorial landscapes during the post-
socialist period. Because of still unsolved historical issues, the recasting of the
memorial landscape is obviously still “in progress.”
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10 Nationalizing the streetscape
The case of street renaming in
Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Monika Palmberger
Introduction
In present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the naming of public places is
ascribed great importance and is often the cause of disputes between the three
constituent peoples—Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs—some of which have even
resulted in legal battles before the courts.1 Along with public squares, airports, and
other cultural institutions, many streets were renamed during, and after, the 1992–
1995 war by the national group that dominated each respective territory. In general,
the renaming process has a twofold effect on a city’s streetscape; first, it eradicates
the old name and thereby aims to “de-commemorate” the event, person, or place
that was previously remembered, and, second, the act of renaming establishes a
new commemorative space (Azaryahu 1997; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and
Azaryahu 2010). Street naming is a state-wide practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina
that has been used to establish areas of influence and assign a certain territory
exclusively to only one “nation.”2 The nation’s claim for exclusive rights of a
certain territory is manifested in the new names, which establish a historic link
between a certain place and the nation. In the case of West Mostar, which will be
the focus of this chapter, the de-commemoration concerns the socialist past while
the new commemorative space is dedicated to Croat national history.
Before the war, many streets in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and across
Yugoslavia), honored the socialist era. Tito’s self-declared aim to unite the
Yugoslav people and to enforce a shared identity was inscribed upon the urban
streetscape. Building on the image of the brave Yugoslav partisans, many streets
were, for example, named in memory of important Partisans who fought against
the Nazis during World War II. During the 1992–1995 war, and after the national
division of Bosnia and Herzegovina, streets were renamed in order to emphasize
the national division of the territory and to erase the socialist past.
With the Dayton Peace Agreement, signed on December 14, 1995, the
43-month-long war in Bosnia and Herzegovina officially ended. From that day on,
Bosnia and Herzegovina became a shared state of the three constituent peoples—
Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs—with Sarajevo as its capital. The country was split
into two entities (plus the special district of Brčko): the Serb Republic (which
forms 49 percent of its territory) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
with its 10 cantons (which forms 51 percent). The Washington Agreement that
Nationalizing the streetscape in Mostar 169
established the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina envisaged Mostar as a
united Bosniak-Croat city and as the capital of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton
(Canton 7). For Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats who claimed Mostar to be their
“capital city” (in contrast to Bosniak-dominated Sarajevo and Serb-dominated
Banja Luka), the renaming of streets on the Croat-dominated west side was an act
of inscribing this claim upon the urban landscape.
This chapter first describes the process of street renaming in Croat-dominated
West Mostar. It shows how by renaming streets and public places, Croat nationalist
elites erased the socialist past in favor of a Croat national history that was etched
into West Mostar’s cityscape. As will be shown, this process runs parallel to the
general rewriting of history. Despite the various efforts at such revisions, the chapter
questions the immediate effect that the renaming of streets has had on the population
and their historical consciousness (e.g., the attempt to erase positive memories of
socialist Yugoslavia). A first effort is made to set up a dialogue between recent
literature on street naming, urban memory, and generational memory.
The material presented in this chapter is part of a broader ethnographic study on
memory discourses in Mostar that combines research on national as well as
personal/generational memory (Palmberger 2016). Extensive fieldwork was
conducted between 2005 and 2008 (with short revisits in 2010 and 2014),
including participant observation, interviews, memory-guided city walks, informal
conversations, and media analysis.
Renaming as a political strategy in times of regime change

The renaming of streets is not unique to Bosnia and Herzegovina; rather, it is a
common practice when regime change calls for a new historiography. Often one of
the first acts of a new political regime is the renaming of the physical environment.
The collapse of the communist regimes in eastern and south-eastern Europe offers a
wealth of examples for the transformation of cityscapes, including the renaming of
streets, squares, and even entire cities themselves (Azaryahu 1997; Ugrešić 1998;
Light 2004; Rihtman-Auguštin 2004; Gill 2005; Palonen 2008). But this process is
not restricted to post-socialist Europe and can be found in other cases when regime
change or significant changes in power relations have taken place (Kliot and
Mansfield 1997; Leitner and Kang 1999; Swart 2008). Taking Cyprus as an example,
a radical renaming of public space occurred after the Turkish invasion and occupation
of northern Cyprus in 1974. In Cyprus’ Greek-dominated south, old street names
have largely remained, yet the Turkish-dominated north has seen a rigorous
renaming of streets and other places in order to “Turkify” the territory. In the course
of this venture, even old Ottoman place names were renamed because the
administration did not trust their “Turkishness” (Kliot and Mansfield 1997, 512).
A new political era is often heralded by naming and renaming “captured
territory,” as has been the case in many modern nation-states:
For nationalism naming and re-naming—the continuing transformation of the

supposedly eternal physical environment—is one of its most powerful and
170 Monika Palmberger
contentious tools, as well as one of power’s most explicit attempts to rewrite
the past, literally reinscribing the surface of the world, and changing the name
on the map—often while laying claim to something more ancient and
authentic than the “old” one.
(Hodgkin and Radstone 2006, 12)
In many parts of the world, street names have served to evince an official version
of the national past by commemorating historical figures and events. This is why
street names are prone to a process of renaming in times of political change.
Street signs are mundane objects. Accordingly, it may appear that the impact of
commemorative street names on the production of a sense of shared past, and in
evincing official versions of history, is significantly less than that of historical
monuments, historical museums, or memorial ceremonies. However,
commemorative street names (like other place names) conflate history and
geography and merge the past that they commemorate into ordinary settings of
human life. It is precisely due to its mundane character that the act of street naming
acquires its ideological force by presenting history as the “natural order of things”
(Azaryahu 1997, 481).
The aim of nationalizing territory in Yugoslavia started long before the war in
the 1990s. A good example is Belgrade at the end of the nineteenth century, which
underwent a process of the renaming of public space (Stojanović 2007). At that
time, an elite commission—including well-respected politicians and intellectuals—
was authorized to rename Belgrade’s streets. Up to that point, streets had been
named after trades and professions, important buildings, or simply their outward
appearance. In the late-nineteenth century, many streets were renamed after
geographical places important in Serbia’s national history and major cities in the
Slav world. If a virtual map were drawn connecting the places “remembered” in
the new street names, the borders of medieval Serbia would come to the forefront.
With this project, the nationally conscious intellectuals of the commission hoped
to bring Belgrade’s population to identify itself with the places remembered in the
new street names so that they would accept them as “their own” (Stojanović 2007,
76). As Dubravka Stojanović (2007) vividly shows in her analysis of this process,
the new names stood in sharp contrast to those chosen by Belgrade’s business
owners for their restaurants and inns, which were much more internationally
oriented, with businesses preferring names of distant places such as “America,”
“New York,” “Bosporus,” “Little-Paris,” “Little-Istanbul,” and “Monaco.”
Stojanović’s observations on the renaming of Belgrade’s public spaces thereby
support the interpretation that those behind the official renaming of streets did not
necessarily act according to the understanding of the wider society, as will be
discussed later in this chapter.
While the marking of public space is a common practice in the nation-building
process, what does the renaming of streets tell us other than revealing the wish of
new power-holders to promote certain events while neglecting others? What does
it tell us about the people who walk and live in those streets? Should we think of
historical consciousness as being initiated from the top (by political elites) and
passively received by the population? This view has often directed the analysis of
transient regimes. As Keith Brown argues:
Yet in a region of transient regimes, what is emphasized about the inhabitants

is their supposed willingness to adopt another national affiliation quickly. In
parallel fashion, the new state is presumed to be ready and able to accept them
as tabulae rasae and to inscribe national identity on them anew. … What one
might term “experienced” history drops out of sight as the rhythm of every
aspect of life is taken to be determined by the continuities or disjunctures in
“top-down” history.
(2003, 129)
Rather than accepting such a top-down approach to history, this chapter builds on
the premise that individuals are shaped by the experiences of the different historico-
political periods through which they live (Schuman and Scott 1989; Borneman
1992; Rosenthal 2006). These experiences may show continuities and discontinuities
and may agree or conflict with each other, but they have an impact on people’s
perceptions of their society and its past (Palmberger 2016). Although political
changes may come about abruptly and radically, it would be inaccurate to assume
that a society fully adapts to all of these changes, and even more inaccurate to
imagine that such societal changes take place at the same speed at which political
elites change. This does not mean that individuals are unaffected by existing
canonical national historiographies when orienting themselves anew in society and
that they do not take part in reaffirming them. But autobiographical memories,
which do not necessarily fit into the official historiography promoted by the ruling
elites, need to find a place in the analysis as well (Palmberger 2013a, 2016).
Much research on the renaming of public space leaves the question as to how
the wider population receives this process unanswered. In avoiding this question,
such studies do not adequately account for the active role that urban residents play
in shaping their own historical consciousness as part of their everyday encounters
with the city’s commemorative streetscape. Light and Young (2014, 683) have
made a plea that we need “further investigation into how place names (and place
name changes) are embraced, negotiated, or rejected within the everyday lives of
the inhabitants of the city.” In order to answer this call, this chapter builds on the
work of urban scholars who critically investigate place-making as a relational
practice that has social dissonance and contestation as an integral part of it (Massey
1994; Alderman 2000; Muzaini and Yeoh 2005; Till 2005; Rose-Redwood 2008)
and on works of memory scholars who understand memory as an active process
as well as personal and collective-national memories as utterly intertwined
(Tonkin 1992; Ricoeur 2006; Passerini 2007).
Remaining divisions manifested in Mostar’s cityscape

The Herzegovinian city of Mostar became a fiercely contested territory during the
1992–1995 war and has thereafter remained a divided city, with a
Bosniak-dominated east and a Croat-dominated west. Mostar represents a special
post-war situation, as it is the only city of its size in Bosnia and Herzegovina that
has been left divided among two national groups almost equal in size. The
composition of Mostar’s population has changed drastically as a consequence of
the war. Before the war, the population was made up of 35 percent Muslims
(Bosniaks), 34 percent Croats, 19 percent Serbs, and 12 percent others (including
those who identified themselves as Yugoslavs); presently, Mostar is split in half
between Croats and Bosniaks, who make up the vast majority of the population.3
Today, most Mostarci (Mostarians) define themselves as Bošnjaci/Muslimani
(Bosniaks/Muslims), Hrvati (Croats), or Srbi (Serbs), unless they are members of
one of the minorities or are among the few who continue to call themselves
Jugosloveni (Yugoslavs). Although the main line of identification is religion
(most Bosniaks are Muslims, most Croats are Catholics, and most Serbs are
Orthodox), the divisions are more of a national than a religious kind (Palmberger
2006). Still, the claim of national suppression during Tito’s socialist Yugoslavia
went hand in hand with the claim of religious suppression.
The lives of most Bosniaks and Croats are widely separated. If they do not
actively seek to interact with one another, Bosniaks and Croats actually share little
time with their national counterparts: Bosniak and Croat children attend different
schools, teenagers go to different universities, adults have separate workplaces,
and leisure time is predominantly spent on “one’s own” side of the city (Palmberger
2010, 2013b; Hromadžić 2015). Only a small number of people still maintain
friendships with pre-war friends of a different nationality and even for them the
nature of their relationships has often changed.
Although there are indeed no clear signs marking the exact border between
Bosniak- and Croat-dominated Mostar, markers giving hints of the “nationality”
of the city’s two sections exist. Apart from street names, which will be discussed
in more detail later in this chapter, these are primarily religious symbols: Catholic
churches on the west side and mosques on the east side.4 As found throughout
Bosnia and Herzegovina, also in and around Mostar these places of worship have
significantly grown in number. Many mosques and churches (often foreign-
funded) have been built in recent years, and they attempt not only to outnumber
one another but also compete in size. Since religion is the main marker of national
identity in the country, religious symbols are the most straightforward territorial
markers. This does not necessarily mean, however, that Bosnians welcome the
massive investment in churches and mosques. Quite to the contrary, many of my
interlocutors expressed great displeasure at what they regarded as a waste of
money, money they thought would have been better invested in public amenities
like schools and hospitals.
One of the most striking religious territorial markers in Mostar is a huge cross
overlooking the city, which was erected in 2000 on the summit of Mount Hum.
The cross, around 30 meters high, stands out in the landscape and is one of the first
things visitors see when driving into the city. The installation of this cross greatly
provoked the Bosniak population, especially considering the fact that a great part
of the heavy damage to the city was caused by artillery that was positioned on this
mountain. The Croat population, on the other hand, presented the cross as a
symbol of peace and the Bosniak request to remove it was seen as a sign of Islamic
intolerance against Croats and their Catholic religion. After several years,
however, the cross has become, if not an accepted part of life, then at least a
popular subject for jokes among the Bosniak population. For example, they joke
that the cross, if not good for anything else, at least provides much-needed shade
during hot summer days. On another mountain on the east side of the city, there is
a huge sign laid out in white stones stating in capital letters, “BiH volimo te” (BiH
we love you). Peculiarly, before the war it read “Tito volimo te” (Tito we love
you) but had to be revised after Tito’s death and the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Most supporters of the new state of Bosnia and Herzegovina can be found among
Bosniaks, while Croats generally show more patriotic sentiments for Croatia. The
Bosnia and Herzegovina flag serves to illustrate this. On public holidays, in West
Mostar the flag is only displayed on official governmental buildings (a new practice
fostered by the international community) and on the buildings of international
organizations, while on the Bosniak-dominated east side the flag can be seen on
many buildings, even on small shops. The nationalization of history is promoted
through a plurality of channels in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Torsti 2004; Donia
2010). In addition to political speeches and media reports, the nationalization of
history is also very actively supported by a considerable number of academic
scholars and through public commemorations, the divided education system, and
the memorial culture that also manifests itself in new street names. Let us now turn
to the political practice of renaming streets in Mostar.
The politics of exclusion: street renaming in Mostar

In terms of street names in Mostar, which will be the focus of the remainder of
the chapter, it is necessary to distinguish between East and West Mostar. While
in the former, street names for the most part remained the same as they had been
before 1992, the streetscape in the latter witnessed considerable renaming. This
process started when West Mostar was declared the capital of Herceg-Bosna
during the war in the 1990s. Herzegovina with Mostar as its main city has been
central to the Croats’ drive toward independence, for the Ustasha movement
during World War II, and for the HVO (Hrvatsko vijeċe obrane, Croat Defense
Council) during the war in the early-1990s. Today, street names, newly erected
memorials, and religious symbols mark the public space of West Mostar as part
of the Croat nation. The claim of Mostar being the city of Bosnia and
Herzegovina’s Croats leads, in its extreme interpretation, to a denial of Bosniak
(and Serb) existence or to a denial of the Bosniak-dominated part of the city. The
claim that Mostar is an exclusively Croat city goes so far that the Bosniak east
side of the city is simply ignored (e.g., in books on or maps of Mostar, see
Augustinović 1999). Interestingly, Pilvi Torsti (2004) shows how Bosniak tourist
guides in Mostar continue to present the entire city similarly to before the war,
while Croat guides concentrate only on West Mostar and leave the Ottoman
heritage, such as the Old Town, unmentioned.
The new street names emphasize a shared history with the motherland of Croatia
by recalling Croat historic personalities and important Croat cities. The former
include names of members of the Catholic Church and politically influential
persons from the medieval Croat Kingdom as well as the so-called “Independent
State of Croatia” (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH).5 The new street names
invoke the national meta-narrative by recalling the past glory of the medieval Croat
Kingdom as well as the long period of victimization of Croats on the way to
national liberation from the Nazis. This meta-narrative is also common in history
textbooks (Torsti 2004) and was taken up in history lectures I attended at the Croat-
dominated university in West Mostar. Among local historians, a central discursive
strategy was the linking of the recent with the more distant past, even if the latter
was not officially the object of study. Numerous connections to the distant past
were made in order to reinforce the ancient history of the Croat nation and to point
out the animosity that Croats have faced throughout time (Palmberger 2016).
Like the advocates of Croatia’s war of independence (1991–1995), nationalist
Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina defined their “true” national identity in sharp
contrast to the Yugoslav identity and the socialist past: heroes of Yugoslavia were
called criminals and any reminders of them had to be erased from everyday life.
Most monuments from the socialist past in West Mostar were razed during and
after the war with the exception of an immense Partisan memorial cemetery that is
still located there, even if seemingly neglected and heavily contested by the
majority of Mostar’s Croats. In the case of street names, the socialist past was
erased by “Croatianizing” them. For example, the street once called Omladinska
(Street of the Youth) was renamed Hrvatske mladeži (Croat Youth). The simple
message behind this was that Croats should no longer be reminded of the Union of
Pioneers of Yugoslavia (Savez pionira Jugoslavije). Instead of bringing up fond
memories of being a member of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav Pioneers, the new street
name aims to direct feelings and affection exclusively toward the Croat youth.
A similar example is Trg Rondo, a central roundabout and square in West
Mostar that was renamed Trg Hrvatskih Velikana—Trg Mate Bobana (Croat
Nobles Square—Mate Boban Square) after the president of Herceg-Bosna, the
Croat quasi-republic during the 1992–1995 war. Rondo is also the location of a
cultural center formally called Dom kulture (House of Culture). Today, big letters
on the top of the building proclaim its new name: Hrvatski dom herceg Stjepan
Kosača (Croat House—Duke Stjepan Kosač) (Figure 10.1).
In West Mostar, streets recalling the socialist period and those named after
people known for their role in Serb or Bosniak national history were replaced by
the names of Croat rulers, such as kings and dukes, or religious leaders, including
cardinals and bishops (Figure 10.2). Others were renamed in memory of recent
national heroes and victims, or after Croat cities in order to emphasize their
affiliation with the mother-country Croatia. In this spirit, JNA (the Jugoslovenska
narodna armija, Yugoslav People’s Army) street became Kneza Branimira (Duke
of Dalmatian Croatia in the ninth century), and Bulevar Narodne Revolucije
(Boulevard of the People’s Revolution) became Bulevar Hrvatskih Branitelja
(Boulevard of the Croat Defenders). Thus the boulevard once named after the
Figure 10.1 The newly renamed House of Culture, Croat House—Duke Stjepan Kosač
People’s Revolution was renamed in honor of the Croat defenders who half a
century later fought for Croat national independence.
The renamed streets clearly show that the heroes of today are no longer the
Partisans who established Tito’s Yugoslavia but those who fought, both to defend
the Croat nation and for its liberation. However, streets are not only dedicated to
national heroes but also to victims. For example, one street in West Mostar has
been renamed ulica Bleiburskih žrtava (Victims of Bleiburg Street). When the
Partisans met the British troops in Bleiburg, an Austrian town, in April 1945, the
British handed over more than 18,000 captured members of various anti-Partisan
forces (including Croat Ustasha soldiers) who had sought refuge in Allied-
controlled Austria. But most of them were massacred when they reached
Yugoslavia (Malcolm 2002).
Another street, previously called ulica Jakova Baruha Španca, after a Spanish
communist revolutionary, is today called ulica Žrtava komunizma (Victims of
Communism Street). Ulica Petra Drapsina, named after a leading Partisan in the
liberation of Mostar on February 14, 1945, was renamed ulica Franjevačka
(Franciscan Street). The day of Mostar’s liberation by the Partisans (still
remembered positively by Mostar’s elderly population, particularly, although not
solely, among Bosniaks) is perceived as a day of mourning by ruling Croats, who
remember the execution of several clerics by the Partisans, after each of whom a
street has been named. Since the official Croat commemoration of February 14,
1945, is not a day of celebration but one of mourning, the street formerly known
as Avenija 14. Februar (Avenue of 14 February) was renamed Avenija Kralja
Tomislava.6 Interestingly, the street in memory of this Croat ruler of the Middle
Ages was renamed in Bosniak-dominated Sarajevo.
The renaming of Mostar’s streets, however, did not remain unchallenged. When
Mostar was under the interim EUAM (European Union Administration)7 from
Figure 10.2 A street in West Mostar newly named after a Catholic priest born in 1871 and
“replacing” a street name honoring the Yugoslav Partisans
July 1994 until January 1997, the goal was to restore it as a multinational city. In
this respect, the renamed streets were seen as an obstacle. When, in 2004, the High
Representative, Paddy Ashdown, issued a new city statute for Mostar prescribing
a unified city council and administration, he also established a commission for
revising the names of streets, squares, and other public places.8 The commission
consisted of seven members, of whom three were of Croat, three of Bosniak, and
one of Serb national background. The commission’s task was to advise the city
council, which in turn had been put in charge of changing the names of two-thirds
of all streets and institutions. The commission’s existence did not become widely
known among Mostar’s population and only attracted limited media attention.
Between 2004 and 2007, there were a number of media reports on the commission’s
work, mainly criticizing its inefficiency and slowness. While the Bosniak-
dominated press expressed interest in a faster and more satisfactory process of
changing to the new names, the Croat-dominated press tended to downplay the
importance of the commission. In the newspaper Dnevni List (a Croat-leaning
daily published in Mostar), for example, the activities of the commission were
criticized for diverting attention from Mostar’s more pressing problems such as
high unemployment, the illegal construction of buildings, and the lack of
residential housing.9
The preliminary results of the commission were presented to the city council at
its session on May 5, 2006.10 The commission’s task was presented as an effort to
rename all streets and institutions that had names associated with fascism and
totalitarianism. The commission was forced to admit that its members had had
difficulties in compromising on the changes and therefore had only been able to
agree on the renaming of a very small number of streets, such as those named after
ministers of the NDH, including the streets ulica Mile Budaka, ulica Jure Francetića,
and ulica Vokića-Lorkovića. After the commission had presented its results and the
municipal councilors of the HDZ (Hrvatske demokratska zajednica, Croat
Democratic Union, the Croat nationalist party) had suggested that streets associated
with Tito’s socialism should also be renamed, a fierce debate arose. The argument
that the HDZ brought forward was that Tito’s Yugoslavia had been a repressive
and totalitarian regime just like that of the NDH. Members of the SDA (Stranka
demokratska akcije, Party of Democratic Action, the Bosniak nationalist party) as
well as the SDP (Socijaldemokratska partija, Social Democratic Party, the successor
of the Communist Party) opposed this and denounced the HDZ’s claim as being
purely tactically motivated in order to divert attention from this uncomfortable
subject. Their argument was that communism could not be equated with fascism.
Members of the HDZ disagreed and claimed that it was clear who had been
oppressed under Tito’s rule—namely Croats, as Croats had not been permitted to
use their language and practice their culture in Yugoslavia. Finally, the councilor
and representative of the Jewish community intervened by saying that his family
had also suffered during Tito’s rule but that nevertheless one should not lump all
the injustices of past regimes together as if they were equal.
In the days following the city council session, press releases by Bosniak-
dominated parties such as the SBIH (Stranka za BiH, Party for Bosnia and
Herzegovina) and the SDA, as well as the SDP, printed in local newspapers
demanded all changes of street names to be reversed. To them, changing only a
few street names would merely be a cosmetic solution. This point of view
presented clear opposition to that voiced in the Croat newspaper, Dnevni List,
which argued that the public was not interested in street names but rather wanted
the city council to focus on more pressing problems.
Bosniak and Croat representatives (or those who claim to represent the Bosniak
or Croat nation) clearly follow different interests and hold different opinions
about the process of reversing Mostar’s new street names, as initiated by the
commission. Still, as mentioned above, the new street names did not become a
pressing issue discussed by the local media nor was the commission’s work much
debated among Mostar’s citizens. The remainder of this chapter considers the
ways in which Mostarians engage with the past and shows how personal memories
are not as easily overwritten as street names.
Memory, nostalgia, and everyday urban encounters

In the introduction to the volume, The Art of Forgetting, one of the editors
suggests: “We cannot take it for granted that artefacts act as the agents of collective
memory, nor can they be relied upon to prolong it” (Forty 1999, 7). Memorials
and commemoration sites need people to read them, which means first of all they
have to notice and pay attention to them. This is also true for street names. During
my fieldwork, I observed that Croats in West Mostar were often unaware of the
new street names and other urban toponyms. For instance, the majority of urban
residents still call the newly named central square, Trg Hrvatskih Velikana—Trg
Mate Bobana, by its former and simpler name, Trg Rondo, and many of those who
grew up in pre-war Mostar continue to refer to streets by their old names.
Generally, the location of public buildings and other sights were described to me
in terms of proximity to other known places rather than by providing the street
names. Similarly, my informants were often unaware of memorials (or at least
their meaning).
Light and Young (2014), who made a similar observation in post-socialist
Bucharest, relate this reluctance among the population to switch to the new name
to habit (rather than resistance). I would not overstress the point of resistance in
the case of West Mostar either, as much points to the fact that the reluctance to
change to the new names is grounded in habit. But the lack of knowledge about
the new street names at least shows that the majority of Mostar’s Croats did not
actively engage with the process of renaming streets. The situation was different
for the non-Croat population, especially for Bosniak and Serb returnees. For them
these territorial markers were a painful reminder of the fact that what they once
used to call home had been taken away from them. This suggests that the act of
Croatianizing West Mostar’s street names first and foremost signals to non-Croats
that West Mostar is no longer their home. One of my Bosniak informants who
grew up in West Mostar described the feeling of being a stranger in her former
home when she said, “I just don’t feel at home there [West Mostar] anymore, even
if I lived there for almost 30 years [before the war]. Everything has changed there,
the people, the buildings and even the street names!
It is important, however, to acknowledge that:
national places of memory are not simply imposed onto an empty landscape.
… Although elites have had more control over the establishment of places of
memory in public settings, they cannot control how they are perceived,
understood, and interpreted by individuals and various social groups.
(Till 2003, 295 and 297)
This becomes apparent when citizens actively protest against replacing an old
name with a new one, as was the case in Sarajevo when a similar commission to
that in Mostar suggested renaming Sarajevo’s main artery, ulica Maršala Tita
(after the Yugoslav statesman Josip Broz Tito), in honor of Alija Izetbegović (a
Bosniak activist and first president of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Here it became
evident that the decisions of the cultural, academic, and political elites about what
should be publicly remembered and what should be silenced did not resonate with
the views of a good part of Sarajevo’s citizens (Robinson, Engelstoft, and Pobric
2001). People took to the streets in protest because they did not want to erase the
memory of their former president. It is likely that even the relocating of street
names, inspired by the Partisan movement, from the center to the periphery after
the war in the 1990s, was a compromise for Sarajevo’s citizens who did not want
to see their (former) heroes leaving the city altogether. But it is not only in Sarajevo
that nostalgic discourses of Tito’s Yugoslavia persist; they are also still vivid in
Mostar, not only among Bosniaks but also among Croats.
Nostalgia among Mostarian Croats may be subtler and not articulated in
protests. Nevertheless, it is clearly present in personal narratives, thereby indirectly
countering the official historical representations of Yugoslavia. I encountered
great admiration for Tito not only among Bosniaks, but also among Croats, as, for
example, with one of my interlocutors, Danica, born 1926. For Danica, Mostar is
closely linked with Tito, whom she will never stop admiring for what he achieved
for Yugoslavia. For her, as for several others of her generation, Tito is more like
a saint than an ordinary mortal. When I once asked Danica what Tito meant for
Mostar, she gave me the following answer:
Everything, just everything! He was an extraordinary man, everyone thought

that! Everyone liked him, everyone! … He did not care who was who but just
cared for everyone, helped everyone as much as he could. He really was a
great man! And as long as he was alive we lived, how do you say, “ko bubreg
u loju” [“like a kidney in lard,” meaning they had plenty of everything,
similar to the English expression “like a bee in clover”].
Nostalgia, as became clear during the interviews I conducted with Mostarians of

different generations, concerns first and foremost memories of socio-economic
security and well-being but also the pre-war good-neighborliness (komšiluk)
among the different nations. Nostalgic discourses can even be found among those
who welcome what is often referred to as “national liberation” and even among
those who are today clearly behind the national division of Mostar (Palmberger
2008, 2013a). Even among young Croats who were educated during and after the
war, nostalgia for Yugoslavia was not uncommon. Although most young Croats I
met supported the “national liberation” of Croats and their language, they still
held positive memories of Yugoslavia, personal memories as well as those passed
on to them by their parents and grandparents. This was, for example, the case with
Sanja, born in 1981. Sanja at times expressed nostalgia for Yugoslavia, such as
when recalling childhood memories of her excitement at the prospect of becoming
one of Tito’s Pioniri (Pioneers), or of the apartment complex where she grew up,
which housed families of all national backgrounds:
I remember we lived at my grandparents’, my mother’s parents. We lived

here and other Croats there and a Serb family over there and next to them
another Croat family and downstairs Muslims and one mixed couple—she
was Serb and he Muslim. They were all married couples of similar age like
my parents, and they all had kids. We used to play together, hanging out,
chatting. My parents used to drink coffee each day with our Serbian neighbors
and they visited us for Christmas.
Sanja’s nostalgia is mainly directed toward the multi-ethnic coexistence she

experienced as a child in the apartment complex she grew up in. She recalls this
place and its tenants as one big family despite the families’ different nationalities.
But Sanja is also “remembering” Yugoslavia as a place where people had jobs,
compared to the great unemployment people face today. Even if she studied the
Croat language (a subject only offered at university after the war) and stressed
several times that she appreciated the Croat “national liberation,” she was still
critical of contemporary developments, such as when she said, “Now we have our
own language but no job. What do we need our own language for if we do not
have a job!”
Individuals are not only exposed to changing political contexts but are also
confronted with their personal past experiences, which is reflected in the ethnographic
examples provided above. My findings suggest that individuals’ reconstructions of
the past remain more flexible and situational than those of “memory makers”
(Kansteiner 2002), namely the elites who decide on renaming streets or historians
teaching in schools and at universities. While the latter’s narrative is strategic and
goal-oriented, the former’s is characterized by target-seeking tactics. This distinction
relates but does not fully correspond to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between
strategy and tactic. For de Certeau, strategy is linked to institutions and structures of
power: “I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships
that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army,
a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated” (de Certeau 1984, 35–36). Discursive
strategies employed by those who claim to represent the nation are used to narrate
independent, coherent national histories, to legitimize and objectify them. A tactic,
in de Certeau’s sense, is utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in a
field of power. A tactic is influenced, but not determined, by rules and structures (de
Certeau 1980). In positioning themselves in relation to the past, Mostarians are
confronted with the political ruptures manifested in their personal lives and in the
history of the wider society. Discursive tactics present in their narratives are utilized
to deal with these ruptures (Palmberger 2016).11
Conclusion
As I have shown in this chapter, West Mostar underwent a severe process of
renaming streets and thereby nationalizing the territory. Despite attempts to
counteract and reverse some of the new names, most of them remain. While streets
can simply be renamed, thereby eradicating certain aspects of a shared past, this
does not seem to be possible for the wider population, at least not in the same
radical manner. This does not change the fact that Croatianizing streets in West
Mostar is a policy of exclusion that unequivocally signals to the non-Croat
population that this part of the city is no longer their home.
In this chapter, I have pointed to the importance of taking into account that
depending on their age Mostarians have been exposed to different nationality
politics (often in conflict with one another) and have experienced in the past
different forms of coexistence. I thus have argued that autobiographical memories,
which do not necessarily fit into the official historiography promoted by the ruling
elites, need to find a place in the analysis of urban memory scholars. Moreover, I
have suggested two different kinds of stratagems in the narratives between those
who are professionally involved in writing history and those who are not.
In summary, it can be said that no direct link can be simply assumed between a
national historiography inscribed in the cityscape by cultural, academic, and
political elites and the way people face these national markers in everyday life and
relate to the past. It is therefore important to stress the fact that the process of
renaming streets tells us first of all about the changes in the dominant public
discourse and political orientation and not necessarily about people’s
understandings of, and positions toward, the past. This does not mean, however,
that they do not join in (and thereby also strengthen) nationalist discourses, but it
suggests that perceptions and representations of the past are more manifold and
overlapping than depicted in the topography of street names.
Notes
1 When the issue of renaming towns in the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska) was
brought before the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was decided that
this violated the rights of the other two constituent peoples (Croats and Bosniaks) to
collective equality and to freedom from discrimination (Feldman 2005).
2 In this chapter I refer to “nation” instead of “ethnicity.” In Bosnia and Herzegovina,
people employ the terms narod/nacija (people/nation) to describe group identities.
Moreover, the term “ethnic” has often been used in a selective and hierarchical way and
has been ascribed only to some groups and not to others (Baumann 1996).
3 In 2007, the Federalni Zavod za Statistiku estimated the population of Mostar to be 111,198.
4 Another identity marker, though not visible in the cityscape, is language, even if the
languages on the Bosniak-dominated east and the Croat-dominated west side of Mostar
are only minimally distinguishable.
5 The NDH was a quasi-puppet state and had been established with the support of
Germany and Italy in April 1941.
6 See Slobodna Dalmacija, February 24, 1995.
7 The EUAM was envisaged in the Washington Agreement and was supposed to enforce
“a unified police force (led by the West European Union); freedom of movement
across the front line and public security for all; the establishment of conditions suitable
for the return of refugees and displaced persons to their original homes; the
establishment of a democratically elected council for a single unified city; and the
reconstruction of the buildings and infrastructure as well as the reactivation of public
services” (Yarwood 1999, 7).
8 A similar commission was set up in Sarajevo as one of the post-war cantonal
government’s first actions (Robinson, Engelstoft, and Pobric 2001). Advised by the
commission, streets carrying the names of historic personalities of Serb (and also, but
to a lesser degree, Croat) origin in particular were renamed, while signs in Cyrillic
script (used by Serbs) were removed. Streets recalling the Serb and Croat presence in
the city were renamed.
9 See Slobodna Dalmacija, February 24, 1995.
10 Special thanks to Larissa Vetters, a fellow anthropologist and friend, for sharing her
field notes on this with me.
11 Tactic as de Certeau describes it, however, is more closely linked to resistance than the
way tactic is used here. Relating tactics closely to resistance would suggest that the
narratives of my interlocutors represent “counter-memories” or “alternative histories”
and that we can draw a clear line between “official” and “popular” representations of
the past, between history and memory. But this is not the case.
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Liverpool University Press.
11 The politics of toponymic
continuity
The limits of change and the
ongoing lives of street names
Duncan Light and Craig Young
Introduction
One of the tenets of critical place name studies is that urban toponyms are
embedded within broader structures of power, authority, and ideology
(Vuolteenaho and Berg 2009). Place naming is thus one component of broader
political projects concerned with governmentality, state formation, and nation-
building (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). Urban toponyms act
to reify a particular set of political values in the urban landscape and in this way
they “are instrumental in substantiating the ruling socio-political order and its
particular ‘theory of the world’ in the cityscape” (Azaryahu 1996, 312).
Furthermore, since urban place names are produced in particular political
contexts, they are vulnerable to changes in the political order (Azaryahu 1996,
2009), which bring to power new regimes with different sets of political values
and aspirations, with the result that names attributed by the former order may
become discordant with the new agenda. For this reason, renaming the urban
landscape is one of the most familiar acts (or rituals) accompanying revolutionary
political change.
This process of “toponymic cleansing” (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and
Azaryahu 2010, 460) constitutes an unambiguous and public statement about the
demise of the former regime (Azaryahu 2009, 2012a). Renaming streets is part of
broader processes of “landscape cleansing” (Czepczyński 2008) through which
the “official public landscape” (Bell 1999, 183) of the old regime is unmade
through acts of “symbolic retribution” (Azaryahu 2011, 29), such as pulling down
statues. Since shifts in political order produce a reconfiguring of the “known past”
(Kligman and Verdery 2011, 9), the new names attributed to streets and landmarks
introduce a new political agenda into the cityscape and, in theory, into the practices
of everyday life (Azaryahu 2009; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu
2010). Such renaming draws a clear boundary between a particular past and
aspirations for a new future (Marin 2012). The renamings that accompany political
change have been a central focus of critical toponymic scholarship (Azaryahu
2012a), particularly in contexts such as post-socialism (Azaryahu 1997, 2012a;
Light 2004; Gill 2005; Palonen 2008; Marin 2012; Drozdzewski 2014), the post-
colonial (Yeoh 1996; Nash 1999; Whelan 2003), and post-Apartheid South Africa
(Guyot and Seethal 2007; Swart 2008).
186 Duncan Light and Craig Young
However, in this chapter we argue that a focus on renaming streets and other
urban landmarks in the wake of political change has tended to neglect the issue of
continuity in the toponymic landscape. Previous scholarship has been
predominantly concerned with issues of change (through renaming) but we seek
to highlight the importance of recognizing that there are many instances of a
significant lack of change; that is, where ideologically charged street names from
a previous political order persist within the urban landscape. As a number of
authors have argued (Azaryahu 2012a, 2012b; Rose-Redwood 2008; Shoval
2013), the renaming of the urban landscape is not always immediate and thorough.
Moreover, politically inspired toponymic change can often unfold in a rather
incoherent, inconclusive, spatially diverse, and protracted manner, and the actions
of key urban actors are less systematic and co-ordinated than might be expected.
All this means that it is important to recognize the limits of renaming the urban
landscape following political change (Rose-Redwood 2008).
Therefore, by considering a range of “left-over” toponymic landscapes we seek
to open up an agenda focusing on the politics of continuity in the toponymic
landscape and the limits to renaming. To do this, the chapter explores three broad
themes: the limits to the political process of renaming; the effects of the actions of
those urban managers and employees responsible for implementing the renaming of
streets; and the responses among the urban populace to changes in street names. Our
theoretical approach is twofold. First, like other critical place name scholars, we
make use of political semiotics (Azaryahu 1996; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and
Azaryahu 2010) in that we focus on street names as signs with multiple meanings
within the urban landscape. In particular, we focus on the ways in which such signs
demonstrate continuity with the past rather than a decisive break with it. Second, we
focus on the agency and performances of key urban actors and the ways in which
these can thwart official processes of renaming. We illustrate our arguments with a
range of examples and case studies from post-socialist contexts. This is partly
because our research interests focus on street names in post-socialist countries
(particularly Romania) but also because the complex (and sometimes ambiguous)
nature of post-socialist political change has produced numerous examples of
continuity within the toponymic landscape (and here we seek to build on previous
studies that have focused on changes to urban toponyms in post-socialist contexts).
The examples which we present are intended to be illustrative rather than
paradigmatic (Azaryahu 1996), and we recognize that the situation in other contexts
(such as post-colonialism) may be quite different. We conclude the chapter by
sketching out a research agenda for the “politics of toponymic continuity.”
Street renaming and the limits of “top-down” political power

The renaming of streets following political change might appear to be
uncomplicated since the incoming order will usually have control of the necessary
administrative and bureaucratic apparatus. However, there are various instances
where a new regime has the ability to rename the urban landscape but does not see
this process through to completion. This may occur for a range of reasons. In
The politics of toponymic continuity 187
some cases, political change may not be accompanied by a desire to erase the
symbolic traces of the former order. While a new regime might portray itself as
representing a radical break from the past, it may, in fact, have an ambivalent
relationship to its predecessor (rather than simply being hostile to it). In such
circumstances, there may be limited concern to mark a decisive break with the
past so that the new regime shows more continuity with—rather than difference
from—its predecessor. Such a position will be reflected in the approach to
renaming the urban landscape created by the former regime.
One such example is post-Soviet Russia. Following the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1990–1991, Russia sought to dismantle the structures of state socialism
(single-party rule and a command economy) and replace them with democratic
rule and a market economy. However, Gill (2005) argues that many post-
communist politicians had deep roots in the power structures of the Soviet regime
and were not motivated by a burning desire to disavow the Soviet past (also, see
Forest and Johnson 2002). For this reason, there was less concern to erase the
symbolic urban landscape created by communism, with the result that many
Soviet-era street names remained unchanged. For example, in Moscow many
streets named after leading communist revolutionaries and Soviet politicians
retained their names such as “Lenin Street” or “Red Army Street” (Gill 2005).
Similarly, in St. Petersburg streets named after key events in communist
historiography and the institutions of the socialist state have kept their original
names such as “Dictatorship of the Proletariat Square,” “Communist Youth
Street,” or “Lenin Square,” while the Oblast which surrounds the city has retained
the name of “Leningrad” (Marin 2012).
Another example is the city of Minsk (Belarus) which also shows considerable
continuity in Soviet-era street names. Between 1990 and 1993, only 14 streets and
one square were renamed, because early in the 1990s former-Soviet nomenklatura
gained positions in the new urban administration and opposed proposals to return
streets to their pre-1917 names (Bylina 2013). Although pressure from political
groups such as the Belarusian Peoples’ Front had achieved some changes, this
ended in 1994 when Alexander Lukashenko came to power and forged strong
links with the Russian Federation. Interestingly, the limited street name changes
that did occur in the early-2000s—such as “Francysk Skaryna Avenue” becoming
“Praspekt Nezelazhnasci” (Independence Avenue) and “Masherov Avenue”
changing to “Praspekt Peramozhcau” (Victors Avenue)—were linked to attempts
to cement Russian-oriented myths about what Russians call the “Great Patriotic
War” (WWII) in the Minsk landscape and Belorussian identity (Bylina 2013).
Here a realignment of state politics to ally with the Russian Federation (which
itself had not pursued an aggressive renaming strategy) underpinned the continuity
of Soviet-era street names in Belarus. These two examples thus illustrate the limits
of renaming as related to political continuity and a lack of political will for change
despite an apparently radical change in political order.
The limits to state power and the resulting lack of comprehensive renaming are
also evident in the case of streets in Romania named after Vasile Roaita during the
socialist era (1947–1989). Romania’s socialist regime lauded Roaita as a teenage
proletarian hero who was shot by the police during a strike in Bucharest’s railway
yards in 1933. Consequently, streets, schools, collective farms, and a seaside
resort were named after him: in 1954, there were nine such streets in Bucharest
alone (Light, Nicolae, and Suditu 2002). However, this celebration of Roaita
changed after Nicolae Ceauşescu assumed power in 1965. As he became the focus
of an extravagant personality cult, Ceauşescu was presented as the foremost young
activist in Romanian communism. Hence, Roaita swiftly fell from favor and was
effectively airbrushed from the historical narrative (Boia 2002). The streets in
Bucharest which commemorated Roaita were renamed, and, by 1973, only one
remained (located right on the very edge of the city). This was renamed in 1990
after the fall of Ceauşescu’s regime.
Yet, in Voluntari and Jilava, two settlements just outside Bucharest, and in two
villages in Transylvania, there are streets which have retained the name of Vasile
Roaita. All survived both the decommemoration of Roaita after Ceauşescu’s rise
to power, and the fall of the socialist regime. Moreover, in Voluntari there are a
number of other streets which continue to commemorate minor Romanian
Communist Party activists. The continued commemoration of Roaita is not an
isolated case. For example, there are five streets in Romania named “August 23,”
a hallowed date in Communist Party historiography which commemorates the
1944 overthrow of Romania’s pro-Axis leader, an event for which the communist
regime claimed the credit.
Why have these streets retained their names, despite a decree-law of March
1990 that called for the change of names which were no longer in concordance
with Romania’s new political aspirations? Ilfov County, in which both Voluntari
and Jilava are situated, has long been a stronghold of the Social Democratic Party
(Gallagher 2005), a party that, in the post-socialist period, has been favored by
former members of the Romanian Communist Party. Local politicians in Voluntari
and Jilava probably held a more favorable view of Romania’s socialist past and
were, therefore, less concerned to erase its symbolic legacy. The significance of
the case of Vasile Roaita is that it illustrates the limits of state-level political
authorities to enforce changes to streets and other urban landmarks. Even if there
is an “official” policy on which names are (or are not) ideologically appropriate,
there is no certainty that such a policy will be uniformly applied throughout the
country. As Verdery argues: “Policies may be made at the center, but they are
implemented in local settings, where those entrusted with them may ignore,
corrupt, overexecute, or otherwise adulterate them” (1991, 84). There is a
temptation to portray the implementation of street name changes as reflecting the
aspirations of a homogeneous political elite, but this may not always be the case.
This is probably the explanation for the four streets in Romania that still carry
Roaita’s name: local administrators responsible for decommemorating Roaita
neglected to do so, or did not consider it sufficiently important or urgent.
In other cases, a new political order may have the political will to rename the
urban landscape but lack the material or financial resources to implement their
policies. Renaming streets is often assumed to be relatively cheap (Azaryahu
2009), but this is not necessarily the case. A single new street name sign may not
in itself be expensive, but if multiple signs are needed for an individual street (and
multiple streets are to be renamed), the costs quickly mount. Furthermore,
following a change in political order, the new regime usually has other more
urgent financial commitments, particularly if radical political change is
accompanied by major economic restructuring (which was the case in many post-
socialist countries). While changing street names may account for a small
proportion of city budgets, it may be regarded by urban managers as a low priority
at a time of budget constraints (Light 2004; Gill 2005). Another consideration is
the costs to citizens that result from changing a street name (in terms of changing
addresses on identity documents). Indeed, such costs can be a major point of
debate in naming struggles and have a major political effect on the (un)willingness
of a government to impose a new name upon and through the landscape (e.g.,
Alderman and Inwood 2013). The result is that renaming streets can quickly cease
to be a priority. In other words, the renaming of streets may be an early declarative
and rhetorical act by an incoming regime, but seeing this process through to
completion may be much less important (and can be delegated to lower levels of
government who, in turn, may not carry it out).
In post-socialist Bucharest, for example, there are over 4,000 streets (many of
which were named to reflect the agenda and priorities of state socialism), but less
than 300 were renamed in the 1990s (Light 2004). Other studies of street renaming
in post-socialist capitals have recorded similar figures (e.g., Azaryahu 1997; Gill
2005; Palonen 2008; Marin 2012). Moreover, in Bucharest the majority of
renamings took place in the central part of the city: almost two-thirds of renamed
streets were within 4 km of the city center (Light 2004), with similar findings
reported in Moscow (Gill 2005). Although it had the opportunity to comprehensively
reconfigure Bucharest’s toponymic landscape, Bucharest’s City Hall opted for a
more restrained approach which concentrated on the most ideologically charged
names and on the city center. No doubt City Hall was well aware of the costs
involved in a more comprehensive purging of socialist-era street names. In 2000,
individual new name plates cost USD $4 each (Anon. 2000). Individually such a
sum is trivial, but if applied to a comprehensive renaming campaign throughout
the city, the costs can quickly become a major burden for local government.
Furthermore, City Hall had other priorities, such as renewing the city’s
infrastructure and assuring the provision of services. Consequently, the street
renaming process quickly ran out of steam and many streets outside the city center
retain names with distinctly socialist resonances, for example, “Street of the
Worker,” “Street of Concrete,” “Street of Reconstruction,” and “Road of the
Cooperative Farm” (for similar examples, see Azaryahu 1997; Gill 2005; Marin
2012). Again, the ability of regimes to implement comprehensive change in the
toponymic landscape can be limited and may founder on various practicalities.
Indeed, regimes may actually play a strategic game and focus on the centers of
capital cities.
Finally, elites with the power of renaming are not homogeneous. A variety of
state institutions and political elites may have different (or even competing)
agendas regarding renaming (Forest and Johnson 2002; Forest, Johnson, and Till
2004). For example, many of Bucharest’s metro stations were originally given
names reflecting the ideological agenda of the socialist state and many of these
survived the changes of 1989, such as “Square of Work,” “New Times,” “Peace,”
“May 1,” and (until 2009) “Peoples’ Army.” Although allocated in a particular
ideological context, these names are sufficiently ambiguous and can be
reinterpreted in a way appropriate for a post-socialist state. Here another key elite
actor—the company that owns the metro and its infrastructure—has taken a
different approach to renaming from that of other parts of the state. Again, states
and urban authorities are not all-powerful and continuities in naming may reflect
the actions of other influential actors.
These examples point to the limits of the political process of renaming streets
after revolutionary political change. In many instances (and particularly in post-
socialist contexts), such renaming is not comprehensive, driven by an ideological
imperative to purge the urban landscape of the symbols of the former regime.
Instead, the process is more pragmatic and the emphasis is on changing particular
names (those that are most ideologically inappropriate) in particular places (the
city center). The result is what we could call “leftover” or “residual” toponymies:
street names allocated by the former regime which in some way reflect the values
and agenda of that regime. More research is required to explore the extent to
which there is a consistent geography to such leftover toponymies (for example, a
greater likelihood for them to persist in the more peripheral parts of the city). That
the new regime is prepared for such street names to remain “in place” indicates
that the use of street names as proclamative ideological statements may be less
powerful than is assumed.
Street renaming and the actions of lower-level urban actors

While we have identified above how elites with the political power to rename the
urban landscape can fail to see the process through to completion, we know
practically nothing about the role played by a range of lower-level actors and
agents in the city who can, wilfully or unintentionally, subvert the attempts of
political elites to introduce new place names. The role of such actors in
implementing political decisions about changing street names has been almost
completely overlooked in the critical toponymy literature (yet, see Azaryahu
2012c). This suggests a need to focus on the everyday mundane governance of
street renaming and the labor required to achieve it, both of which can play a role
in the limits of renaming.
For urban managers to implement top-down policies of street renaming requires
the allocation of resources for the production of new signage, plus the labor costs
of installing it. Following a period of political change, the allocation of funding
may be uncertain (or reduced). Furthermore, urban managers may have more
urgent priorities in adjusting to the demands of the incoming political order.
Consequently, in balancing financial priorities, urban managers may decide that
they cannot immediately afford the costs of producing new signage in order to
implement street name changes and so may elect to delay the process until
appropriate resources are available. They may even ignore central directives about
renaming streets in order to focus on more pressing issues.
In post-socialist Bucharest, well over a decade after the collapse of Ceauşescu’s
regime, there were many streets which retained their socialist names and signage,
even though they had been officially renamed in the early-1990s. This can only
have caused confusion for the people who lived there, who may now have been
uncertain of their exact address. It also meant that taking a taxi to some parts of
the city necessitated using a socialist-era street name, and such a simple
performative utterance destabilizes official efforts to rename the urban landscape
(Kearns and Berg 2002). Such a delay in introducing new signage into the urban
environment following an official decision to change the names of streets has also
been reported in a range of other contexts (Azaryahu 1992, 2012c; Shoval 2013).
In other cases, new street name plates have been affixed alongside the old ones.
For example, in the city of Timişoara in western Romania (birthplace of the 1989
revolution), there are numerous instances where the socialist era street name (and
name plate) remained in place (in April 2016) alongside the new names and plates
(in a different format) allocated in the post-socialist era (Figure 11.1). This
apparently results from a decision by an official in the City Hall to retain the old
signage in order to avoid confusion about addresses among the residents of those
Figure 11.1 Old and new street names in Timişoara, Romania (2015). Strada Turgheniev
commemorates Ivan Turgenev, a nineteenth-century Russian writer. The
street was renamed in 1993 to commemorate a senior figure in the Romanian
Orthodox Church.
streets and to ease wayfinding within the city.1 In such instances, the role of a street
name as a means of spatial identification and orientation takes priority over its
semiotic role as a commemorative marker (Azaryahu 1996). The result is a curious
and unresolved form of parallel toponymy which, once again, raises questions
about the power and limits of ideologically motivated street name changes.
In Bucharest, there are many similar instances of socialist-era signage remaining
in place, but the explanations appear to be different. For example, in the center of
the city one of the principle arteries—“Boulevard of the Republic” (named in the
first months of the socialist era)—returned to its pre-WWII name of “Queen
Elisabeth Boulevard” in 1995. Yet, while many of the name plates with the
socialist-era toponym were removed, there were several that remained in place
throughout the late-1990s and early-2000s. One survived until late-2006 (when it
was removed during the preparations for Romania’s accession to the European
Union). Other examples of isolated socialist-era name plates can be found in many
parts of the city. A similar situation is apparent in Tbilisi, Georgia, where new
street names, particularly in the central parts of the city (those most likely to be
encountered by tourists), are bilingual in Georgian and English. These have
replaced older street name signs in Russian. However, not far from the city center,
there are numerous surviving Soviet-era signs in Georgian and Russian, even on
renovated buildings. In some cases, workmen have decided to simply spray
pebble-dash over the Russian language sign rather than taking it down, leaving a
ghostly remnant of the previous regime.
This points to the role of another important group of urban actors: the workers
who are responsible for affixing new street name plates and taking down the old
ones. The actions of this group play a vital role in implementing broader political
decisions about renaming streets: they are responsible for literally putting the new
names “in place.” However, there is the possibility that they can also thwart the
process in a variety of ways. In the case of Bucharest, we can only speculate about
why city workers neglected to remove the socialist-era signage. It may be that
they did not notice the old signs, or that the old signage is physically difficult to
remove due to the way that it is fixed to buildings. Alternatively, workers may
have chosen not to remove the old name plates if they were not given explicit
instructions to do so. The ideological fervor which drives state-led, top-down
renaming strategies may mean little to workers who have to actually physically
implement these changes (some of whom may decide that it is more practical not
to remove the old names and signs). Indeed, by the time the new names had been
chosen and were ready to be installed, many of the workers were probably entirely
indifferent to the remnants of the socialist era which remained in the city. Here the
mundane practices and attitudes of city workers and the materiality of the old
signage combine to underpin the persistence of toponymies in the urban landscape.
The materiality and “agency” of old nameplates can thus also play a role in the
limits of top-down political renaming projects.
Another important group of urban actors includes those responsible for making
the new signage. In the context of a broader confusion about the changing names
of streets, they may misunderstand their instructions. This appears to be the only
explanation for cases in central Bucharest where new signage was produced and
affixed to buildings which still displayed the socialist-era name. For example,
Strada Măndineşti in the historic center of the city was renamed Strada Sf. Dimitru
(after a nearby church) in 1993 but signage installed in the 1990s listed its original
name with the “changed” name in brackets and some of these signs remained in
place in December 2015 (Figure 11.2).
In the case of post-socialist Bucharest, the managers of apartment blocks
represent another group of urban actors who operate independently from the city
authorities responsible for street naming and whose actions undermined the
process. In Bucharest, the address of the block is painted above each entrance and
many blocks also display small metal plates indicating particular entrances and
the apartments which can be accessed from them. If a street changed its name in
the post-socialist period, then it was the role of each block manager to change the
signage. However, many block managers (who have found their role diminished
in the post-socialist period) were slow to do this or did not even bother. They may
have lacked funds to have the address repainted; they may have been unwilling to
change a name to which they and the residents were accustomed; they may not
have thought it important; or they may have simply forgotten about it. The
outcome is that socialist-era names can still be found on blocks, even if the street
signage displays the correct name (Figure 11.3).
The sometimes conflicting actions of city governments and the committees
responsible for implementing changes in street names can also play a role here. It
is well known that urban administrations are complex, and sometimes characterized
Figure 11.2 A street name sign in central Bucharest (2005). Strada Măndineşti was
renamed Strada Sf [Saint] Dumitru in 1993. However, the signage gives the
former name with the new name in brackets.
Figure 11.3 Old and new street names on an apartment block in Bucharest (2009).
During the socialist era the street was named Strada Furnirului (Street of
the Wood Laminators). It was renamed Strada Vintila Mihăilescu (after a
Romanian geographer) in 1992. However, the old name remains on a
number of the apartment blocks along this street.
by political disagreement or poor communication between departments. This

appears to explain a rather confused approach to renaming a metro station in
Minsk. In 1992, the former “Lenin Square” was renamed “Independence Square,”
as was the nearby metro station. However, the toponymic cleansing was far from
thorough as the name “Lenin Square” remained on signs within the metro system
(in addition to a surviving monument of Lenin) (Bylina 2013). In 2003, the city
authorities decided to reintroduce the name “Lenin Square” to the metro station.
Public protests followed and the street names commission within the city’s
Executive Committee proposed to reinstate “Independence Square” as the name
for the metro station. This was never implemented with the commission citing
public protest against the name change. Thus the Soviet-era toponym “Lenin
Square” has reappeared and persists due to disagreements within the city authority.
The toponymic traces of a former regime can thus survive for a wide variety of
reasons, including a lack of resources or political will to replace them;
misunderstanding of what changes are to be implemented; a possible unwillingness
among workers to do anything more than instructed; a lack of interest in the
renaming of streets; or simply a failure to recognize it as important. A political
decision to change a street name does not necessarily mean that the name will be
changed (at least not immediately) or that the material signage which marked the
former name will be removed. These examples illustrate how the projects of
political elites can be compromised through the mundane actions of a wider range
of lower-level urban actors (both within and outside the administrative apparatus
of the local state). For these reasons, top-down projects to rename the urban
landscape can be much less immediate, visible, and effective than is sometimes
supposed. Again, this points to the limits of the process of renaming the urban
landscape after a period of political change.
Everyday popular responses to street name changes

Although there has been considerable academic interest in the renaming of streets
following political change, most researchers have focused on the top-down,
political-administrative process of renaming. However, the responses of the urban
population to such renamings have received only scant attention. Indeed, the
wider issue of how people use urban place names is an area where more research
is required (Azaryahu 2011; Light and Young 2014). Among political elites there
seems to be an unstated assumption that renaming the urban landscape for political
ends will be effective; that new names will be accepted by the inhabitants of the
city and will be quickly absorbed into everyday life. However, street name changes
do not necessarily enjoy popular support and can be contested or resisted
(Azaryahu 1996; Kearns and Berg 2002; Alderman 2008; Rose-Redwood,
Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010; Alderman and Inwood 2013; Light and Young
2014), such that new names attributed to the urban landscape can fail to gain
widespread popular acceptance (de Soto 1996; Myers 1996; Rose-Redwood 2008;
Marin 2012; Shoval 2013; Light and Young 2014).
Urban residents can oppose street name changes for a number of reasons. They
may feel an attachment to the old name and this can be especially important
following radical political change when residents may look for the reassurance
offered by the familiar (Gill 2005). Here it is important to acknowledge that
ideologically imposed street names may undergo a process of “semantic
displacement” (Azaryahu 1996, 321), through which the name becomes detached
from the person or event which it commemorates. To the inhabitants of the city, a
name may be understood as just a name (rather than a proclamative ideological
statement). Indeed, many urban dwellers may not even know the significance of
what or who is commemorated by a street name but still form mundane attachments
to it as the place where they live or socialize. Therefore, they may be unsympathetic
to top-down attempts to change it.
Alternatively, residents may contest a new name because they do not identify
with who or what is commemorated by it. While the incoming regime may seek to
impose a new hegemonic narrative of national history, not everyone in the
population will necessarily agree with the choice of new names. Furthermore,
residents may distrust the motives behind the attribution of a new name. A further
reason why residents may oppose street renamings is for the personal inconvenience
it causes them. To understand this we only have to think of the number of people,
institutions, and organizations that we need to inform if we move house and
change our address. Changing the name of a street places a burden on the residents
of that street to change their identity papers, and inform employers, banks, utility
companies, and friends of their new address. This all involves time and expense
and for this reason renamings can be unpopular (particularly if there is a delay
between a political change and the subsequent changing of street names).
The actual practices (or “tactics” following De Certeau 1984) of resistance to a
new toponym that has been imposed by political elites can take two forms. First,
citizens can simply refuse to use a newly allocated name (Yeoh 1992; Myers
1996; Shoval 2013). For example, in Bucharest in 1997 the Christian Democratic
National Peasant Party, which controlled the City Hall, elected to change the
name of “May 1 Boulevard” to “Ion Mihalache Boulevard” (after a pre-WWII
politician who was a member of the party). This renaming was deeply unpopular
with many in the city who argued that May 1 represented an international day of
worker’s solidarity that did not have exclusively socialist associations. The
renaming was also interpreted as a rather clumsy attempt by the ruling party to
foreground one of its “own” people (Light and Young 2014). Consequently, many
Bucharesters deliberately do not use the “official” name (preferring to continue to
use “May 1 Boulevard”), and a group of residents of the boulevard submitted a
formal request for it to return to its original name (Anon. 2002). Shops and
businesses located on the boulevard frequently use both names in their publicity
in acknowledgment that there are many who do not know the boulevard by its
official name. Thus toponyms can continue in everyday practice even if officially
removed, further illustrating the limits of renaming practices.
A second way to oppose a change of street name is to seek to intervene in the
administrative process, either to prevent a new name being attributed, or to seek
to reverse a previous renaming. The rationale for this is often a mixture of the
ideologically laden nature of street names with more mundane and prosaic
considerations, such as confusion among urban residents, concerns with the cost
and inconvenience associated with having the street where they live renamed, or
popular attachment to long-established names. For example, in Moscow in the
early-1990s, the Presidium of Moscow City Council began a renaming process
during which it changed about 70 street names. However, public opposition to this
process grew, particularly linked to the confusion caused in everyday life by the
renamings, with the result that the City Council halted the renaming process,
ensuring the survival of names which were due for removal (Vakhrusheva 1993).
In one particular case, that of renaming “Ulitsa Pushkinskaya” to “Bolshaya
Dmitrovka,” Muscovites opposed renaming on grounds of the cost to local
government at a time when it had other priorities and the fact that Pushkin’s name
was strongly associated in their minds with that location.
A further example from Moscow illustrating this complex mix of political
opposition and more mundane considerations is that of what is now “Alexander
Solzhenitsyn Street,” which was renamed in 2008 from “Big Communist Street”
(Harding 2008). This name change was the subject of political opposition by the
communist Left Front youth organization which mounted a legal challenge.
However, residents also opposed the change because of the cost and inconvenience
of altering essential documents. Here Muscovites signed a petition by the hundreds
and residents of the street took more direct action, physically tearing street signs
from buildings (Harding 2008). In the Siberian city of Irkutsk, architects and
historians petitioned the city to halt renaming proposals on the grounds of
protecting the historical value represented by the toponymic landscape and fears
that residents would become confused (Goble 2013). However, counter-examples
can be found. Bylina (2013), for example, reports that the public, mass media, and
intellectuals in Minsk express discomfort with the continuity of Soviet-era street
names in the post-Soviet period, illustrating that public responses to renaming
processes will be highly varied in different contexts.
However, it is possible to expand the terms of the debate here by recognizing that
the use of old toponyms can persist even when officially and materially they have
been changed, simply because of everyday practices and habit. Geographers, and
those studying the politics of toponymic change, have perhaps been too keen to
focus on resistance. While the contestation of new street names is important, we also
have to recognize that it is not the only popular process which subverts the imposition
of the new names. We also need to consider a range of unreflexive practices and
habits among urban residents that are often overlooked (though see De Soto 1996;
Rose-Redwood 2008; Light and Young 2014). Elsewhere, for example, we consider
the case of “Moghioroș Market” in Bucharest, a socialist-era toponym that
commemorates Alexandru Moghioroș (1911–1969), who was a senior member of
the Romanian Communist Party (Light and Young 2014). After 1989, Bucharest’s
City Hall changed the name to “Drumul Taberei Market,” reflecting the name of the
neighborhood in which it is located. However, the name “Moghioroș” remains in
daily use, sometimes instead of the new name and sometimes in parallel to it. The
name is largely devoid of its original meaning (few people remember who it
commemorates). Local people continue to use the original name because they have
always done so, or they hear others use it, rather than because they are resisting the
de-Communization strategies of the post-socialist Romanian state. Businesses also
use the old name so that people understand where they are located. In this case, it is
simply mundane, habitual practices that keep the old toponym in current use.
This section has explored a little understood aspect of the politics of toponymic
continuity and the limits to political power when it comes to renaming strategies,
namely public responses to renaming. For a variety of reasons, reflecting a
complex mix of the political and the practical, residents may actively oppose
renamings, seek to reverse them, or choose to ignore official renaming practices.
These can be political actions but can also be due to habit or even apathy. These
points also raise the question of the extent to which people in their everyday lives
pay attention to, or connect with, street names and changes. Publics may not share
the importance attached by political elites to new names, which highlights the
performative limits of street names as political statements.
Conclusion
The study of toponymic cleansing has rightly established itself as a prominent and
popular theme within the critical toponymy literature. Such studies will continue
to be important, not least because they reveal the significant role of street renaming
in the interplay between ideology, power, identity, urban governance, and
landscape change. However, in this chapter, we have argued that critical toponymic
studies should go beyond examining the issue of street renaming as part of regime
change to also consider the “politics of toponymic continuity.” To conclude this
chapter, we identify three areas which we consider central to developing this
research agenda.
First, more research could address continuities in ideologically charged
toponyms, from the scale of individual streets to the toponymic landscape of
entire cities. Previous studies have tended to focus on which streets are renamed
and why, but more investigation is required of why some streets are not renamed.
This is not so much about a quantitative evaluation of how many streets retain
their names—after all, it is unrealistic to think that an urban administration would
seek to change all street names—but about the politics of which are deemed to not
require eradication. Such a choice is value-laden and inherently political and may
involve retaining (or ignoring) street names which may, from external perspectives,
seem appropriate for changing. However, historical figures and events are
ambiguous and are always socially and politically constructed. Hence, while it
might seem obvious that a new regime would want to remove ideologically
inappropriate names, implementing this process may be considerably less
straightforward and people can have all kinds of complex relationships to place
names. The politics of such relationships and choices—by states, urban authorities,
and urban populations—require much more thorough investigation. This needs to
be done in the context of carrying out more nuanced analyses of the
comprehensiveness of renaming, which considers the more complex geographies
of renaming and continuity as part of the same process. The issue of geographical
complexity in the thoroughness of renaming, from the intra-urban scale to looking
across the urban hierarchy outside capital cities, requires much more consideration,
and such studies could also be more sensitive to any temporal dynamics.
Second, a focus on the politics of continuity also demands a greater appreciation
of both the messy politics of renaming and the potentially incoherent strategizing
and implementation that follows. Previous research has perhaps tended to draw
too neat a link between regime change and street renaming, implying a
straightforward political process. However, political tensions and in-fighting (not
just between political viewpoints and parties, but within urban administrations or
between state- and urban-scale administrations) require greater attention (e.g.,
Palonen 2008). Further down the line, what is really lacking is an understanding
of how lower-level actors within and outside of urban administrations (committees,
urban managers, block managers, work units, and workers) influence this process.
In particular, it may be the case that the fate of particular street names rests on
mundane decisions around budgets and resources, or the approaches of the
workers detailed to actually take down old nameplates and put up new ones.
Last, a major research lacuna is the ways in which various publics form different
relationships to street names, beginning with the question of the extent to which
street names (and changes) actually do resonate in any way within people’s
everyday lives. The assumption that changing the toponymic landscape actually
has an impact on urban residents requires much more critical investigation.
Clearly in some places people do react to changes to street names, but this may not
necessarily constitute political opposition, and may be informed by much more
mundane and prosaic considerations (like cost and inconvenience). Alternatively,
urban residents may be happy to continue living with street names which incoming
regimes might consider ideologically inappropriate because they have developed
long-term personal and even emotional relationships with those names. Engaging
with the issue of residents’ emotional and everyday lived geographies of street
names, and how they impact upon continuity and change, is a major challenge for
our proposed “politics of toponymic continuity,” which itself suggests a new
direction for critical toponymies.
Note
1 We are grateful to Remus Creţan for this observation.
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12 Toponymic complexities in
Sub-Saharan African cities
Informative and symbolic aspects
from past to present
Liora Bigon and Ambe J. Njoh
Introduction
The linguist Pièrre Alexander noticed that on the official map of Cameroun
made before independence a certain “Ambababoum” is shown as an important
village on the road from Yaoundé to Bafia. However, it does not exist and has
never existed within living memory.
(Baesjou 1988, 1)
Rather than relating to any reality, the above quotation is a colonialist fictional
toponymic construct of a rural, not urban, environment. Risking criticism for
exposing the colonized spatiality in Sub-Saharan Africa to ridicule, we use this
quotation as an opening for discussing the reverse. Our interest is not in existing
names for non-existing places, but in non-existing names for existing places. In
short, we are interested in the problem of toponymic ambiguity in urban Sub-
Saharan Africa.
Toponymic inscription—that is, place naming generally and street naming in
particular—as well as physical addressing systems, are critical components of an
effective and efficient urban management system.1 It is central to the orderly,
systematic, and semiotic construction of the city. By designating locations and
pronouncing certain thoroughfares as distinct urban units, it also conflates urban
space and the symbolic realm of cultural signification (Azaryahu 2009). In this
chapter, both the informative and symbolic dimensions of toponymic inscription
are analyzed in light of three interrelated spatial problems in contemporary Africa.
The first is the failure by municipal authorities to prioritize toponymic inscription.
Municipal authorities in Sub-Saharan Africa have seldom prioritized the need to
identify places, produce meaningful maps, codify streets, or generate
comprehensible and unambiguous addressing systems for their cities (Njoh 2010).
The second concerns the colonial roots or origins of the toponymic ambiguity
problematic in Africa. Particularly, we discuss generic and specific names in the
colonial urban vocabularies of both French and British regimes, the main
colonizing powers on the continent. In the process, we expose the dualistic nature
of the relevant nomenclature in the colonial period. Here, we hasten to note that
street naming was a consequence of residential segregation on a hierarchicalized
racial basis (Bigon 2012). The third concerns power struggles in built space,
Toponymic complexities in African cities 203
particularly critical during the colonial period. We use this period as a point of
departure for a more intense focus on the nuances and complexities of urban
toponymy in the postcolonial era.
Despite its indisputable importance in urban management in Sub-Saharan
Africa, toponymic inscription has been accorded only scant attention in the
relevant literature. Njoh has expressed dismay at the tendency to ignore this
problem. He contends that with the exception of a few (Farvacque-Vitkovic,
Godin, Leroux, and Chavez 2005; Coetzee and Cooper 2007; Njoh 2010; Bawumia
2012), most analysts have ignored this area of study. Consequently, several gaps
remain in knowledge of its implications for socio-economic development in
Africa. In recent critical toponymic scholarship, street names are recognized as
products of cultural, social, and political struggles over spatial and cognate
toponymic practices (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). However,
the manner in which these struggles are resolved, and the resultant street name,
constitute a function of several factors, including the historical, socio-cultural,
geographical, and political contexts. Thus, knowledge of the implications of
toponymic inscription is best fostered by contextualizing the variables of interest.
By examining the toponymic inscription problematic in Sub-Saharan Africa,
we go beyond “simply reflecting the impress of the state or elite ideologies”
(Myers 1996, 237). This chapter seeks to unearth the impact of toponyms on
spatial policies and everyday practices—be they of the “top-down” or “bottom-up”
variety. We draw on specific examples from a variety of cities throughout Sub-
Saharan Africa, with a focus on Cameroon and Senegal where we conducted field
work, for illustrative purposes.
Urban vocabularies, toponymic inscription, and implications
Clearing his throat to overcome his nerves, he began by criticizing the countries
of Europe, who dazzled us with the sun of independence, when in fact we’re
still dependent on them, since we still have avenues named after General de
Gaulle and General Leclerc and President Coti and President Pompidou, but in
Europe there are no avenues named after Sese Seko, or Idi Amin Dada, or
Jean-Bedel Bokassa or any of the other fine men known personally to him, and
valued for their loyalty, humanity, and respect of the rights of man.
(Mabanckou 2010, 14–15)
The above words were once uttered by the Cameroonian-born writer Alain
Mabanckou. The words highlight, though in an ironic way, the inherent tension
between African states and their former European métropoles in postcolonial
times. The words also draw attention to a more worrisome problem, which arises
from the tendency to adopt appellations from Eurocentric lexicons as toponyms in
Sub-Saharan Africa. While content-related aspects of such names are not our
main concern, we remark that unambiguous addresses of the genre indicated by
Mabanckou—intended for commemorative or other purposes—are relatively rare
204 Liora Bigon and Ambe J. Njoh
in Africa. Where they exist, their origin can be traced to the colonial era and their
spatiality is relatively limited.
Postcolonial authorities have rarely considered the task of developing a precise
address and property identification system a priority. A precise address is one that
includes unambiguous details on the permanent or temporary location of a person,
event, place, or thing: addresses of this genre are rarely found in African cities.
However, we would be remiss if we failed to mention recent developments that
have included, if only peripheral, attention from politico-administrative authorities
in the region. For instance, according to the Ghanaian administrator Mahamudu
Bawumia, a well-designed system of street, place, and property identification is a
prerequisite for the transformation of Ghana’s economy into a modern and globally
competitive one. Such a system, Bawumia (2012) insists, is necessary to facilitate
the navigation of built space, thereby facilitating commercial and related activities.
Perhaps most importantly, precise and unambiguous addresses are necessary
for the proper functioning of modern navigation-facilitating gadgets that depend
on Geographic Positioning Systems (GPS). The need for precise street, place, and
property identification systems has been amplified in recent years by the processes
of globalization. Globalization has resulted in rapidly integrating all regions,
including Africa. Africa can neither develop nor derive any benefits from this
process without redressing its toponymic inscription problem (Anson 2007;
UN-DESA 2008). Regimes of urban management are gravely compromised by
the inability of service delivery and other devices to function in Sub-Saharan
Africa. At the micro-economic level, for example, while throughout the Global
North a variety of goods and services can now be ordered and paid for online
through smart phones from the comfort of one’s home, online transactions in
Africa remain a luxury in a few cases, and non-existent in most. The region is
replete with cities characterized by nondescript spatial structures. A paramount
feature of these cities is that they contain numberless buildings, nameless streets,
or streets that bear names that are not sign-posted (Njoh 2003).
Like the modern spatial structures with which they are associated, the sign-
posting of street names, and other toponyms, in Sub-Saharan Africa is a colonial
legacy. It is therefore paradoxical to associate the problem of nondescript spatial
structures in the region with colonialism. Yet, this is indeed the case. During the
colonial era, urban Africa reposed on a dual platform. Within the framework of
this dualistic urban system, colonial towns were divided into two main districts
(Njoh 1999, 2007; Bigon 2009). One district, the Native District (or la ville des
indigènes), was exclusively for members of the “native” population. The other
section, the European District (or la ville des europèenes), was, as the name
suggests, an exclusively European enclave. While several “in-between” spaces
existed, we hasten to note that, in general, the native districts covered a much
larger geographic area than their European counterparts throughout Sub-Saharan
Africa. Unsurprisingly, the native districts were disproportionately underserved,
if at all, when it came to basic service and infrastructure provisioning.
Colonial authorities were determined to establish European spatial and
environmental standards in the colonies. However, they were significantly
constrained by their shoestring budgets. This severely limited the extent to which
they could transform their wishes into real and implementable policies. In the
spatial development arena, this meant a substantial scaling-down of the orbit of
certain policies. In the case of toponymic inscription, the orbit was limited to the
European districts. Thus, while streets and places were christened and their names
sign-posted in these districts, no commensurate initiatives were undertaken in the
native districts. Over time, the native areas, complete with their nondescript
structures, expanded to usurp the European districts. Thus, toponymic ambiguity
in urban Sub-Saharan Africa can be seen as rooted in the colonial policies that
encouraged the growth of native districts in urban areas.
It is important to appreciate the basis and raison d’être for selecting street
names and other toponyms in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa. For colonial
authorities, the opportunity to christen a place or street there was often considered
an occasion to embellish the power of their native countries in a foreign land. Our
observation thus is in line with Brenda Yeoh’s (1992) assertion that, more often
than not, the traditions of toponymic inscription sought to express the power of the
“namer” over the object being named. In British colonial Singapore as in colonial
Sub-Saharan Africa, place names were drawn from a Eurocentric spatial and
environmental design lexicon. Ignoring the interest of indigenes of the colonized
territories, urban toponyms as well as the built space of which they are a part,
reflect the European vision of what a human settlement should be in terms of its
form and function. As to their functioning, colonial built space and commensurate
features were designed to benefit members of the expatriate population. In line
with the thinking that emerged in concert with the Age of Enlightenment, the
establishment of a network of official street names introduced a sense of order into
what was otherwise nondescript urban space. In contrast—and the very existence
of a contrast played a vital role in the formation of colonial imageries—the spatial
structure of the indigenous districts was nondescript.
The dualistic urban structure that was created by colonial authorities is not only
of historical significance. Rather, it has far-reaching implications for contemporary
development efforts. After all, this is the structure that colonial authorities
bequeathed to their indigenous heirs. Thus, it follows that it is the structure
comprising the nucleus around which contemporary urban growth has been
occurring throughout the continent. With the demise of colonialism and the
concomitant departure of the Europeans, one would have expected an end to the
dualistic urban structure. This was certainly not the case. Instead, no sooner had
the Europeans departed than they were replaced by elite members of the emerging
bureaucracy. Accordingly, what used to be a dual urban structure characterized by
a European and a native district became one containing an exclusive enclave for
the socio-economic elite and a district for the rest of society.
With considerable success, the indigenous leadership has jealously guarded the
privileged enclaves of their European predecessors. Currently, these enclaves,
complete with carefully written and conspicuously posted street names, exist as
islands of spatial orderliness in an ocean of spatial chaos.2 Figure 12.1, a
photograph of a major intersection in Cameroon’s commercial city, Douala,
Figure 12.1 Clearly written, conspicuously posted, and well-positioned street signs at an

intersection in the formal area of Akwa, the erstwhile colonial district, of
Douala, Cameroon (photograph by Ambe Njoh)
vividly captures this situation. Yet it would be an exaggeration if not sheer

fabrication to say that complete spatial order is the order of the day in any part of
urban Sub-Saharan Africa. This is because even in the most ideal situations one
finds streets that go by two or more names (Njoh 2010). Usually, one of these
names, the more popular one, is the one known to the urban residents while the
other, the less popular one, appears in official records.
Toponymic inscription in British and French colonial

Sub-Saharan Africa
It was a gardened city. A great number of the inhabitants spent their lives on
the gardens, and the fountains and parks … around that city, just like all the
cities we know, like Johannesburg for instance, grew up a shadow poverty
and beastliness. A shanty town. Around that marvellous ordered city, another
one of hungry and dirty and short-lived people. And one day the people of the
outer city overran the inner one, and destroyed it.
(Lessing 1972, 151)
The above words belong to a renowned novelist from segregated Zimbabwe

(formerly Southern Rhodesia). They suggest that toponymic constructs in that
country were a consequence of both actual and conceptual spatial divisions.
Conceptual spatial divisions determined actual spatial divisions, and vice versa.
Zimbabwe was not unique in this regard. Rather, such spatial divisions, binary
oppositions, and contradictions constituted a ubiquitous feature of colonial Africa
as a whole. We focus more intensely on the urban centers as opposed to peripheries
in order to expose their bipartite and imaginative character as well as related
associations and inherent ironies. Our empirical referents are the territories that
came under the colonial orbit of Britain and France, the dominant colonial powers
in the region.
An Anglophone glimpse
Embracing an anthropological qualitative insight, the generic language of British
colonial urbanism has been analyzed in some detail by Anthony King (1976). By
dwelling on key notions such as the “cantonment,” “hill station,” “mall,” and
“bungalow-compound complex,” King illuminated the reliable connections
between classifying terminological systems and colonial space, conceived as a
social, cultural, behavioral, and perceptual space. However, when trying to move
away from the colonial urban “heart”/“center” (in India) towards its colonized
“fringe”/“periphery,” an equivalent account is lacking from King’s pioneering
study, especially from the indigenous viewpoint. Another prominent account of
indisputable historiographic value that sheds light on colonial urban space and
toponymy is the 1922 work of Lord Lugard.3 Yet Lugard’s work not only lacks
critical perspective, it also fails to include indigenous urban forms or the
perceptions of indigenous people of their settlements. In his comprehensive
account, Lugard actually sought to establish the British colonial vision regarding
political doctrines and economies, including the structure and terminologies of the
colonial urban forms.
British colonial urbanism was mainly characterized by racial segregation. The
resultant spatial structure segregated Europeans from Africans by creating
separate residential areas for the expatriate minority on elevated terrain. Officially,
this dual spatial structure which accompanied the policy of “indirect rule” was
designed to promote public health—the latter also served as a pretext for planning-
law codification. For example, Lugard’s Township Ordinance of 1917 contained
a health provision whose functioning, it was claimed, depended on racial
segregation. The concept of “township” as defined by the ordinance meant an
enclave outside of the native administration and jurisdiction, separately governed
and reserved for Europeans and non-Europeans. The township was further sub-
divided into smaller residential units, and served like the hub as opposed to the
periphery of human settlements (Lugard 1922, 150–152; Home 1983). In apartheid
South Africa, however, the concept of “township” usually referred to urban
enclaves that were built on the periphery of towns and cities, usually set aside for
non-whites. Apart from the fact that the non-white areas were poorly equipped,
they were sometimes turgid with large informal settlements (Mabin 1992).
Moreover, in the local parlance, the term “township” connotes “suburb.”
An essential physical component of the Lugardian township was the “greenbelt”
or “sanitary cordon.” This was typically an open space of at least 440 yards that
served to separate European from African residential areas. This minimum
distance was based on the belief that such a distance was too great for malaria-
causing mosquitoes to traverse (it was clear that mosquitoes could actually be
carried by the wind much farther) (Lugard 1922, 148–149; Home 1997, 148). We
shall only stress here a striking irony in the Lugardian scheme, which was the
conspicuous absence of the indigenous town from urban development plans. Yet,
rather early during the colonial era the indigenous town throughout Sub-Saharan
Africa had expanded and was encroaching upon the “center” of the colonial
administrative, business, and residential hub. Failure to include such towns on
colonial city maps constitutes a manifestation of this problem.4 Thus, within the
colonial mindset, the “indigenous urbanite” was not conceptually an integral part
of the “city.” It was especially in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa that the “other”
(part of the) city was also an object apart from the world. The ville réelle, in
contrast to the ville officielle, was essentially marginalized and peripheralized.
Representing the “otherness” that stood in binary opposition to “our” civilized
spatial model, the African indigenous town was considered—if we may borrow
Achille Mbembe’s words—“the intractable, the mute, the abject, a failed and
incomplete example of something else” (2001, 1–4).
Its vociferous silence is noticeable in the colonial documentation, and if a
reference or description was given to this seemingly constant and ultimate
periphery, it was usually negative. In British Zanzibar, the British architect and
town planner Henry Vaughan Lanchester suggested, in the 1920s, a blueprint for
a layout of what he called the “hutting grounds to the east” (Myers and Muhajir
2014, 99–101). This area was segregated from new European suburbs. At about
the same time authorities were also launching sporadic attacks on the “hutting”
phenomenon in British colonial Lagos. And, in the discourse of toponymic
inscription, Lagos gained notoriety in colonial circles for the many, albeit
pejorative, names by which it was known. Some referred to it as “a rubbish heap,”
“a rabbit warren of shanties and rickety wooden ‘upstairs’, awash with mud and
garbage,” and so on (Wren 1952 [1924], 10; Leith-Ross 1983, 85). In 1946, a
report by the Lagos Town Planning Commission characterized the outlook of
indigenous Yoruba cities as “disgraceful,” concluding that even Lagos, which had
grown increasingly cosmopolitan, “remains a Yoruba village with a village
mentality” (Report 1946, 17). However, the generic terms “slums” and “squatters,”
problematic and relational in themselves, dominated the colonial planning
vocabulary after the Second World War.
A Francophone glimpse
A remarkable attribute of contemporary toponymic inscriptions in urban “centers”
as opposed to “peripheries” in French colonial urbanism is their striking similarities
to their British counterparts. This revelation is surprising considering the overt
differences in colonial doctrines and administrative organization between both
regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bigon 2014). The idea of a socio-spatial and
racial division through residential segregation prevailed in the French-speaking
territories (including Belgian Congo). But unlike the English-speaking colonies
(including South Africa), racial residential segregation was enforced there rather
informally. Within this framework the urban “center” was the only part that was
considered the “real” and “civilized” city. It was meant for the white population,
while the urban “periphery” was designated as the non-European zone.
In the French colonial cities such as Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), Brazzaville
(Congo, PRC), Kayes (French Sudan, present-day Mali), and Dakar (Senegal), the
neighborhood of the expatriate population was called Plateau. The “Plateaux”
prototypes were designated and configured as the European administrative and
residential districts. Originally implying higher ground, this term, a key notion in
the French colonial urban discourse, represented the ideals and the elitist dimension
of the French presence in West Africa. Geographically, the Plateau as a preferred
zone that was intended for the expatriate population was associated with public
health considerations and with the tradition of military camps of the European
colonial powers. These camps, especially overseas, were generally placed at a
distance from the local population, as the cases of the British “cantonment” (and
“Hill Station”) in India or Sierra Leone show (King 1976; Goerg 1997). In the
French case, topography was employed to symbolize the unequal distribution of
socio-political power between the Europeans and the locals. The symbolic
meaning of Plateau was particularly conspicuous in Niamey (Niger), where the
European quarter that was so-named was in fact not established on higher ground
at all. In Kayes, a few structures and the presence of only a small number of
military and civilian French servicemen was enough to justify this name.5
Subsequent to the demise of colonialism, these previously exclusive European
enclaves became privileged urban spaces for the indigenous socio-economic and
politico-administrative elite.
In the French colonial urban discourse, the Plateau was often regarded as the
“European city” (ville europèenne) or “white city” (ville blanche). Its African
counterpart was branded the “African city” (ville africaine), “indigenous village”
(village indigène), “village of the blacks” (village des noirs), or “indigenous
quarter/neighborhood” (quartier indigène). In North Africa, it was also called the
“new city” (ville nouvelle), in order to distinguish it from the “old city,” or the
“traditional city,” of the indigenous population.6 The Plateau was also occasionally
referred to as the “urban zone” (zone urbaine), while its African counterpart was
called “semi-urban zone” (zone semi-urbaine). In many places the European part
of the city was called the “residential zone” (zone résidentielle), even where it did
not actually serve residential purposes. This contrasted with the “African quarters/
neighborhoods” (quartiers africains). In some cases the term “cite” was used in
reference to the African district. This is quite ironic because it bears medieval
connotations in French, as opposed to the term “ville” (city) (Topalov 2012).
Through the usage of this terminology, the narrative of the colonizer, his urban
practices, values, and building standards were promoted as the ultimate and absolute
ones. The “periphery” of the colonized was crystallized as an antagonist, considered
only partly urbanized or as an essentially rural sphere in relation to the white area.
Official toponymic inscriptions such as street names were almost exclusively
identified with the Plateaux. In early colonial Dakar, for instance, these consisted of
commemorative names reflecting the imagery of the French sector alone (Faure
1914, 148–154). If nothing else, this served to alienate the indigenous population
from the city center. Outside of Dakar’s Plateau, only the two streets that linked it to
the surrounding area bore any official and sign-posted names. The names in this
particular case are noteworthy for one reason. They were outside the norm of French
colonial toponymic practices because they commemorated Africans. However,
those so commemorated were two Senegalese leaders who had cooperated with the
French regime during their territorial conquest initiatives. The Médina, a neighboring
quarter spartanly planned by the colonial administration in the 1910s to house the
Dakarois, comprised numbered street names, which were not clearly sign-posted
(Figure 12.2). Moreover, Dakar’s Médina and certain areas of its Plateau were
referred to by another informal set of names that resulted from a bottom-up naming
process. These names were used by the autochthones (Bigon 2008).
Similar to their British counterparts, colonial authorities in Dakar also
conceptually and administratively excluded indigenous areas from the municipal
borders. Also, as was the case in the British colonies, French colonial authorities
sought to eliminate huts from urban areas and their vicinities. Here, authorities
tolerated nothing but buildings of permanent materials or what they referred to as
“en dur.” Perishable materials, or anything that was not considered as “en dur”
(mud, cloth, straw, cardboard, tarred carton, and lattice-work) were illegal in the
Figure 12.2 A house at the corner of Streets No. 5 and No. 8 in Dakar’s Médina. The
resident has sign-posted it by hand, indicating his occupation (photograph by
Liora Bigon).
colonial urban centers. Outside of their official borders, in what gradually became
villages (or quartiers) indigènes, regulations were less strict, and non-permanent
building materials were allowed.7 By establishing two sets of laws for different
regions sharing the same urban space, the development of the whole of the
municipal area seemed unnecessary. Yet despite all the efforts on the part of the
colonial authorities, the straw-hut-landscape never entirely disappeared from
these colonial towns. Considered as “organic,” “spontaneous,” and “random,”
these sometimes improvised, but nevertheless contextually relevant structures,
became the ultimate image of these towns.
By the period of decolonization, the ever-growing gap between the European
beaux quartiers and the African bidonvilles became stark. The term “bidonville,”
that is, a “shanty-town” or “slum,” referred to the temporary building materials
that were used for traditional construction. The term is derived literally from the
French bidon, meaning “tin can.” It was originally associated with the empty oil
containers that were abundant, and served as roofing material especially in North
Africa during the Second World War (Abu-Lughod 1980, 330). This derogatory
French term is also used nowadays for corrugated iron roofing sheets that are used
extensively in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In place of the greenbelt employed by British colonial authorities, the French
used the cordon sanitaire. Here, the purpose was to separate European from
African districts. In the French colonial urban lexicon, the cordon sanitaire also
goes under other appellations, including zone interdite or zone non edificandi. In
practice, these zones actually assumed a variety of forms, such as a stadium (as in
Dakar, Senegal), public parks (as in Rabat, Morocco), a dry creek (e.g., Niamey,
Niger), lagoons (as in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire), river channels (as in Brazzaville,
Congo, PRC), or some other geological barrier (as was the case in Moroccan cities
such as Fez, Marrakesh, and Meknes). Since the demise of colonialism, many
such parochial terminologies have been replaced by global and more technical
ones, as part of a general ideological change.
Postcolonial toponymic ambiguity: the case of Cameroon

In major cities and towns throughout the continent, the dualistic urban centers
created by colonial authorities have evolved. This evolution has not helped the
toponymic inscription problematic. While street signage exists in some gated
communities and very few other zones, the nondescript areas have now grown,
proliferated, and usurped the small planned districts or the formerly European
enclaves. Thus, privileged urban spaces complete with well-aligned, named, and
conspicuously signed streets are now an exceeding rarity throughout the region.
Yet it is difficult to miss the stark contrast between these privileged spaces and the
“unplanned” areas engulfing them. To the visitor, these areas appear “nondescript,”
“chaotic,” and “disorderly.” The residents of these cities see things differently.
For them, getting around is never the problem a visitor may imagine. The resident
sees names for streets and places where the visitor sees none. These names are
engraved in the residents’ shared mental imageries of their cities. The keyword
here is “shared,” for it is only because these imageries are shared that a taxi- or
cab-driver is able to know with certitude his passengers’ destinations. Also, were
these imageries not of the shared variety, it would be difficult to describe venues
for business transactions or other social interaction.
While the importance of formalized toponyms cannot be discounted, at the
same time, it is difficult to trivialize the socio-psychological implications of names
commemorating non-Africans on African soil. These implications go beyond the
more simplistic colonizer–colonized power relations. To be sure, some of the
colonial commemorative street names were removed after independence, though
their colonial name is actually still preferred by many of the urban inhabitants.8
This has created another barrage of problems of its own, not least of which is the
phenomenon of a street or place going by multiple names. Typically, a street or
place would be known by two names. The one is often official while the other is
may be unofficial but more popular.
Our fieldwork in Cameroon provides further support to this assertion. In town
after town we noticed streets with multiple names whether sign-posted or not. In
the country’s national capital, Yaoundé, a major street such as Avenue John Ngu
Foncha is more popularly known as Nkom Nkana. In the same city, the street
shown on the official urban plan and sign-posted as Rue 1.750 is known by locals
as Nouvelle Route Bastos. In Douala, the country’s chief commercial city, a major
street was officially changed from Rue Njoh Njoh to Rue Soppo Priso in the
1990s. However, locals continue to refer to it by its former name despite the fact
that the street sign-post and official records have, since the 1990s, referred to it as
Rue Soppo Priso. In some older parts of Douala, the toponymic-inscription
problem is borne of sheer neglect. For instance, in New Bell, which was established
by German colonial authorities as a residential district for native-foreigners, the
street signs are faded and barely visible. The metal posts bearing them appear to
have taken more than their fair share of abuse. In almost every case, the post is
twisted and either lying on, or barely sustained at an irregular angle to, the ground.
In Limbé, one of the country’s oldest cities along the Atlantic Ocean, the toponymic
problematic is of a different genre. Based on Eurocentric accounts, Limbé was
founded in 1858 by Alfred Saker, a British Baptist missionary. The town was named
Victoria in honor of Queen Victoria of England. The town went under that name from
its founding to 1982. In fact, despite its colonial roots, some Anglophone Cameroonians
of the older generation prefer to refer to the town as Victoria. This bolsters the assertion
that place names create and maintain emotional attachments to places (Kadmon 2004;
Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). Despite the town’s neatly configured
orthogonal street pattern, few streets have sign-posted names. Yet, from a bottom-up
perspective, there are hardly any nameless streets throughout the city.
Some 16 kilometers from Limbé on the way to Douala is a major junction town
with an estimated population of 70,000 known as Mutengene. This town’s
morphology and fabric are particularly interesting for their toponymic implications.
The town boasts neither a neatly configured street pattern nor paved streets. The
buildings have barely visible hand-scribbled letters and numbers (Figure 12.3).
These have been inscribed by the local electrical power provider for billing
Figure 12.3 An example of the signage system of Mutengene, as inscribed in white chalk by
authorities of the Société Nationale de l’Electricité du Cameroun (SONEL), the
quasi-national electricity corporation in Cameroon (photograph by Liora Bigon)
record-keeping purposes. Mutengene is a veritable testament to our earlier

observation that where a visitor may see chaos and disorder, the locals see an
unmistakably well-defined space. The town has six major streets—Buea Road,
Tiko Road, and Limbé Road (all highways), and Electric Line Buea Road, Electric
Line Tiko Road, and Electric Line Limbé Road—and several minor streets, none
of which are sign-posted.
Anyone used to an unambiguous built space is likely to ponder how one ever
navigates the nondescript built space characteristic of urban centers in Cameroon
and other African countries. In such places, knowledge of the popular as opposed to
the official name of streets and places is necessary. In Yaoundé, for instance, an
individual wishing to travel by taxicab from one part of the city to the street officially
known as Avenue John Ngu Foncha would do well to tell the cab-driver to take him
or her to Nkom Nkana (between la SNEC and Carrefour Madagascar) in Tsinga.
Here, as implied above, the cab-driver is likely unaware that Avenue John Ngu
Foncha is the official name of rue Nkom Nkana. Yet, the problem is not only with
streets going by multiple names. In some cases, the problem is with multiple streets
going by the same name. The case of Ndamukong Street is illustrative (Njoh 2010).
A main paved thoroughfare and several minor ones on both sides of this street in
Bamenda, Cameroon’s third largest city, are known as Ndamukong Street.
Cameroon’s toponymic-inscription problem is not limited to the absence of
street/place names. Rather, it possesses a linguistic dimension. The country is
officially bilingual, with French and English—a legacy of its colonial heritage—
as its official languages. However, the country’s bilingual status is largely
symbolic alone, since most official business is conducted solely in French.
Similarly, signs throughout the Francophone zone (i.e., four-fifths) of the country
are solely in French. In addition, highway signs throughout most of the country,
including the Anglophone zone, are also solely in French. This renders the
navigation of built space difficult for most of the country’s population, especially
Anglophones without knowledge of written French.
In all fairness to authorities in Cameroon, they have taken some steps to ameliorate
the country’s toponymic problematic. The earliest recorded initiative in this regard
includes the 1971 Circular establishing street/place naming criteria throughout the
country. The Circular effectively charged municipal authorities with the task of
christening places and streets (Farvacque-Vitkovic et al. 2005; Njoh 2010). A
second initiative in this regard concerns the designation of a special governmental
agency in charge of toponymic inscription in the nation’s urban centers. The 1990s
witnessed the entry of international development agencies in the country’s
toponymic inscription arena. Noteworthy in this connection was the World Bank’s
targeting of physical addressing and property identification problems as part of its
broader country-specific development program of 1992 (Njoh 2010; Goerg 2012).
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have examined a variety of problems related to toponymic
inscription in contemporary urban Africa in terms of their nature and extent in an
era of globalization. By tracing the direct relation of some of these problems to the
British and French colonial legacies, and their dualistic urban legacies, we have
shown that urban space throughout Africa is a product of the continent’s rich and
complex history. In spite of the overt difference between the two dominant
colonizing powers in terms of administration, ideologies, and political doctrines,
as well as their different linguistic backgrounds, the British and French toponymic
systems shared similar semantic motifs regarding colonial urban space. These
motifs reflected an imaginative process of “othering” and “peripherializing” the
colonized populations and their settlement perceptions and organization.
Presently, it is the formerly colonial “periphery,” that is, the constantly growing
informal part of the city, that is home to a cross-section of the population, including
members of the middle-class. In contrast to the privileged space of the elite, this
part of the city is typically nondescript—replete with named but “sign-less”
streets. Many areas in this part of the city have street lights that are hardly lit and
signs that are more often leaning at awkward angles to the ground than vertically
erect. In the midst of what a stranger may consider chaos and disorder, people
appear to be going about their business with facility. Yet the need for an
unambiguous system of street/place and property identification in this era of
globalization cannot be overstated.
Notes
1 While the practical meaning of the concept urban management is generally agreed upon
by urbanists, its definition remains in controversy (Stern 1993; Mattingly 1994).
2 We are aware of the fact that postcolonial urban mapping gradually incorporates toponyms
of quarters beyond the European residential zones, central business districts and the
African quarters that were planned by the colonizers in their proximity (such as Poto-Poto
in Brazzaville, Cocody in Abidjan, New Bell in Douala, and Dakar’s Médina). These
were traditionally mapped by the colonizers by the 1930s. Yet still, because of the fact
that slum and squatter settlements can reach up to 80 percent of the total urban areas under
question, only the names of the main roads are normally indicated in current mapping.
3 Lugard was the first High Commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria (1900–
1906), Governor of Hong Kong (1907–1912), and Governor-General of colonial
Northern and Southern Nigeria (1912–1919). See also Lugard (1922).
4 See, for instance, relevant maps from the 1910s of Nigerian cities: National Archives of
Nigeria (Ibadan): SCO 26, 14623, Classification of townships under the Township
Ordinance, 1917; The British Archives (London): CO 1047/659, Plan of the Town of
Forcados, Southern Nigeria, 1910; Rhodes House (Oxford): Papers about the removal of
the capital of the Northern Province, 1914–1916. MSS. Brit. Emp. S. 99, 1: 1914–1916.
5 Royal Commonwealth Society Collection, Cambridge UK, CASE A59, Senegambie-
Niger reports: reports to the Governor General from local officials, vol. 4 (5 vols.):
Cercle de Kayes.
6 For the difference between the North African “old city” (casbah, médina) and the
“traditional city” in relation to the European “new city,” see Hamadeh (1992).
7 Archives Nationales du Sénégal, Dakar, NS H22, l’Hygiène à Dakar, 1919–1920 (inside:
Rapport sur l’hygiène à Dakar de 1899–1920, pp. 354–355). Also, see Seck (1970).
8 We noticed this regarding Avenue Roume in Dakar (after one of the early Governor-
Generals of French West Africa), in popular use instead of Avenue Senghor (after the
first Senegalese president upon independence).
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13 Coloring “Rainbow” streets
The struggle for toponymic
multiracialism in urban
post-apartheid South Africa
Wale Adebanwi
Introduction: going down “problem road”

Some of the challenges associated with street renaming in a post-conflict,
multiracial society such as South Africa are illustrated in the renaming of Cowey
Road, one of the most upscale streets in Durban. It was renamed in 2008 after
Problem Mkhize, a black South African trade unionist and anti-apartheid activist
who was forced to go into exile during apartheid. While the renaming honors one
of those who made sacrifices to ensure the building of a multiracial society, many
entrepreneurs on the street felt that the new name could harm their businesses.
These business owners were not concerned with the symbolic implications of
honoring one of the heroes of their freedom. Rather, they focused on the potential
economic implications of the renaming. One property owner said that he had a
prospective tenant who decided not to rent the property because of the new street
name. “He looked at everything and was happy but said he did not want his
business on a street named Problem” (Goldstone 2008). In this case, “revolutionary”
renaming clashes with “commodification” as renaming threatens, or is assumed to
threaten, the financial or symbolic profit derived from the existing name (Giraut
and Houssay-Holzschuch 2016, 8; cf. Rose-Redwood 2008b, 444).
As South Africans continue to struggle with the legacies of apartheid and
respond to the challenges of the creation of an inclusive multiracial society, place
renamings have constituted some of the most visible signs of the social and
political (re)configurations of this “post-racial” society. As A.J. Christopher
argues, the “momentous social engineering projects from colonialism and
segregationism to apartheid and, currently, the democratic transformation” have
all had “profound spatial implications and left significant legacies in the geography
of the country” (1994, 1). Therefore, in the attempts to re-order the socio-political
space between the majority black population and the minority white population so
as to remove what Achille Mbembe (2007, 161) describes as “the marks of the
Beast in the landscape,” there is an enormous investment in the symbolic value of
street renaming as a potential instrument of de-racialization (which some see as
re-racialization) in the context of the arduous struggle to build a multiracial
society. No doubt, this process of de-racialization is tied to a decolonization
paradigm. However, because the colonial experience in South Africa was not
merely racial, but institutionally and officially racist, renaming has been
Coloring “Rainbow” streets in South Africa 219
approached more as de-racialization by its protagonists (and as re-racialization by
its antagonists) than as decolonization per se.
This chapter explores a series of South African case studies of street renaming
that illustrate the interconnectedness of toponymy and the politics of racialization
as post-apartheid cities are “confronted with a daunting array of challenges” (Nel,
Hill, and Maharaj 2003, 223). As Khadija Patel (2012) states, “[f]ew issues raise
the national temperature quite like the prospect of new signage in the streets” in
South Africa. This is so because renaming is not merely an aspect of the
transformation witnessed in South Africa, but a spatial practice “which more than
many others forces people to recognize that a far-reaching process is under way”
(Koopman and Deane 2005, 85). Generally, “[a]t the heart of the matter … [is] a
debate on the harm that the new or old names would cause to people” in post-
apartheid South Africa, as the Mail & Guardian (2016) concludes.
While a majority of the black population insist on “restorative justice” through
the renaming of streets from apartheid-era names to older or newer names, a
critical section of the minority white population claims that this process, if
unchecked, would lead to the erasure of an important part of the nation’s past,
their own imprint on that past, and their present. In identifying “the general logics
underlying a specific naming process,” Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch (2016, 7)
encourage us to distinguish, relate, and compare the different elements that are
critical for interpreting renaming. These include geopolitical contexts,
technologies, and actors. Building on their important argument about the “who”
and “why” of place renaming and the overlapping of contextual logics, actors’
motivations, and the technologies employed, this chapter examines the cultural
politics of street (re)naming in post-apartheid South Africa as (1) a vehicle for the
critique of power relations in the urban setting of a post-conflict society; (2) a
form of ideological debate on the (in)visibility of history in the construction of a
shareable present and a common future; (3) an attempt to harness, manipulate,
and/or transform historical spatial relations, and therefore racial, political, and
socio-economic relations; and (4) a practical political deliberation on the role of
time, space, and language in the building of a multiracial society.
This chapter argues that the celebration of, and strong opposition to, street signs
that the gale of street renaming has attracted, show that street renaming is not merely
a symbolic act; rather, it is integral, if not central, to the idea and ideal of South
Africa as a “Rainbow nation.” Thus, street renaming is a crucial process of affirming
and contesting what it means to be a (post-apartheid) multiracial society. The
chapter interprets street renaming in the country’s four important cities, Pretoria,
Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban, as ways of confronting and assuaging the
country’s harmful past as well as negotiating its present and constructing its future.
Race, power, subjectivity, and street (re)naming

Recent works on the “contested politics of place naming” have provided innovative
ways of analyzing nationalism, (post)colonialism, identity politics, and collective
memory (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010; Rose-Redwood and
220 Wale Adebanwi
Alderman 2011). Much of this critical toponymic scholarship has underscored the
crucial role that street (re)naming plays in the social production of urban space
(e.g., Azaryahu 1996; Myers 1996; Yeoh 1996; Carlos, Faraco, and Murphy 1997;
Alderman 2000, 2002, 2003; Light 2004; Rose-Redwood 2008a, 2008b; Swart
2008; Adebanwi 2012; Bigon 2016).
Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch (2016) contend that Foucauldian perspectives
robustly illuminate the different dimensions of the issues at stake in street (re)
naming. I have argued elsewhere that in analyzing street renaming, governmentality
can be recast as “the conduct of (mis)conduct,” going beyond the conventional
Althusserian position in which interpellation is presented as an “ideological
disposifit” (Adebanwi 2012, 648). I found the Gramscian argument about
articulation more persuasive in that it transcends Althusser’s understanding of
interpellation as demonstrative only of the ideology of the dominant class, while
connecting it to Foucauldian governmentality as a form of interpellation “produced
and reproduced by the tensions between subjectivity and power” (Adebanwi
2012, 646). Thus, we can transcend Althusser’s focus on dominant classes given
that the dominated can also mobilize interpellation. In this chapter, I examine
street naming by building upon Foucault’s conception of governmentality in the
narrow sense of the conduct of conduct as “an assemblage of practices, techniques
and rationalities for the shaping of the behaviour of others and of oneself” (Dean
1999, 250, emphasis added). However, I contend that the practice of street
renaming, as a response to an “injurious” action, can be used as a strategy for the
conduct of (mis)conduct (Adebanwi 2012, 647).
By focusing on the Foucauldian notion of dispositif, rather than Althusser’s
formulation, and going beyond the “general meaning” of governmentality, Giraut
and Houssay-Holzschuch (2016, 6) make a persuasive argument for viewing a
dispositif as “opening up promising theorising prospects” in understanding street
naming. Against this backdrop, in examining the struggle for toponymic
multiracialism in urban post-apartheid South Africa, I suggest that street renaming
constitutes not only the conduct of conduct, but a more elaborate dispositif which
refers to “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses,
institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions … laws, administrative
measures …. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established
between these elements” (Foucault 1990, 194, cited in Giraut and Houssay-
Holzschuch 2016, 6, emphasis added).
I think the emphasis on “assemblage” in Foucault’s articulation of the conduct
of conduct and “ensemble” in his analysis of dispositif are both useful in
understanding the South African case for several reasons. First, assemblage
denotes accumulation, while ensemble denotes bringing together. Therefore, on
the one hand, street renaming in the post-apartheid era constitutes an attempt by
the ascendant order—that is, the post-apartheid regimes, cultural groups, civil
society groups, and so on—at righting the wrongs accumulated over three
centuries through the present conduct of past misconduct at the national and
municipal levels; on the other hand, the reasons provoking the specific renaming
and the targeted results of such renaming bring together or combine different
contexts, technologies, and actors (illustrated below), as brilliantly argued by
Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch (2016). Second, approached as both the conduct
of conduct and as dispositif, the cases examined in this chapter help to critically
illustrate Foucault’s (1986) argument about how ‘“history unfolds’ in its inherent
spatiality” (Soja 1989, 17). Foucault argues that the heterogeneous spaces of sites
and relations—which he calls “heterotopias”—can be constituted in every society,
but they take different forms and change over time in the context of the unfolding
of history as enfolded in spatiality.
This Foucauldian perspective (Foucault 1971) has three important implications
in the South African case. The first issue is the heterogeneity of sources for the
country’s pre-colonial, apartheid-era, and post-apartheid toponyms, which has led
to the current challenges of renaming. The second issue involves the different
layers of meanings that these toponyms have had historically for the different
races/ethnicities/cultural groups and the different asymmetric relationships that
these toponyms provoke or invoke. Finally, there is also the question of utopia on
which Foucault focuses in examining the concept of heterotopia, which is also
crucial in the South African case. Despite the manifold dystopias of racial tension,
bad governance, violence, and crime, there is consensus on imagining the country
as a Rainbow nation and a multicultural melting-pot.
Consequently, even though Foucault does not identify the street as one of the
many sites in which history unfolds spatially, I suggest that it is sufficient that he
identifies heterotopia as “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several
spaces [and] several sites” which are “in themselves incompatible” (Foucault
1986, 25). In the South African example, the attempts at ensuring such
compatibility provoke the struggle for and against street renaming in the making
of a Rainbow nation.
Street fighting
Until his release from prison on February 11, 1990, the name of Nelson Mandela
was taboo in official quarters of apartheid South Africa, largely because he was
branded a “terrorist.” It was not until 1994 when he was elected president in
representative democratic elections that his name became literally a toponymic
target within South Africa. As a way of producing and allocating “symbolic
capital in the form of recognition and prestige within the public sphere” (Azaryahu
2012, 74), naming places after Mandela sought to enfold Mandela—as the
representation of the victory over apartheid—“into everyday life contexts that
seem to be detached from political and ideological contexts.” A decade later, the
country’s leading newspaper, Mail & Guardian (April 2, 2004), reported a “spree
to baptize roads, bridges, public places and universities after Mandela,” thus
pointing to what the Telegraph of London describes as an “insatiable appetite for
a piece of the icon” (Laing 2011).
The renaming of places after Mandela, who was described by Newsweek’s
Arlene Getz (2008) as “the first truly unifying national symbol in a country that
had no common anthem or flag,” embodies the movement toward a post-racial
222 Wale Adebanwi
society in South Africa. As the embodiment of the creation, legitimation, and
sustenance of a new political order (Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch 2016),
Mandela’s name is unsurprisingly central in the renaming processes. Consequently,
it can be argued that in South Africa, the naming of places generally, and the
renaming of places after Mandela in particular, are used to intervene in the post-
apartheid conversation among multiple races in the struggle to build what has
been called a “Rainbow nation.” Renaming, therefore, involves a spatially and
temporally constituted debate about the basis and rationale—and perhaps
functionality—of a utopia; that is, post-racial nationhood in South Africa.
However, the legitimation of a post-apartheid nation and society is challenged
by those who regard this re-ordering of the socio-political space as one that is not
leading to a “post-racial” nation and society as assumedly desired by most South
Africans. In many ways, the dimensions of this controversy are enfolded in the
perennial questions of time and space and the manner in which, as Foucault (1982,
22) argues, “certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose
the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space.” In the
South African case, the ideological conflicts that manifest in the struggles for and
against renaming are complicated by the fact that the polemists on both sides have
different attitudes toward (historical and present) time even though they are all
inhabitants of the same space.
Indeed, the renaming of places is not an innocent act. Given that street names
are cognitive maps, the spatial cognition raised by street names can not only be
structured by historical experiences and events but also configured around
ideological standpoints, identities, and (re)determined through political
intervention. Against this backdrop, place naming can become a critical part of
contested racial politics, because “place names provide a rich source of discussion
on space and power through varied strategies for contestation embedded in their
use” (Myers 1996, 237). The toponymic practices as examined here point to the
tensions inherent in the social order as represented by the power to name places
and the capacity of others, both legal and extra-legal, to challenge the power of
(re)naming. These are done based on different conceptions of subjectivity which
either affirm the power of some groups and/or challenge the power of others.
Coloring Rainbow streets: toponymic politics in post-apartheid

South Africa
The history of place naming in South Africa since the second half of the fifteenth
century when the Europeans started giving names to places in their languages is a
most telling, even if grave, testimony to the ways in which the “symbolic politics
of naming are imbricated in the very material politics of accumulation by
dispossession” (Berg 2011, 13). The domination of the indigenous groups and
space by Europeans led to the alteration, adaptation, translation, and supplanting
of existing names (Raper 1989). As South Africa began to adapt to what E.R.
Jenkins euphemistically describes as “demographic changes,” place names
reflecting the nature of power and the emergent forms of subjectivity began to
“tell the story of waves of European settlements, of the extinction of indigenous
peoples, flora and fauna, of successive political dispensations, of urbanization and
Balkanization, [and] of changes in the fortunes of the languages” (1990, 60). By
the late-nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, the country and its large
cities became “so redolent of colonialism” (Wines 2007) and white domination
that they turned out to be targets of material and ideological struggles in the post-
apartheid era. It is understandable, therefore, that place renaming became a major
national project in the post-apartheid era, constituting an attempt by the
dispossessed to repossess, including the need for appropriated things, both
material and symbolic—including linguistic—to be re-appropriated. However, it
is significant that even though the struggle for and against renaming has often
raised the political temperature in the country in the post-Mandela era, in the
period between 2000 and 2014, of all the geographical names registered by the
South African Geographical Names Council, only 20% involved renaming.
In spite of the lower proportion of actual changes in the post-apartheid era,
renaming has been enlisted as a principle of minimizing the racialism imprinted
into the landscape by apartheid and maximizing the inclusiveness of the imagined
post-racial society. Given the cultural and “linguistic hegemony” that results from
place naming by dominant groups, when there is “a radical change in the political
order” (Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch 2016, 6)—such as the end of apartheid—
attempts at massive renaming are not uncommon (Azaryahu 1990, 1992; Coetser
2004; Swart 2008; Guyot and Seethal 2007; Palonen 2008; Giraut, Guyot, and
Houssay-Holzschuch 2008; Orgeret 2010). In the light of the struggles and
controversies that mark the politics of street renaming in the post-apartheid era,
this phenomenon is beginning to attract the necessary attention in the scholarly
literature (Jenkins et al. 1996; Jenkins 2007; Swart 2008; Palonen 2008; Ndletyana
2012; Duminy 2014).
Indeed, the wave of street renaming in South Africa, which The Guardian of
London succinctly describes as “signs of the times” (Smith 2012), has become
one of the most visible means of affirming the termination of apartheid as well as
confirming (black) majority rule. However, since the end of apartheid, there have
been marked changes in the attitude of the leaders of the country to renaming.
Though President Mandela encouraged limited renaming, he insisted that the
whole ethos of a Rainbow nation involved sustaining the names of even some of
those who built and sustained the racist order. For instance, Mandela cautioned
against the renaming of Hendrik Verwoerd Dam after Albert Luthuli, the Nobel
Peace Prize winning former ANC leader (Ndletyana 2012, 92). But President
Mbeki’s attitude was different. After succeeding Mandela in 1999, Mbeki
supported and mobilized the people for greater toponymic changes. He was very
vocal about his disappointment with existing apartheid-era names. Under his
leadership, there was an explosion of actual and attempted renaming. Nine years
later, Mbeki’s successor, President Zuma, inherited such a contentious atmosphere
regarding renaming that he called for a conciliatory approach. Even though his
rhetoric was geared more towards empowerment of black South Africans before
and after he took power, in his reaction to the “war” over renaming in the country,
224 Wale Adebanwi
he had to embrace the Rainbow nation ethos. In his State of the Nation address in
2009, Zuma pledged to take a “common national approach to the changing of
geographic and place names,” which would “involve all South Africans in forging
an inclusive national identity” (Brown 2010).
Despite the conciliatory tone of the leadership of the country and the ANC, the
planned and actual changes are opposed by those whose identities, ideological
position, and/or histories have been erased and marginalized in the strong wind of
renaming. Yet supporters of massive renaming dismissed the conciliatory attitude
captured by President Zuma’s statement about “Government efforts to mollify
slighted whites while making a break with the past” as “pandering.” For example,
the Tshwane Royal House issued a statement on the proposal to change the name
of Pretoria to Tshwane, stating that: “It seems government is so eager to pander to
the tantrums of a tiny white Afrikaner minority, at the expense of the black
majority who fought so hard for liberation” (Brown 2010).
The African National Congress-led South African Government formalized the
popular desire for toponymic transformation in the country with the Road Name
Change Act in 2007. The Act seeks to rename streets “which have links to pre-
1994 colonialism.” Despite opposition, after many changes of street names and
other toponyms that marked the immediate triumph of majority rule in May 1994,
there seems to have been a renewed enthusiasm in the last seven years for more
changes. The majority party, the ANC, and its majority black supporters, have
been behind most of the recent calls for toponymic changes (Jenkins et al. 1996;
Jenkins 2007). Much racial—and class-based—tension has been raised by the
changing urban geography in post-apartheid South Africa, because “the legacy of
apartheid’s spatial and social design continues to dominate the urban scene despite
policy efforts” (Lemanski 2006, 564). This relates to many areas of local and
national life from issues of desegregation, assimilation, identity crisis, and inter-
racial relations to urban governance, environment politics, and social planning,
including issues of housing and poverty.
Many of these issues are mirrored by the struggle over street renaming. From
the move to change the name of the administrative capital city from Pretoria to
Tshwane, to the proposed changes of many street names in the country’s four key
cities (Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, and Pretoria), South Africa seems to
be in an era of toponymic revolution. The four cities are unsurprisingly typical in
the acrimonious struggle over renaming, because as Smith (1992, 2) notes, “the
doctrine of apartheid” was “inextricably bound up with urbanization” as the free
movement of the African majority population was largely constrained by “pass
laws” which controlled access to the cities at “levels consistent with demands for
labor” (also, see Beavon 1992). Against this backdrop, in the transformation of
these cities from “inequitable and racially divided cit[ies] in a pariah state to …
cosmopolitan metropole[s]” focused on creating “a socially just, democratic and
sustainable urban future” (Beall, Crankshaw, and Parnell 2002, 4–5), street
renaming has emerged as one of the symbolic ways of ensuring transformation.
In understanding the context of the toponymic revolution, as pointed out by
Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch (2016, 7–8), it is important to note that the
“radical change in the political order” that produced this occurred against the
backdrop of an earlier conquest, “the subjugation, or control of a territory through
force,” which produced the initial renaming in the pre-liberation era. Therefore,
the post-apartheid era renaming is a context in which “conquest” is being righted
by “revolution.” The technologies being used in the contexts examined here are
four-fold, depending on the particular situation: cleansing, which involves erasing
the existing (apartheid-era) street names; restoring, which involves not only
putting the imprint of the “original” owners of the country on the street but also
“reinstituting dominated memories and cultures”; founding, involving the use of
street renaming to “create, legitimize, and ultimately, sustain a new political and
cultural order” both at the local and national levels; and challenging, which in
relation to founding actively contests extant “history” and the existing cultural
tapestry imposed by old street names while presenting and defending alternative
ideological (liberationist) and cultural (multiculturalist) histories of the present.
Examples of these are discussed below. The actors in these processes of renaming,
with coalescing and often times contradictory and clashing objectives, include the
national, local, and municipal states and office holders at these levels as well as
civil society, which is dominated by racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.
Even though criticisms and protests have forced relevant municipal and national
authorities to submit the practice of name changes to a more democratic process—
or, at least, what appears so—in most cases, the authorities are going ahead with
the changes. One major compromise reached over the struggle for changes of city
names was the 1999 division of the country into municipalities as a third tier of
government (Koopman 2012). In many cases, the municipalities took the African
language names of the cities or towns. Thus, the city of Pretoria is in the
Municipality of Tshwane, while the city of Durban is run by the eThekwini
Municipality. In the next section, I will examine the politics of renaming in four
key South African cities in the post-apartheid era.
Durban: “red-tape” renaming

Durban, a major coastal city in the eastern part of South Africa, was first renamed
by the Portuguese as Rio de Natal in the fifteenth century and then renamed Port
Natal by the British in the nineteenth century. This name was officially replaced
by D’Urban in honor of the colonial Governor of Cape. It was later simply called
Durban (Koopman 2012).
Red tape has become the most common element in the attempt to erase the unjust
past in Durban’s streets signs. To prevent disorientation because of the renaming of
most of the major streets downtown, and in the central suburban areas of the city, the
old names are crossed over by red tape, while the new street names are posted above
them. There have been many proposed and actual street name changes in Durban,
signifying what Wines (2007) describes as a “political brouhaha of the first order”
and “an object lesson in the pitfalls of building South African democracy.”
On May 1, 2007, a 6,000-strong group of protesters marched through the city’s
downtown protesting the planned renaming of 180 streets and public buildings.
226 Wale Adebanwi
They complained that some of the names were chosen “not to honor modern South
African heroes, but to heap glory on the African National Congress.” Also, they
insisted that supporters of the minority Democratic Alliance party were offended
by the plan to rename streets after Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Yasir Arafat,
“ANC heroes who, they argued, were hardly democrats, and hardly in the anti-
apartheid forefront” (Wines 2007). They were incensed that Andrew Zondo, the
ANC guerrilla who killed five white civilians in a 1985 bombing, was to be
honored with a street name in the neighborhood where he killed his victims.
Evidently, the ANC “freedom fighter” was the protesters’ “terrorist.” Mary de
Haas, an anthropologist and expert on political and racial violence in KwaZulu-
Natal, told the New York Times, “The whole thing has been provocative …. People
want reconciliation, decent-minded people. They don’t want to reopen old
wounds” (Wines 2007). Between July and September 2008 alone, 99 street name
changes were adopted and implemented by the eThekwini Council in Durban
(Orgeret 2010, 298). In erecting the new names, the municipality kept the old
names which were crossed over with a thin strip of red tape. This was in itself a
powerful symbol of the cancellation of the (apartheid) past and the inauguration
of a multiracial present.
In 2003, President Thabo Mbeki, who was partly responsible for the scope and
pace of renaming, said:
I am embarrassed by the temerity with which the subject of name-changing is

approached. There are probably only a handful of places in South Africa
named after a white person who wasn’t a land-grabbing murderer. The fact
that Grahamstown, Harrismith and, say, Durban, are still named after John
Graham, Harry Smith and Benjamin d’Urban is appalling.
(Jenkins 2007, 104)
Changes in street names in Durban have included names of heroes, ANC stalwarts,
and martyrs of the liberation struggle such as Steve Biko Road, Biko being an
ANC martyr, General Joseph Nduli Street, named after a Commander of uMkhonto
we Sizwe (Zulu for “Spear of the Nation”), the armed wing of the ANC, and Chris
Hani Road, named after the assassinated ANC leader (Koopman 2012). Others
changes include Argyle and Brickhill Roads which were renamed after Sandile
Thusi and Sylvester Ntuli, respectively (Figure 13.1). In 1988, Thusi, then a
researcher in the University of Natal, was detained under the state-of-emergency
regulation for his anti-apartheid activities. Ntuli was at the forefront of the 1961
“One Pound a Day” strike and was shot twice in the lower abdomen by the
apartheid police but survived.
Apart from mass protests, resistance to such name changes have also included
court challenges, extensive letters of protest published in the local press, spray-
painting, and other physical desecration of the new street signs (Orgeret 2010;
Koopman 2012). Some of the protesters have accused the ANC-dominated
Durban City Council of the “destruction of our heritage” (Koopman 2012, 147)
and using name changes to “salute those whose extremist vitriol demanded
Figure 13.1 Taking anti-apartheid activism to the streets in Durban, South Africa (photograph
reprinted with permission from Kyle G. Brown)
imposition of a Soviet-style one-party autocracy on this country rather than

multiparty democracy” (Turner 2009, 128). Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of
the Inkatha Freedom Party, accused the ANC of a “rush to rewrite the history” of
the province, adding that “[r]enaming must not be conducted in a manner befitting
Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which names and events that do not fit the ruling
party’s liberation narrative are disdainfully ejected” (Wines 2007). The mayor of
the city, Obed Mlaba, responded to these criticisms by stating that “the spoils of
democracy include ensuring that the towns and cities, the roads and streets reflect
the people and history, the collective culture of ALL South Africans. Universal
franchise alone will not undo decades of oppression and racism” (Turner 2009,
129). He was echoed by Vusa Khoza, an ANC ward councillor, who wrote that the
renaming constituted an attempt at writing a “proper” history of KwaZulu-Natal,
thus “making history and giving our people a sense of belonging, relevance and
ownership of their environment” (Orgeret 2010, 298).
Cape Town: limited renaming

Cape Town, like the rest of the Western Cape, has experienced limited renaming
because the majority of the city’s population are not black. However, after the
228 Wale Adebanwi
public outcry that followed the attempt to change Adderley Street to Nelson
Mandela Avenue and Wale Street to FW de Klerk Street, honoring South Africa’s
two Nobel Prize recipients and “architects of the political transition” (Ndletyana
2012, 94), the mayor of Cape Town, Gerals Morkel, announced that the city
would not follow the examples elsewhere in South Africa. He noted that “the
wholesale altering of names” in other parts of South Africa “has left in its wake
divisions and sectoral bitterness.”
Subsequently, where the city has embarked on renaming, the process has been
consultative, elaborate, and rigorous. The Western Cape (Province) government
set up a committee in 2003 which identified 11,000 place names to be considered
for change. For many years, nothing changed. In 2007, the City of Cape Town
commenced a public process for naming and renaming streets and other public
places. A Panel of Experts assessed the proposals received from the public. The
Panel recommended 31 naming proposals for approval by the Council. The
Council subsequently embarked on public consultation. Out of this, the City
implemented four name changes. Oswald Pirow Street, named after the late Nazi-
sympathizer and former Justice Minister, was changed to Chris Barnard Street,
Eastern Boulevard became Nelson Mandela Street, and the concourse between the
Artscape theater and the Civic Centre was renamed after Albert Luthuli.
Additionally, Castle Street was renamed after a matriarch of Khoisan, Krotoa,
who served in the seventeenth century as an interpreter for the Dutch, while
Western Boulevard also changed to Helen Suzman Boulevard.
The proposal for changes has therefore followed a more inclusive process in
Cape Town than in Durban. The proposed renaming of 27 streets included calls on
residents to submit comments to the mayoral committee, particularly regarding
the seven streets named after such racial segregationists as Jan Smuts, the late
Afrikaner prime minister of the Union of South Africa, and Hendrik Verwoerd,
the man who conceived and implemented apartheid.
Despite attempts to ensure that street renaming is more inclusive in Cape Town,
in 2012, a blogger, Stroob, exclaimed, “Leave Cape Town the F&*K Alone,”
while adding on a more sober tone:
We should never deny our past, but there seems to be an increasing vendetta
to erase any fragment of white heritage, and no matter how hard certain
people try, I am not ashamed of who I am. I am South African and the future
lies in building something together, not taking from one person and palming
it off to another.
(Stroob 2012)
Given the surviving leverage of the heirs of the old order, two different and
contrasting attitudes toward cleansing, restoration, and founding as technologies
of ideology are evident here. While most black South Africans (who now constitute
about 39% of the city’s population) see renaming as a way to cleanse the racist
past, restore pre-colonial ownership of the space, as well as emphasize the
founding of a new political order, most Afrikaners (and the colored who mostly
speak Afrikaans) support preserving the existing names, which are reminders of
the founding of a new order by their own progenitors, the Boers. Therefore,
conquest (the past) refuses to be erased or cleansed by revolution (the present) in
the struggle for multiculturalism.
Johannesburg: liberation and renaming

Perhaps more than any other major city, the City of Johannesburg adopted a very
inclusive process in its renaming exercises, even while paying attention to the
historic struggle against racial domination and hatred. As a “divided city” and a
“multilingual, religiously diverse and polycultural city,” the political authorities
in the city recognize that “negotiating difference is a crucial aspect of combating
social exclusion and managing social cohesion” (Beall, Crankshaw, and Parnell
2002, 8). The city has a clear Policy on the Naming and Renaming of Streets and
Public Places which is geared towards celebrating “Joburg’s shared past and
future” (City of Johannesburg 2014).
In “a fitting tribute to the memory of youth leaders who changed the face of
South Africa and made an immense contribution to the liberation of our country,”
the city announced the renaming of four streets in honor of Tsietsi Mashini,
Lekgau Mathabathe, Wycliff Tobo, and Danny Kekana as part of commemorating
the thirtieth anniversary of the uprising that started in June 16, 1976, popularly
called the “Soweto uprising” (City of Johannesburg 2006). The uprising was a
black student-organized protest in the township of Soweto near Johannesburg
against apartheid-era Bantu education.
The renaming of the streets after the four black South Africans who took part in
the uprising involved “a thorough consultation process with family members and
the running of advertisements in newspapers inviting the community to participate
in the process” (City of Johannesburg 2007). In 2014, the city also renamed some
of the busiest streets in the Central Business District after well-known heroes in
the struggle for liberation to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the
country’s democratic transition. The renaming followed an extensive consultation
process starting a year earlier. Four activists who played prominent roles in the
anti-apartheid movement, and led the famous Women’s March to the Union
Buildings in Pretoria involving 20,000 women of all races in 1956, had streets
renamed in their honor. The four are representative of the “City’s demographics
and all have strong historical ties with Johannesburg and its place in the
transformation of South Africa” (City of Johannesburg 2014). Sauer Street was
renamed Pixley ka Isaka Seme Street after one of the founders of the African
National Congress; Bree Street was renamed Lilian Ngoyi Street after the former
Secretary General of the ANC Women’s League and National Chairman of the
Federation of South African Women; Jeppe Street was renamed Rahima Moosa
after a “formidable woman” who “led the initiatives to unite the liberation
movement” (City of Johannesburg 2014); President Street was renamed Helen
Joseph Street after a founding member of the Congress of Democrats; and Noord
Street was renamed Sophie de Bruyn Street after the youngest and only surviving
230 Wale Adebanwi
leader of the Women’s March. Furthermore, two student activists who played
prominent roles in the Soweto uprising were also honored. Japie Vilankulu
Crescent replaced Lion Crescent while Thabeta Street was renamed Hastings
Ndlovu Street.
However, among other changes of apartheid-era street names, perhaps the
most crucial changes for black South Africans in Johannesburg were the
renamings of D.F. Malan Drive, Hendrik Verwoerd Drive, and Hans Strijdom
Road. The first was changed in 2001, while the other two were renamed in 2007.
The street named after Malan, who, as prime minister in the National Party
government started the implementation of the policy of apartheid in 1948, was
replaced with Bevert Naudé Drive. Naudé, also an Afrikaner, was a cleric and
theologian who opposed apartheid. Verwoerd Drive was changed to Bram
Fischer Drive. Verwoerd, also a former prime minister, is regarded as the
mastermind behind the racial policy of apartheid. BuaNews reports that by
replacing Verwoerd’s name with that of Fischer, an Afrikaner lawyer and activist
who was jailed for defending Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists,
Johannesburg “has rejected the architect of apartheid for a gentle, caring advocate
who despised the oppressive system” (Davie 2008). Strijdom Road, named after
another former prime minister, an Afrikaner nationalist and a strong proponent of
segregationist ideas that led to the implementation of apartheid, was renamed
Malibongwe Drive. Translated as “praise the women,” the Johannesburg
Development Agency announced that renaming the latter was to commemorate
the 1956 Women’s March against the official policy of non-white women
carrying passes. Because the name changes included both black South Africans
and Afrikaners who participated in the struggle for freedom, Johannesburg’s
street renaming pointedly showed how past conquest was righted by the
revolutionary changes brought about by the collapse of apartheid leading to the
cleansing of street names inherited from the unjust past. The new names signify
the founding of a new multicultural political order while challenging the leftovers
of the racist heritage.
Pretoria: contesting the center of the nation

The case of Pretoria is very interesting for its peculiarity. As the administrative
capital of the country, or what Azaryahu (1988, 241) describes as “the center of
political life of the nation,” Pretoria’s “street names … have a particularly
representative importance when compared with those of other towns and cities” in
the country. This is also true for the name of the capital city itself. Pretoria is
named after the Voortrekker leader, Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius.
Voortrekker (Afrikaans and Dutch for pioneers) are the Dutch who, in what was
called the Great Trek, moved en masse from the British-controlled Cape Colony
in the 1830s and 1840s into the interior. They are the direct ancestors of the
present-day Afrikaners. Pretorius was a leader of the Boers instrumental in the
creation of Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (South African Republic). He is famous
among the Afrikaners and infamous among black Africans for leading the
Voortrekker battles against the indigenous people including the “Battle of Blood
River” in which the Zulu soldiers suffered 3,000 casualties. Memories of this
battle and others led by Pretorius, through which large areas were lost by the
indigenous people and subsequently renamed by the Voortrekker and their
progeny, remain fresh in the minds of black South Africans. Hence the struggle to
cleanse the city of his name and memory.
Thus, in 2005, the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Pretoria
was used by the ANC-led City of Tshwane Metropolitan Council in an attempt to
officially change the city’s name from Pretoria to the indigenous name, Tshwane.
This was resisted by the white population. One group hoisted a placard which
provided a divisive meaning for the words in the proposed renaming:
Taking
Stealing
Hijacking
White’s
Assets
Names
Equities
(cited in Ndletyana 2012, 94)
For the group, the attempt to change the city’s name was a form of anti-white
(specifically anti-Afrikaner) re-racialization. A compromise was eventually
reached in which the greater city is called the metropolitan municipality of
Tshwane, while the core city is called Pretoria.
In the immediate post-apartheid era, few African names replaced Afrikaner and
European street names in Pretoria. However, a public hearing for more name
changes in 2008 ended in chaos (Brown 2010). Proposals for renaming were “met
with howls of derision from members of the Afrikaner community” with some of
them erupting “into racist songs” while preventing people from speaking. Freedom
Front Plus councilor and member of Tshwane’s Public Place and Street Names
Committee, Conrad Beyers, stated that “local governments are targeting Afrikaner
heroes and replacing them with the names of ANC party stalwarts,” while adding
“[t]hey’re changing the heroes of one community to the names of the heroes of
another community. We say that is not a solution.” On the contrary, Khorombi
Dau, member of the Mayoral Committee for Sport, Recreation, Arts, and Culture
in the municipality of Tshwane insisted that Afrikaner and European names
should be removed. Dau stated that “[t]hose names should be removed. They
belong to a dark part of our history” (Brown 2010).
Despite the opposition and in line with the wishes of the black population, in
2011 the Tshwane Metropolitan Mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa announced
plans for “massive street” renaming in Pretoria. The process, he added, was to
be “conducted to accommodate the names of those who fought for the liberation
of this country.” After Prince Edward Street was renamed for Nelson Mandela,
for some time Pretoria did not witness many other street renamings in honor of
232 Wale Adebanwi
the heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle. After 18 years of the ANC’s dominance
in power, its supporters expressed surprise, even anger, at the fact that Pretoria’s
“streets still bear the names of leading figures from South Africa’s white-
dominated past, making it impossible to cross Pretoria without passing a
mention of the fathers of apartheid” (News24 2012a). Even though the population
of Pretoria has become diverse in the post-apartheid era, the city is still
dominated by the Afrikaners. The new effort to change the names of major
streets, according to Ramokgopa, is “about striking a balance between the
memory of the country’s former masters and their successors” (News24 2012a,
emphasis added). After a series of court cases to halt the changes, about 30
streets in downtown Pretoria had new street signs, with a red line striking out
the old Afrikaner names. The changes do not exactly “strike a balance” for some
members of the Afrikaner community.
The renaming of the apartheid-era Hans Strijdom Drive as Solomon Mahlangu
Drive, and D.F. Malan Drive, named after an apartheid-era prime minister, as
Beyers Naudé Drive were particularly offensive to the Afrikaner community. The
Afrikaners dismissed Mahlangu as a “terrorist.” In June 2015, the court ruled that
the City of Tshwane was wrong in removing the names of Strijdom, Malan, and
others, because the court had issued an order in 2013 that the old street names
should be retained alongside the new names. Earlier in 2013, the municipality
removed the old street names which had appeared temporarily with the new
names, while AfriForum was still challenging the changes in court. AfriForum’s
lawyer‚ Werner Human‚ described the group’s latest victory as one for everyone
“opposed to the cultural vandalism by the Tshwane Metro Council” (Skelton
2015a). Human added that the City had targeted street names “with exceptional
cultural value for Afrikaners and other minorities.”
The City promised to appeal the June 2015 judgment at the Supreme Court of
Appeal. Its spokesperson, Blessing Manale, stated that the court directive that the
dual name plate signage must be maintained was only to satisfy the “colonialist
egos and apartheid nostalgia of the AfriForum” (Skelton 2015b). In August 2015,
for the fourth time, AfriForum won the court battle to retain the old street names,
and the group’s lawyer, Willie Spies, told the media, “Our endeavors for the
promotion of mutual respect for the heritage of cultural minorities in South Africa
have not been in vain” (Ngozo 2015).
But AfriForum and Spies’s joy came to an end recently. On July 7, 2016, the
Constitutional Court sitting in Johannesburg set aside the High Court interdict
preventing the City of Tshwane from renaming certain streets. Chief Justice
Mogoeng rejected as “mind-boggling” Afriforum’s argument “that looking at
names linked to other race groups would cause ‘harm and toxicity’ to white
Afrikaners.” The majority judgment concluded: “This leaves very little room for
the acceptance of black people as fellow human beings deserving of human dignity
and equality, talk less of honoring them for their pursuit of justice and freedom in
South Africa.” Afriforum’s position that the renaming of streets “would cause
emotional hurt or suffering to those who cherish them,” added Mogoeng, was
“highly insensitive” to other cultural or racial groups:
It is divisive, somewhat selfish and does not seem to have much regard for the
centuries-old deprivation of “a sense of place and a sense of belonging” that
black people have had to endure. As a result, the victims of colonialism and
apartheid were entitled to orders directing authorities to remove names that
perpetuated the colonial and apartheid legacy.
(Areff 2016)
Before this judgment, some whites in Pretoria had expressed worries “about losing
their cultural identity in the South African capital” because of the name changes.
However, Mayor Ramokgopa responded that “Afrikaners are not hated or the object
of contempt, but it is a fact that all the streets in the city are named after Afrikaners.
It will never be argued that Afrikaners did not play a role, but the city must represent
everyone’s past.” The Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Helen Zille disagreed with
the actual practices of the ANC-led government, yet approved of the rhetoric of
Ramokgopa on the need for toponymic inclusivity. She pleaded that South Africans
“must acknowledge our discriminatory and unjust past, and genuinely seek to
develop inclusive cities, where all feel welcome” (News24 2012a).
The changes in Pretoria even had reverberating effects in The Netherlands. A
Dutch right-wing political party, De Partij voor de Vrijheid (the Party for
Freedom), PVV, issued a statement at The Hague demanding action from the
Dutch cabinet in support of the retention of Afrikaans street names in Pretoria.
“The Netherlands Embassy situated in Queen Wilhelmina Avenue should refuse
to accept a new name,” said the PVV, adding that renaming the street after a black
South African would constitute a “slap in the face of the Dutch royal family”
(News24 2012b).
Respected cleric, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also intervened. He told the
people of Pretoria: “Don’t let it be a divisive exercise—as happened in KwaZulu-
Natal. We should be magnanimous. Let’s not rub people’s noses in the dust, don’t
fill people with resentment” (Smith 2012).
Conclusion
Place renamings have become some of the most important symbols of political
change in South Africa since 1994. In their number, size, and impact, the renaming
of streets in South Africa is only comparable in contemporary history to post-
communist societies in the 1990s, which Azaryahu (2011, 29) describes as
“toponymic cleansing.” In the South African context, some argue that street name
changes reflect majority black rule and the ANC’s domination of the political
space rather than some sort of utopian post-racial nation. For many whites and
opponents of the ANC, what is being witnessed in the country’s four most
important cities is not the writing of the Rainbow into street signs but attempts to
metaphorically change the color of the street signs into black-only. These
toponymic conflicts are not only reflections of the “contested versions of South
Africa’s history” (Swart 2008, 119); more importantly, they are struggles over
how to remember the past in the liberatory present as part of the construction of a
234 Wale Adebanwi
democratic and inclusive society. As Khumalo (2006) contends, street renaming
can help to show “whose story is history.”
Two recurrent themes in much of the opposition to the regime of renaming
include the argument or perception that the process is not fully democratic (or,
that it is outright undemocratic) and that it tends to silence a version of history
while over-emphasizing, even over-glorifying, a particular political-ideological
narrative. The two central themes of the challenges of place renaming in post-
apartheid South Africa therefore raise the question of whether this flurry of
renaming constitutes “symbolic reparation” for those who suffered under white
minority rule (majority black South Africans, in particular) or “symbolic
retribution” against those who benefitted from apartheid (minority white South
Africans). While Azaryahu (2011, 29) argues that such renaming in South Africa
constitutes a form of “symbolic retribution,” Swart (2008) contends that it should
be understood as “symbolic reparation.” In fact, the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) recommended that the renaming of geographical features
would constitute a form of “symbolic reparations to address South Africa’s unjust
past” (Patel 2012). However, what Azaryahu and Swart emphasize differently is
that, as a vehicle of commemoration, street naming is potentially compensatory
and/or potentially punitive.
Against this backdrop, the fate and future of the South African multiracial
society is imagined as contingent upon the reconstitution of the cultural and
political landscape through the renaming of streets. As technologies of historical
correction (compensatory or/and punitive), involving, in different ways,
toponymic cleansing, founding, restoring, and/or challenging, this process often
privileges majoritarian interpretations of inclusion read strictly through the prism
of anti-apartheid struggle over and above technologies of transformation which
accept elements of the harmful historical past as part of the uneasy process of
living together in the present. The latter was Mandela’s position, which has been
and is being contested under the leadership of his successors. Mandela asked that
the process of renaming “should not be the terrain of ‘petty revenge’ or
defensiveness.” Mandela’s plea is critical because, as Swart (2008, 113) rightly
argues, “[i]t is dangerous to represent a country’s history as only consisting of a
certain selective, sanitized portion of history.”
As the examples of street renaming in Johannesburg remind us, when street
name changes focusing specifically on cleansing, restoring, challenging, and/
or founding are predicated on the overarching goal of transformation, that is,
transforming memory rather than merely preserving it, renaming is less
controversial and more inclusive. In most cases, the renaming of streets after
heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle and other anti-colonial activists in the
four cities point to this. While some of the protagonists and most of the
antagonists of renaming would want to preserve memory rather than transform
it, I suggest that the idea and ideal of a multiracial society, the Rainbow nation,
is essentially about transformation. Transformation, which I argue is more in
the spirit of the negotiated process that ended apartheid, implies that the past
cannot be totally toponymically cleansed, erased, or fully restored. The past in
South Africa, like every national past, includes uncomfortable and uneasy
heritage. Therefore, the present remains a transformational process in the
building of a common future.
As a technique and rationality of governing people and space, the struggle for
street (re)naming in South Africa exemplifies what Foucault (1988, 19) calls a
“strategic game between liberties.” The conception of liberty by black South
Africans and heirs to the liberation clash with that of many Afrikaners, heirs of
the old order. In the fight for and against renaming, we see what Dean (1999,
245) describes as “the nature of politics as a struggle or competition between
competing forces, groups or individuals attempting to influence, appropriate or
otherwise control the exercise of authority.” Against this backdrop, I suggest that
street renaming in South Africa constitutes a form of governmentality as evident
in the cases examined. The struggle represents both the conduct of conduct and
dispositif. As technologies of ensuring transformation through projecting
historical restitution, ensuring cultural restitution, and/or symbolic reparation,
street renaming is not only mobilized to shape the behavior of both the protagonists
and antagonists of street name changes (conduct of conduct) in the actually
existing (racially, political, socially, and economically) divided society. It also
constitutes propositions about the system of relations among the races, cultural
and interest groups, and political parties (dispositif) in the post-apartheid urban
contexts that can lead to the creation of a truly multicultural nation. The first
captures the past and present dystopia, while the other points to the imagined
utopia. In this way, new signage on the streets, emerging from heterogeneous
sites and relations, reflects the accumulation of historical experiences while
gesturing at the eventual unfolding of these experiences in a democratic and
multicultural present and future.
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14 Street renaming, symbolic
capital, and resistance in
Durban, South Africa
James Duminy
Introduction
Early on a humid South African summer morning in mid-January 2009, in the
affluent suburb of Durban North, the Mayor of Durban, Obed Mlaba, wearing
casual clothes, climbed a short ladder, gripped a detergent-soaked brush, and
began to clean the crude spray-paint from the obscured sign of Dr. Kenneth
Kaunda Road. Little over five months previously the new metallic sign, then
gleaming proudly in commemoration of Zambia’s famous independence leader
and long-time president, had been erected to mark the official renaming of
Northway Road. Present with the mayor to launch eThekwini Municipality’s
hands-on “clean-up campaign” of defaced signs—part of “an ongoing process”
designed to “rid the city of negative sentiments from citizens who are not
embracing change”—was City Manager Michael Sutcliffe, as well as an
illustrious collection of influential local African National Congress (ANC)
members and councillors (eThekwini Online 2009a). The extent of street sign
vandalism in Durban, especially in middle-income suburban areas, had been
alarming since the erection of new signs for 99 renamed roads in August 2008.
Mlaba explained:
What we are seeing [the defacing of the new street names] is precisely the
effects of the fact that South Africans have not been made to integrate and
reconcile properly—and have not begun to understand their continent and its
leaders, including the role the African continent played in our freedom.
(eThekwini Online 2009b, additions in original)
The mayor proceeded to issue various punitive threats at the anonymous, nocturnal
spray painters: “If the culprits are caught, they will be forced to face the law and
they will be prosecuted accordingly. I do not understand why people cannot accept
change” (Daily News 2009).
Some passersby indicated their support for the mayor’s effort; others
reportedly “showed signs of disapproval” (eThekwini Online 2009b). A local
resident, present at the event, described sign vandalism as “disgusting” and
“costly”—the expressions of obscure individuals bent on “fighting change.”
Nevertheless, she suggested that the “street names will be vandalized again
Street renaming in Durban, South Africa 241
overnight” (Daily News 2009). A local representative of the Democratic Alliance
(DA), the ANC’s main political opposition in Durban, rejected the campaign
launch as a “cheap publicity stunt,” stating that “the ANC should know that you
can never force unpopular changes and decisions on communities which have
rejected them” (Daily News 2009).
The public performance of what the street renaming process officially meant, in
contrast to the actual utterances of public opponents, signals some of the salient
aspects of the furiously confrontational discourse that came to surround the
Durban street renaming project, which took place from 2007 to 2008—albeit with
plans stretching back at least to 1999. Those for and against the process contested
questions of who or what is worthy of commemoration in Durban; of whose vision
of and for post-apartheid South African society is “correct”; of the “real” meanings
or intentions hidden in the official process and its associated acts of resistance;
and of who or what has legitimate authority over the production of the urban
symbolic environment, amongst a multitude of other historical, economic,
logistical, and aesthetic issues.
Street renaming in post-apartheid Durban must be seen within the city’s wider
history of enforced race-based segregation and post-apartheid symbolic
transformation. In the early-twentieth century, the city pioneered the application
of segregationist policy through the so-called “Durban System” of racial
administration. Apartheid policy attempted to institutionalize the general
ideological conviction that “the urban” was the permanent domain of white
citizens, with other race groups viewed as temporary sojourners to the city. With
the passing of national legislation such as the Group Areas Act of 1950, Durban’s
central business and residential districts were reserved for Whites, whilst African
and Indian people residing in relatively central locations such as Cato Manor were
forcibly removed (in the late 1950s) to newly constructed townships on the city’s
outlying periphery.
With this history of enforced racial segregation, following the end of apartheid
Durban has faced acute challenges in terms of municipal restructuring and socio-
spatial integration. Despite concerted efforts to develop municipal capacity for
“integrated development planning,” to some extent the city’s basic pattern of
race-based segregation has persisted, largely through market mechanisms
reproducing spatial inequalities based on class. However, the city’s central
business district has experienced an influx of black residents and businesses from
the late-1980s, just as white business and residential property interests have
relocated to nearby centers such as Umhlanga and Ballito, and sprawling
upmarket developments reaching northward from the city (Todes 2008). Middle-
income to upper-income suburbs surrounding the city center have experienced
less radical transformations, although gradually their racial profile has shifted in
conjunction with the rise of a black South African urban middle-class. It was in
these central and mostly affluent precincts that the renaming project and its
discontents materialized.
In the context of persistent patterns of socio-spatial fragmentation in many
South African cities, renaming has become a means of “symbolic transformation.”
242 James Duminy
Since the first national democratic elections in 1994, the ruling ANC party has
renamed numerous municipalities and urban features throughout the country.
Renaming has provided a platform for the redress of painful memories of racial
exclusion as well as the enactment of new territorial imaginaries and visions of
South African history and culture, often framed within the image of a young but
reconciled and multicultural African nation (Guyot and Seethal 2007).
Occasionally, renaming projects have been met with resistance from local
residents and political opponents wary of their high financial cost, or sensitive to
the possibility that such efforts may constitute a hegemonic attempt by the ANC
to “obliterate the past.” In Durban, the perceived radicalness of the historical
vision projected by the ANC exacerbated these tensions, leading to an
unprecedented degree of local public interest and opposition. Although public
concern and antagonism emanated from a variety of sources, for different reasons,
and across racial and class lines, local state representatives responded by casting
all in terms of “counter-transformation,” identifying and confronting their
opponents as conservative elements opposed to “positive change” at the local and
national scales, but generally without an explicitly racialized politics.
Whilst the motivations and controversies surrounding the street renaming
project were grafted onto South Africa’s and Durban’s wider histories of enforced
exclusion and post-apartheid symbolic transformation, the event itself gave rise to
a more localized and contemporary terrain of conflicts, scalar politics, and political
subjectivities. These local dynamics are the substance of this chapter, which
examines the case of street renaming in Durban with a critical analytical
perspective of place naming as “text,” “arena,” and “performance” (Dwyer and
Alderman 2008). Emphasis is placed on the coproductive material and symbolic
dynamics underpinning these acts of symbolic transformation and resistance. I
argue that theorizations of “naming as symbolic resistance” (Alderman 2008)
need to take account of at least two dynamics, as evident in the Durban case:
firstly, the differences between actors who disagree with certain name–place
associations, yet agree with the principle of renaming, and those who reject or
contest the projected symbolic authority of the “namer.” Secondly, authorities
may act to confront and “name” their critics as part of an overall, iterative process
of toponymic resistance and legitimation, which includes—but extends beyond—
the “formal” disagreements or dissent raised within civil society. I argue that such
a “performative” conception of symbolic capital and resistance may aid
understanding of renaming processes, especially those carried out in contested
memorial landscapes.
The following section examines the Durban renaming in terms of the hierarchies
of symbolic prestige and distinction produced and reified by the process. The third
section considers acts of contestation and resistance, highlighting the diversity of
discourses and practices that expressed some form of opposition to the process.
This leads into a discussion of how key local political actors confronted this
opposition, and actively legitimated the basis for the symbolic project of street
renaming. Concluding reflections on the implications of this research for critical
place name scholarship follow.
The Durban street renaming process
Local government interest in renaming the streets of Durban preceded the turn of
the twenty-first century, when the municipal council devised a policy framework
for the necessary participatory and administrative procedures to be followed.
Mayor Mlaba, of the ANC, first publicized the idea of renaming streets,
monuments, buildings, parks, and stadiums across the municipality in 1999, yet
apart from several low-profile name changes with little or no political relevance,
the street renaming policy remained largely unimplemented (The Mercury 2003).
Public proposals gathered dust as councillors directed their energies towards
achieving election success. Political interest in street naming only reemerged in
January 2007, with the local ANC leadership of (now renamed) eThekwini
Municipality determined to pursue a national party resolution to “honour the
heroes” of the post-apartheid era. Mlaba announced the ANC’s intention to
rename eight of the city’s major roads and streets at a full council meeting, stating
that the renamings were “in line with the creation of a united, non-sexist South
Africa” (Ezasegagasini Metro 2007). As some ANC councillors noted at the time,
this was to be “Phase One” of an overall process.
Representatives of opposition parties, particularly the Inkatha Freedom Party
(IFP) and DA, reacted to the sudden announcement with trepidation. The matter
was raised in connection with the renaming of Durban airport in honor of the anti-
apartheid struggle icon Moses Mabhida and seemed to have entered the council
agenda without their prior knowledge (eThekwini Council 2007).
Despite opposition concerns (discussed in greater detail below), the ANC
majority in the council ensured that Phase One was approved and implemented,
with an official renaming ceremony held on March 23, 2007. Prior to this, on
March 9, advertisements calling for further public nominations of street name
changes ran in local newspapers, marking the beginning of Phase Two, which
would culminate in the renaming of 99 streets, predominantly located in the city
center and affluent surrounding suburbs of Durban (Figure 14.1).
The names of most of Durban’s central and suburban roadways reflect an
obvious bias towards the city’s British colonial history. In the case of Durban
North, a suburb forged according to British town planning principles in the
Garden City tradition, the Durban North Estates Company named a majority of
the new streets after places in London (McIntyre 1956). Similarly, David Dick’s
popular history Who Was Who in Durban Street Names (2008) recognizes that a
considerable proportion of street names in the central business district and
surrounding suburbs were borrowed from places in the United Kingdom and
Ireland; many others from colonial authorities in the Cape, Natal, and post-
unification South Africa. Colonial military commanders and engagements,
including British conflicts with Indian, Zulu, Boer, German, and Italian forces,
provided over 120 names. A typical example was Aliwal Street, now Samora
Machel Road, originally named in honor of Sir Harry Smith’s 1849 victory
“over a large force of Sikhs” near the village of Aliwal in Punjab, India (Sunday
Tribune 2008a). The version of history represented by these names is neatly
Figure 14.1 Map of renamed streets in Durban, South Africa circa 2008 (cartography by
James Duminy)
captured by John McIntyre in the introduction to his Origin of Durban Street
Names, first published in 1956:
The names which mark the streets we tread every day—names which are
household words but which have no significance for most of us—frequently
enshrine and commemorate some historical fact or preserve the name of some
historical personage or of some worthy citizen who has served the community
in one sphere or another. Many of them bear the names of courageous pioneers
and early settlers who played their parts in establishing the flourishing and
prosperous city we know to-day.
(1956, i)
Durban’s original street names were thus commemorative of a European history,

of a European pioneering effort on subtropical African soil. Over time, their
persistence in the city-text evidently irked local political actors. Half a decade
before the final completion of the street renaming process, ANC member Nigel
Gumede, chair of the Municipal Infrastructure Committee, explained the ANC’s
general objection: “We believe those old names were given in terms of skewed
considerations because they were simply entrenching the old order that was
cherished by the minority” (The Mercury 2003).
Such opinions constituted the starting point for the local ANC leadership’s decision
to conduct its symbolic transformation of the urban landscape. In 2007, eThekwini
Municipality published a list of all the approved name changes for Phases One and
Two, including a short justification for the selection of each proposed name.1 Of the
107 names bestowed post-2007, 11 were apolitical, referring to local economic
activity, local educational or cultural benefactors, musicians, or significant figures of
nineteenth-century Zulu history. The overwhelming majority honored individuals
specifically for their involvement in either anti-apartheid or international
revolutionary, usually anti-colonial movements. In general, two trends are
discernable: firstly, women constituted roughly one-fifth of all the incoming
names—a proportion that contrasts noticeably with the male-dominated symbolism
of Durban’s street name system as a whole. Secondly, whilst the list included activists
from a wide variety of interest groups, including youth clubs, student organizations,
and trade unions, approximately two-thirds were explicitly motivated in terms of
their previously active membership in the ANC or one of its institutional allies.
The official motivations given by eThekwini Municipality were generally short,
providing brief biographies of the people or things concerned, usually describing
a significant event in the life of a local figure. The renaming of Edwin Swales VC
Drive to Solomon Mahlangu Drive, for example, was motivated by the latter’s
heroics on behalf of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the disbanded military wing of the
ANC: “On March 2, 1977, Solomon was sentenced to death by hanging. On April
6, 1979, 23 year old Solomon Mahlangu faced the gallows, raised his hand in the
ANC salute, and met his death at the hands of a racist regime.” Mahlangu’s
commemoration is justified by his unfailing opposition to the apartheid
government. The blurb from an official local state poster put it clearly:
246 James Duminy
The street renaming is indeed an ultimate step forward towards honouring all
the heroes and heroines who fought a good fight for a good cause. Chief among
these, are those whom in pursuit of freedom ventured their way through the
troubled bridges of apartheid. Therefore as eThekwini council we feel honoured
to be part of such an historic process of ensuring that the names of these great
men and women of the struggle remain known even to the generations to come.2
The “official” view is that participation in the anti-apartheid struggle is a legitimate

source of heroic status, distinction, and prestige (that is, symbolic capital). In fact,
it is not only the legitimate, but the predominant source. Steve Biko, despite not
having been a member of the ANC, therefore warranted commemoration.
International anti-colonial and revolutionary leaders such as Che Guevara,
Kenneth Kaunda, and Julius Nyerere also fall within the definition of having
“fought a good fight for a good cause,” and for this reason deserved commemoration
alongside those with more obviously local or national significance. The
composition of the new street names thus lent the anti-apartheid struggle a degree
of ideological and historical continuity by linking it with legitimate revolutionary
movements internationally, including the Tanganyika African National Union (in
the case of Nyerere) and Movimiento 26 de Julio.
With some exceptions, the renamed streets themselves were “prominent”
thoroughfares—that is, when prominence is defined in terms of their geographical
linking effect. Those chosen as commemorative places were predominantly
highways, arterial linking routes, and important inter-neighborhood and intra-
neighborhood thoroughfares (Figure 14.1). The most prominent roads were
invariably renamed after influential and revered anti-apartheid activists or ANC
leaders. Inkosi Albert Luthuli’s immense symbolic status (as long-time ANC
president and Nobel Peace Prize winner) afforded him the privilege of association
with one of the most important roads in the entire municipal area, the M4 Southern
Freeway. Other roads with similar functional capacity were invariably and similarly
renamed after military or political veterans of organizations related to the ANC.
The city manager showed a keen awareness of the need to balance a street’s scale
and a name’s symbolic value, stating: “you can’t have a little street named after a
hugely prominent individual. There might be some good suggestions, but for the
wrong road … In these cases we might mix and match” (The Mercury 2007a).
Evidently, a perceived relationship between the commemorated agent’s
symbolic status and the street’s size and functionality underlay the renaming
process. Individual name changes were deemed “appropriate” when there was a
correspondence between symbolic and functional hierarchies. Therefore, the
spatial “prominence” deliberately afforded to key ANC members within the city-
text was a reflection of their preferential ranking within an underlying hierarchy
of symbolic importance.
This section has shown that the Durban street renaming project was, on one
level, a demonstration of socio-political change, deriving its meaning from the
ANC’s refusal to forget painful memories of segregation and subjugation (Legg
2005) as well as a negation of the city’s colonial and apartheid history. Furthermore,
Figure 14.2 Renamed street sign in Glenwood, Durban, South Africa, 2014. New signs
had identical structures and the same “DIN A Text” official typeface. Old
signs were left atop the new, crossed out with red tape (photograph by
Andrew Duminy).
this demonstration depended upon material practices, including the physical

process of changing street signage and the allocation of material urban space to
produce and reify symbolic hierarchies of distinction (Figure 14.2). This does not
suggest that expressions of symbolic power such as official naming procedures are
248 James Duminy
simply reflective of pre-existing and well-defined divisions operating within the
symbolic field. In fact, it is through official interventions that such divisions are
produced, reiterated, and institutionalized, or indeed “materialized” (Butler 1993),
in the public domain. That is precisely the reason that post-independence
organizations such as the ANC carry out grand projects of symbolic
transformation—it allows the fixing of certain meanings and categories of
perception in conditions of political and ideological uncertainty. This raises the
question of popular recognition and legitimacy. The technique of allocating
symbolic capital according to an individual’s opposition to apartheid is
legitimate—that is, it can confer a symbolic effect—only if “the struggle” is
popularly recognized as a “good fight for a good cause.” That people will have
different interpretations of symbolic prominence is inevitable, especially in places
with histories of racial and ideological conflict such as Durban. Indeed, the
following section discusses cases in which residents of the city advanced very
different notions of historical representation and symbolic distinction.
Contestation and resistance

The Durban street renaming process generated an unprecedented degree of
antagonistic public debate. Although Phase One was not met with significant public
opposition, the ANC’s political opponents in the eThekwini Council, in the form of
the Democratic Alliance (DA), Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and Minority Front
(MF), were concerned from the outset that the process lacked (their) participation,
and that it projected a highly partisan image of anti-apartheid struggle history. It was
the sudden commencement of Phase Two, in quick succession to Phase One’s
controversies, that catalyzed the greatest public and political outrage. Advertisements
calling for public name change proposals as part of Phase Two ran in local
newspapers on March 9, 2007. On April 21, a total of 181 proposals were published
in local newspapers, asking for public comments and objections. By May 21, the
municipality had received 12,000 written public objections (The Mercury 2007b).
The local media became a particularly active site of public debate and discursive
contestation. Local daily newspapers, especially independent morning publications
aimed at English readers, such as The Mercury, bulged with indignant letters from
concerned residents or visitors of all races. As with the arguments delivered by
political parties, many questioned the legitimacy of the official participatory
process leading to the renamings, and they reacted to the perceived insult and
“political triumphalism” of the ANC’s project. More significantly, however,
public concern arose in response to specific name changes, where the renaming
created associations between spatial, material, and symbolic characteristics that
were perceived as inappropriate. A professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
captured a recurrent theme of middle-class opinion by suggesting, “if somebody
wants to change a name, change it to something that makes sense. Name it after a
person or something significant that happened in the area” (The Mercury 2008a).
In this view, the relevance of a name change is determined by the extent to
which the commemorated individual acted within and directly influenced the
locality concerned. Indeed, judgments about whether a commemorated individual
had exemplified some form of local historical agency became a primary point of
contestation. Occasionally this was framed in terms of the particularities of local
identity (with whom do locals identify?). So, Brendon Pillay of the Bayview
Tenants and Ratepayers Association objected to the proposed renaming of
Higginson Highway, Chatsworth, in honor of Yasser Arafat, because the
Palestinian figurehead “has no relevance to Chatsworth.” The local Indian
community would “more readily identify with struggle stalwarts such as Fatima
Meer, Ismail Meer, Yusuf Dadoo and Chris Hani” (Sunday Tribune 2007).
Other challenges to the renaming process did not necessarily demand a close,
palpable geographical correspondence between historical action and
commemorated actor. Rather, they sought an appropriate balance between the
material and symbolic statuses of the commemorated agent and the commemorative
place. An illustrative example is the renaming of Point Road as Mahatma Gandhi
Road, intended to commemorate the time Gandhi spent living in Durban (from
1893 to 1914) and his contributions to the development of the civil rights
movement in South Africa, including his role in founding the Natal Indian
Congress in 1894. Point Road, in a material sense, is a formerly prosperous inner-
city area now in a state of economic decline (and currently the target of significant
inner-city regeneration efforts); symbolically, it is Durban’s red light district, the
“capital” of the city’s illicit drug and prostitution industry. The stark contrast
between Point Road’s “sleaziness” and the global eminence of Gandhi led some
in Durban’s Indian communities to see the association, and the “symbolic
dissonance” it involved, as an insult to Gandhi’s reputation and family. Others
were less perturbed, but regretted that an alternative, “more appropriate” road had
not been chosen to befit his status. As his granddaughter and Durban resident Ela
explained, “Gandhi would have settled in Point Road to change people’s immoral
ways … My only concern is that he should have been given one of the more
important roads, given his contribution to the non-violent movement in South
Africa” (The Mercury 2005).
Here the source of concern is a dissonance between the “prominence” of
individuals, in this case measured primarily in terms of their local actions and
accomplishments, and the functional and symbolic significance of commemorative
places. These and other concerns meant that general public discourse became
increasingly organized around the question of “relevant spatiality,” in terms of
deciding who was appropriate for commemoration (that is, whether their material
legacy included a specifically local impact and hence warranted commemoration
within Durban specifically), but also in terms of the appropriate scale at which
people thought Durban’s new heroes should be remembered.
Those concerned with the naming of Mahatma Gandhi Road perceived that the
“importance” of the road did not befit his status. How they judged this importance
is not clear, but the criteria without doubt included perceptions of material or
functional “prominence.” In this sense, a road can be more or less appropriate as
a commemorative place depending on its geographical linking effect, local
property values, and the extent and character of local economic activity. In the
250 James Duminy
association of certain names with certain streets, it was precisely when expectations
of symbolic and material value were not met (“Gandhi deserves a more important
street”) or when there was a certain “dissonance” between the distinctiveness of
the agent and the street concerned (“Point Road’s sleazy image undermines
Gandhi’s legacy and reputation”) that public interest and debate were sparked. In
these circumstances, people such as Ela Gandhi generally accepted the right of the
local state to grant names, the “need” for renaming and symbolic transformation,
as well as the legitimacy of the anti-apartheid struggle as a source of symbolic
distinction or prestige. They took issue with particular name–place associations,
and, therefore, their activities had less to do with resistance of the symbolic
imposition than with contestation of its content.
While these discursive games, primarily associated with concerns and questions
over symbolic dissonance or local relevance, played out in the local media, the
renaming process also emerged as a prime arena for the “infrapolitics” of symbolic
subordination, a contestation largely performed in material urban space, attracting
a range of less formalistic, occasionally illegal, modes of opposition. The
continued use of the original street names, for example, is one area of “low-profile
resistance” (Scott 1990). Other demonstrations of reluctance to adopt the new
names were more overt, as with cases of street sign vandalism. Within a week of
their installation in late August 2008, several signs along Albert Dlomo and Lina
Arense Roads in the suburb of Glenwood had been obscured with black spray
paint or “destroyed” (Sunday Tribune 2008b). Signs commemorating Esther
Roberts, a founder of the South African Institute of Race Relations, had been
removed. Deputy Mayor of Durban Logie Naidoo blamed local DA councillors
for the acts, as well as various “right-wingers,” for whom he promised sting-style
prosecution traps would be set.
A less destructive mode of anonymous protest emerged in the form of an
unofficial “civil renaming,” performed on a minor street in the residential area of
Berea in September 2008. Here the name of Kinnord Place was neatly crossed out
with red tape, in the manner of all officially renamed streets, and a look-alike sign
bearing the “new name” of Mike Sutcliffe Boulevard fixed atop it (The Mercury
2008b). The road chosen to honor the city manager, who had previously claimed,
“You can’t have a little street named after a hugely prominent individual,” was an
unimposing cul-de-sac. Sutcliffe himself reacted with good humor towards the
informal renaming, which brought into focus a plethora of public concerns with
the street renaming, including its perception as an autocratic imposition, the self-
flattering tendencies of the local ANC as well as the intimate role played by the
city manager in the process. Nevertheless the carnivalesque act, through the
satirical inversion of symbolic authority, actively problematized the recognized
legitimacy of the “official” renaming process (Darnton 1984).
In light of these findings, it is worth revisiting the concept of “symbolic
resistance” and the tendency to include a broad range of acts, including formal
political contests and the employment of competing, informal place names, under
this label (Alderman 2008). The Durban renaming process indeed emerged as an
“arena” for a wide variety of contesting acts and utterances by various sections of
the public. The extent to which this variety of activities can be described as
“resistance” is limited, however, for the Durban case provided numerous examples
of people accepting the local state’s “right” to act as the holder of the monopoly
of legitimate symbolic violence—their concerns lay primarily with the
participatory deficiency of the renaming process, and the symbolic “dissonance”
produced through specific name–place associations. On the other hand, a
willingness to embrace the legitimate symbolic authority of the state was not
present with symbolic gestures such as street sign defacing and acts of informal
renaming. Such acts, generally undertaken anonymously and occasionally
involving the material inversion of symbolic authority, implied a challenge to the
local state’s right to determine the meanings of the urban symbolic environment,
in addition to the “legitimate” categories of perception and appreciation implied
by the renaming project.
The diversity of these acts and practices complicates any conceptualization of
“symbolic resistance,” and we shall return to the theoretical implications of these
findings in the conclusion. Before this, however, we must consider the ways in
which local state or ANC party representatives responded to their critics and
justified the renaming project, in order to see the meanings of the renaming event
as defined, over time, by interacting forces within a wider “perlocutionary field”
(Rose-Redwood 2008).
The prose of counter-insubordination

As the acts described in the previous section unfolded in public discourse and
urban space, representatives of the ANC or local state reacted to their challengers
emphatically, casting all in the terms of “anti-transformation.” In this section, I
focus on the discursive practices of certain key actors and delegates of the ANC,
the municipal government, or both, as they confronted, named, and attempted to
discredit their opponents.
With the publicly fought contest gaining intensity by late April 2007, excited
by the initiation and publication of Phase Two, the response from the municipality,
or more precisely the city manager, involved lengthy rationalizing texts and public
statements, of which the following extract from the online City Manager’s
Newsletter, published on May 2, is an example:
Adverts ran on March 9, 2007 in major local newspapers calling on the public
to put forward proposals for the renaming of roads, streets, freeways,
municipal buildings, community halls, parks and other public places within
the municipal region. Posters were also placed in different Sizakala centres
and libraries. The public was encouraged to email, fax, post or even hand-
deliver to these centres. The closing date for submissions was the 30th March
2007, giving the public 21 days to engage with the municipality. And even
after this closing date, a few submissions were also considered. A total of 245
proposals were received.
(City Manager’s Newsletter 2007a)
252 James Duminy
In contrast to the claims of the political opposition (see section 2), the representation
of the street renaming process provided by the newsletter implies that all relevant
public participatory requirements were unequivocally fulfilled. The city manager
points out the municipality’s accommodative stance towards late submissions. He
is also careful to mention the Sizakala (the isiZulu word for “get help”) centers,
many of which are located in eThekwini’s townships, and the possible option of
hand delivery. The verisimilitude of the account is enhanced by the use of a
measured, pragmatic vocabulary and the inclusion of objects and processes
relating to responsible democratic governance (advertisement, submission,
consideration, and so on).
However, the question of whether or not the process had been procedurally and
legally correct was not all that was at stake. Project proponents needed a reason
for undertaking the costly business of renaming in the first place; the story of the
renaming needed to fit within a larger narrative of symbolic transformation. On
April 21, 2007, the latest list of name change proposals for Phase Two was
published in local newspapers, with the explicit purpose of securing “public
comment.” The city manager received thousands of objections. The following
response was authored approximately a fortnight later:
The unfortunate part of the street renaming process is that no matter how
much our (1) country has changed, there remains a core of people (2) who
simply do not want to accept that change. We (3) all know that of the more
than 30 000 street names in our (4) city, over 99% were named during the
colonial or apartheid eras. However, when the council unanimously agrees to
a process to allow for public participation … we (5) find elements (6)
miscommunicating the process itself and creating mayhem and confusion.
(City Manager’s Newsletter 2007b)3
In the first line of this passage, South Africa is referred to as “our country” and in
the following sentence, Durban as “our city.” The author appears to speak on
behalf of a certain group, one that has a degree of “belonging” within both the
nation and the city. Exactly who or what constitutes this group is not entirely
clear. It can be assumed from the text’s source—an official municipal publication
that specifically addresses the rate-paying citizens of eThekwini Municipality—
that the city manager writes as a delegated agent of the street renaming committee,
which he led, and the municipality as a whole, of which he was the highest-ranking
civil servant. Yet, he also reveals an implicit claim to represent the interests of
some sort of a public majority, which is evident in the use of the collective “we.”
By claiming that “we all know … ,” he projects his personal understanding of the
context for street renaming as “common knowledge,” as something that should be
shared by every resident of Durban. He speaks as a “simple symbolic substitute of
the people” (Bourdieu 1991, 212–213), performing “a symbolic takeover by
force,” which, as Bourdieu argues, appears as a “takeover of form.” This is most
commonly exhibited by the spokesperson’s permanent shift from the use of “I” to
that of “we” (Bourdieu 1991, 213). In doing so, the city manager commits an act
of symbolic violence on all those whom he claims to represent, according to the
“oracle effect,” which “is what enables the authorized spokesperson to take his
authority from the group … in order to exercise recognized constraint, symbolic
violence, on each of the isolated members of the group” (Bourdieu 1991, 212). In
other words, references to the collective “we” enable the production of the interests
of the group, and thereby the definition of boundaries of acceptable action.
If the city manager claims to speak as “the people,” who lies beyond the
boundaries of this group? Impersonal linguistic forms are used to reference a
“core of people” that is opposed to “change,” as well as “elements” that act to
disrupt the renaming process. Apparently, the division between “us” and “them”
is determined by a corresponding set of interests pertaining to both a general
process of “change” and the renaming project. The author and the other constituents
of the collective “we” feel favorably towards both. “They,” on the other hand,
resist or “refuse to accept” both.
These references to “change” deserve greater attention. We see that in the first
sentence South Africa is represented as being in a state of change. No mention is
made of what constitutes such change, and no explanation given as to why it
might be desirable. The author merely states that localized opposition to the street
renaming process is representative of the more general opposition to “change” on
a national scale. In doing so, he depicts a correspondence between the interests
and objectives surrounding either process. This style of language, involving
repeated reference to the desirability of “change,” is characteristic of the ANC’s
political discourse of “transformation.” Giliomee, Myburgh, and Schlemmer
(2001) describe transformation as a “term without content,” and an “indefinable
moral end” making possible a political mode of vanguardism, and its meaning is
basically derived from the ANC’s strong ideological connection with the past
(Saunders 2008). Essentially, transformation refers to a continuation of the anti-
apartheid movement—an ongoing, far-reaching process of change within South
African political and socio-economic fields. The starting point for this process is
the objective socio-political structures of apartheid; the final cause or end result is
possibly when all forms of capital (such as political, economic, cultural, and
symbolic capital) in South African society are allocated in direct proportion to its
racial structure.
Since the late-1990s, transformation—understood as a progressive and entirely
morally justifiable process with a resolute teleological structure—has emerged as
a central ideological theme and discursive strategy of the ANC. Yet the vagueness
of the concept allows some “flexibility” in terms of how it is employed by
representatives of the ANC party or state. It is precisely this degree of conceptual
flexibility that allowed City Manager Sutcliffe to represent the Durban street
renaming as nationwide transformation writ small. Two key effects are produced
by creating this relationship. Firstly, it implies that Durban’s local state acted in
consonance with the central state authority and its ANC leadership, which is
responsible for delivering transformation on a larger scale. Thus, the interests and
activities of the local state are tied to those of an institutional apparatus with a far
greater capacity to confer political and symbolic capital upon a delegated agent
254 James Duminy
(himself, in this case). The city manager is not a delegate of the ANC or national
state in actuality, yet his rhetorical style allows him to defend the actions of
himself and eThekwini Municipality with all the symbolic power and popular
recognition of the political discourse of transformation. He thus implicitly draws
upon this popular recognition, these stocks of capital, in order to frame the street
renaming process as being, in principle, legitimate and desirable.
Secondly, the linkage between street renaming and transformation enables the
categorization of any local dissenting agency, such as an objector, within a much
broader group. This was explicitly demonstrated by an ANC member of the
eThekwini Council, Vusi Khoza, who stated: “Those people who are opposing the
road name changes are really saying they don’t want change and transformation in
South Africa” (The Independent on Saturday 2007). In this view, acting against the
renaming is tantamount to acting against transformation. As the latter is entirely
moral and desirable, it follows that opposition to the renaming is morally and
ideologically backward and irrelevant. Thus, in casting these relations, the city
manager and others with similar institutional support from the state or ANC created
the opportunity to categorize and discredit the intentions and opinions of any
dissenting agency, without resorting to an explicitly racialized language of accusation.
In this section, I have argued that for local ANC actors to deploy the language of
“transformation” as a counter-oppositional discourse during the Durban renaming
debate, the street renaming had to be represented as a constitutive part of a desirable
and wide-reaching process of change unfolding on a national scale. By consistently
referring to agents and events in the language and rhetorical style of “transformation,”
ANC-affiliated actors categorized the entire project (including themselves and the
new names) within a grand teleological narrative of progressive social change.
Legitimacy was conferred by association. At the same time, those opposed to some
aspect of the renaming project could then be categorized as anti-transformative,
and subjected to all the symbolic violence that municipal or ANC representatives
could muster, most acutely expressed in accusations of being “pro-apartheid.”
Conclusion
This chapter has analyzed post-apartheid street renaming in the city of Durban
with a conceptual approach based on the metaphors of “text,” “arena,” and
“performance” (Dwyer and Alderman 2008). Each of these notions provides
insights into the complexity of this process, and so the study generally affirms
their utility as sensitizing analytical concepts for studying memorial landscapes.
Firstly, through the metaphor of “text,” we have seen that the meanings and norms
surrounding the renaming were produced through the “interweaving” of symbols
and objects in the production of the city-text through, for example, the hierarchical
allocation of particular names (seen as more or less prestigious) to streets of
different size and prominence. We have also seen that the renaming project was
“defined, contextualized, and configured” (Rose 2002, 391) in relation to historical
and political discourses active on a wider geographical scale, as a way of lending
the initiative some legitimacy in the face of bitter public dissent. In so doing, the
renaming event was drawn and rescaled into a political discourse, usually reserved
for the national scale, based on the projected symbolic authority of the ANC as the
vanguard of post-apartheid transformation.
Secondly, the Durban case confirms the importance of understanding public
memorializations as “arenas” for the emergence and performance of diverse,
competing claims surrounding historical memory as well as contemporary
political and symbolic legitimacy. This case is remarkable for its diversity of
modes and acts of contestation and resistance, which varied significantly in terms
of attitude towards the state and the principle of renaming. Some disagreed with
aspects of the project, such as particular name–place associations that were
perceived as offensive, through rationalized arguments delivered in the media or
in court; others challenged the legitimacy of the projected symbolic authority and
its implied norms through everyday language and practice, or anonymous
transgressions performed in public space. These acts were met, and no doubt
spurred on, by a vigorous counter-politics carried out by key local political actors.
With these findings in mind, this chapter has sought to address the potential
limitations of a conceptual framework based on “naming as symbolic resistance,”
with a view to developing the utility of “symbolic resistance” as a theoretical
category for studying the politics of place naming. Firstly, the ambiguity of the
term—does “symbolic resistance” refer to resistance “to the symbolic” (that is,
actions in opposition to a symbolic imposition), to resistance that is performed
through symbolic means, or to both? By keeping the definition of “symbolic
resistance” flexible enough to encompass the full range of acts and relations
attending renaming projects, the question of what may be termed an act of
“resistance” is greatly complicated, with the risk that it could signify nothing more
than a “reaction,” or simply carrying a strong opinion on a contested matter of
public discourse without necessarily disagreeing with the basic rationale of political
and symbolic transformation. Secondly, an analytical focus on “resistance”
(defined as a conscious reaction to an already existing entity or power) may detract
attention from describing and explaining the various political subjectivities and
practices that can flourish between the projected poles of dominator/subordinate,
producing the coherent appearance of this binary as an effect of their relations, or
possibly even creating “alternative spatialities” that extend beyond any interests
and desires defined in opposition to an ostensibly hegemonic power (Rose 2002).
Therefore, either a more rigorous definition of “symbolic resistance” or some
theoretical refinement is necessary to improve the concept’s potential for studying
the politics of place naming. Against an ontological reading of symbolic resistance as
a distinct category of intentional practices, I have argued that a key area for further
conceptual development lies with a performative understanding of resistance as the
“discursive occasion” (Butler 1993) for the “disruption” of projected norms or social
categories or, put differently, as a “subversion” that is a “consequence of the slippages
inherent in citation” (Gregson and Rose 2000, 437). Here resistance is viewed as a
“potential” generated within the citation or act of naming, made possible through the
incompleteness and “self-subversion” of the official discourse, and undefined by the
intention or choice of an “anterior active human agent” (2000, 438). In examining
256 James Duminy
“symbolic resistance,” then, what matters are the acts and spaces that give existence
to this potential and associated “arenas of resistance” through the disruption of
projected norms. Performing place renaming unsettles the meanings attached to these
places, revealing the arbitrariness of the official city-text as a historical discourse, and
thereby enables the emergence of a variety of overlapping and sometimes conflicting
arenas of resistance. In these temporary spaces, actors project and contest different
conceptions of “legitimate” history through various modes and scales of discursive
performance. They can appropriate symbols or artifacts (including street signs)
associated with “dominant” actors as ways of contesting or disrupting the legitimacy
of those very symbols (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010), but they do
not necessarily do so. Furthermore, arenas of resistance and the “symbolic resistance”
they entertain include not only the practices of “subordinate” groups, but also those
of powerful actors, which disrupt or subvert the meanings of oppositional acts. An
analytical frame drawing upon this approach demands that we take into account the
diversity, specificity, and relationality of all performances and counter-performances
resisting and reconstituting the “perlocutionary field” of the naming process (Rose-
Redwood 2008). It would further seek to explain the more or less coherent dominator/
subordinate binary as a projected after-effect of these interactions.
Finally, this study confirms the value of conceiving of naming as a performative
practice, in which symbolic power and capital are seen as reproducible yet
unstable, as emergent from the relations cast between creative acts of iteration and
destabilization, rather than as a property deduced from a presupposed hegemony.
Arguably, this perspective is especially important for studying official symbolic
acts in urban settings with intense local cultural diversity and histories of
ideological and political conflict, such as Durban, because in these cases it is
likely that the “performative limits of the official city-text” (Rose-Redwood 2008)
will be more overt, that the projected geopolitical or ideological imaginaries will
be more contentious, and that the process will be met with a greater diversity and
urgency of performative contestations. With these findings and conclusions, I
hope that this study will prompt further critical investigation into the discursive
performativity of contested street naming procedures.
Notes
1 Downloaded from the official website of eThekwini Municipality: www.durban.gov.za/
durban/government/renaming/Final%20List-%20Street%20Naming2.xls
2 Downloaded from the official website of eThekwini Municipality: www.durban.gov.za/
durban/government/renaming/Street%20Renaming%20Poster%20A4.pdf
3 For ease of reference to the text, instances where the author refers to various agencies in
either impersonal or personal terms were identified with a numeric label.
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15 Street naming and the
politics of belonging
Spatial injustices in the
toponymic commemoration of
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood
Introduction
In outlining a new agenda for geographical research on place naming, Rose-
Redwood (2011) stresses the importance of naming rights. He notes how the right
to name a place—including parks, schools, and streets—is increasingly controlled
and commodified in today’s society, thus limiting the ability of communities to
claim and use those public spaces and their names as sites of social life and
expression (Rose-Redwood et al. 2010). Meanwhile, a growing number of
members of historically marginalized groups—especially racial and ethnic
minorities—are turning to place naming, and commemorative street naming in
particular, as a political strategy for addressing their exclusion and misrepresentation
within traditional, white-dominated constructions of local and national heritage.
We are interested in the central and contradictory place that street naming holds in
people’s lives and their struggles over racial identities and rights, understood here
not only as the legal authority to name a place but also the broader rights of people
of color to participate in the production of place and to have their histories
recognized publicly within cities and towns (Berg and Kearns 1996).
Toponyms are expressive and constitutive of the politics of citizenship,
conferring a greater degree of belonging to certain groups over others while also
serving as sites for battles to widen the “distribution of citizenship” and the use of
space (Dunn 2003). Naming practices work, ideologically, to disenfranchise or
empower historically marginalized groups as they make claims for urban space,
political legitimacy, and the “politics of belonging,” which defines membership to
a group and ownership of a place. Schein (2009, 811) points to the importance of
exploring the “oppositional politics of belonging” that undergird the production of
landscape, drawing particular attention to how African Americans have
traditionally been “written out” of prevailing notions of belonging. As he argues,
such an oppositional politics of belonging focuses not only on moments of
exclusion but also points of intervention, where marginalized groups might claim
citizenship and struggle to create a more racially inclusive landscape.
Our objective in this chapter is to identify and discuss the kind of oppositional
politics of belonging that animates debates over street naming, thus elucidating
260 Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood
broader political struggles over the right to the city. A case study of (re)naming
streets for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. offers an opportunity to
explore African American struggles to reshape the identity of urban streetscapes,
the contours of social memory, and the larger sense of political membership and
social inclusion. Streets named for King are more than just monuments to the U.S.
Civil Rights Movement. They are the materialization of ongoing African American
claims for civil rights, racial equality, and civic fairness in historical representation.
Many proponents see King street naming as an anti-racist spatial practice, a way of
inscribing a new vision of race relations into the American landscape. Yet King
streets are actively shaped by racism, white privilege and supremacy, and locational
discrimination that threaten to reinforce, rather than challenge, the spatial and
social boundaries that have traditionally constrained black power and identity
within cities—a bitterly ironic memorial to a man famous for battling segregation.
The politics of remembering Dr. King serves as an effective way to think, more
broadly, about street naming as a mechanism of spatial (in)justice. Spatial justice
stresses the spatiality of belonging, recognizing that social (in)justice does not
simply have geographical outcomes; rather, space plays a more fundamental role
in constituting and structuring the broader processes of discrimination or equality
(Soja 2010). The spatiality of ongoing efforts to recognize historically silenced
racial and ethnic groups through street naming is critical to their potential to
transform the politics of belonging. Where we remember the past matters along
with what (and who) we remember. Indeed, the contested politics of naming
streets for King is not simply a matter of determining whether the civil rights
leader will be honored but also debating where that name is best situated within
public space. As African American activists have long and stubbornly asserted, it
is not enough to name just any street for King. In fact, some of them have refused
to rename a road for the civil rights leader when they believe the street does not
occupy a sufficiently prominent or visible place in cities or does not transgress
longstanding racial and economic divides. The ultimate location of a named street
affects the social meaning and political efficacy of King’s commemoration while
also symbolizing the degree of cultural power and rights held by black citizens.
Confining where King can be remembered publicly, especially in relation to the
aforementioned social divides, places limits on recognizing and recovering the
civil rights leader’s historical identity as a challenger of the liberal-democratic-
capitalist order.
In this chapter, we focus on street naming in terms of the “right to participate”
and “right to appropriate,” and identify some of the barriers that hinder the full
realization of these rights for African Americans and the creation of a streetscape
that truly reflects the teachings of King. Two brief case studies from the
southeastern United States (Statesboro, Georgia and Greenville, North Carolina)
illustrate how opponents, sometimes with the (un)witting cooperation of black
activists, impose scalar limits on the rights of African Americans to participate in
the street naming process and appropriate the spatial identity of streets outside of
their neighborhoods, thus creating procedural and distributive injustices in the
toponymic commemoration of King.
Street naming and the politics of belonging 261
A street fit for a King?
While many victims of oppression and discrimination in the United States have
pursued the renaming of public spaces to reclaim dignity and identity, African
Americans have been especially vocal in calling for these changes. In arguing for
a greater recognition of their experiences and struggles, black activists, community
leaders, and elected officials have carried out a campaign of renaming places to
celebrate black historical figures—particularly from the Civil Rights Movement.
Street names have proven to be a popular battleground for these struggles for
legitimacy because of the way they permeate our daily vocabulary—both visual
and verbal (Kearns and Berg 2002).
(Re)naming roads for Martin Luther King, Jr. is especially important in African
American efforts to rewrite the U.S. commemorative toponymic landscape.
Although the Civil Rights Movement was carried out by many leaders and
workers, King is perhaps the most widely identified national icon associated with
the struggle for racial justice, often to the exclusion of the many women, young
people, and local activists who also drove the Movement (Dwyer and Alderman
2008). By 2014, well over 900 cities and towns in the United States had named a
street for King. Although these named streets are found in forty states and the
District of Columbia, over 70 percent of them are clustered in the southeastern
region among both large cities and small towns. It is in the Southeast where the
earliest Civil Rights Movement battles were fought and this is the current home of
a majority of the country’s African American population.
On the surface, the widespread presence of King streets belies their contested
nature, seeming to signal a victory for African Americans and progressive
whites when, in reality, the naming process and the ultimate location of these
streets tell a different story. Street name commemoration of King evokes highly
public protests and debates because of its potential to touch and connect
disparate groups—some of which may not identify with King (Alderman 2000).
Yet, the controversy over honoring King with a street name is not only about the
civil rights leader’s social and historical contributions but also about people
contesting the racial (re)signification of space and the (re)negotiation of
individual and collective identity (Caliendo 2011). African Americans face the
prevailing assumption among the conservative white establishment and other
opponents that King’s name should be confined spatially to the black community
rather than cutting across traditional racial boundaries in cities. For many
activists, naming a major thoroughfare that stretches beyond minority
neighborhoods is essential to educating the broader white public about the
importance of King and all African Americans. These debates about where (and
where not) to locate King’s name and memory take place between blacks and
whites, but they also occur within the African American community and thus
prompt us not to essentialize black identities and political goals. Naming
activists articulate different spatial strategies, which include naming streets only
in black neighborhoods (Alderman 2003). Some naming proponents are more
interested in inspiring and mobilizing their fellow African Americans—rather
than challenging the historical consciousness of whites—while others fear
losing ownership of the civil rights leader’s image in light of the vagaries of
white-controlled place naming decisions.
Some opposing whites believe that naming a street for King will stigmatize the
identity of their neighborhood: “As a direct result of racial (mis)representations in
public memory, King streets … signify Blackness, poor Black people, and even a
dangerous neighborhood whereby commemoration recalls not social achievements
by African Americans but a socioeconomic decay of Black neighborhoods”
(Caliendo 2011, 1157). There are King streets that defy that image (Mitchelson et al.
2007), but public opposition frequently leads to the naming of side streets or portions
of roads located within economically struggling, African American areas of cities
and towns. As some activists argue, to marginalize the commemoration of King on
blighted streets within the black community, particularly in the face of African
American requests not to do so, is to perpetuate the same force of segregation that
the civil rights leader battled against (Alderman 2000). Tilove (2003, 122) perhaps
put it best when he wrote: “To name any street for King is to invite an accounting of
how the street makes good on King’s promise or mocks it.”
While the politics of naming streets involves struggles to define King’s
historical reputation and his cross-racial resonance (Alderman 2002), the process
also speaks to the obstacles that face African Americans as they struggle to
challenge the control historically exercised by whites over racial/ethnic minorities
in the United States. These struggles prompt us to consider how the Civil Rights
Movement, both in terms of how it has changed society and how it is remembered,
is an evolving and unfinished project. Rather than a simply symbolic gesture,
street naming for many African American activists is about gauging society’s
relative progress in fulfilling the goals of the Movement, to ground truth
contemporary race relations and to gauge, materially, public attitudes about
equality and justice. Martin Luther King Streets are where ideology hits asphalt
for the communities who debate and determine which street is fit for a King.
Street naming and spatial justice

It is important to reflect on how the geography of place names—where they are
located and, even more importantly, where they are not—can advance or obstruct
the realization of the political goals of historically marginalized social groups.
Political struggles over naming streets for King often revolve around the issue of
location, with proponents and opponents putting forth competing ideas about
where best to emplace King’s memory within the cultural landscape and who, in
effect, has a right to certain public spaces in the city. At the same time, citizenship
can be spatially managed through the structure of decision-making (Dunn 2003).
One’s physical and socio-economic location within a city, particularly in relation
to the potentially renamed street, is frequently used by government authorities and
naming opponents to define and limit the place naming rights of African Americans.
Spatial (in)justice is a useful concept for understanding how King street naming
proponents view and mobilize their cause in spatial terms and how the opposition
responds by actively using geography to contest these claims to the city. The concept
of spatial justice has gained increasing attention across the humanities, social
sciences, and planning circles (Bromberg et al. 2007; Soja 2010). Spatial justice
recognizes that social, economic, and political injustices are frequently based on,
and perpetuated through, the ways in which we organize, use, and control places and
spatial processes. Social life is inherently territorialized and any meaningful effort
to create social justice must address the geographical order that constitutes and
shapes social inequalities and unfair decision-making (Bromberg et al. 2007).
Using spatial justice framework, we analyze the politics of naming American
roads after Martin Luther King Jr. in terms of the “right to appropriate” and the “right
to participate.” Although these rights have been examined previously in the context
of Lefebvre’s right to the city (Purcell 2003), they have saliency beyond the specific
way that the French thinker critiqued capitalism and the state and conceived the
claiming of space by inhabitants. Inwood (2012) has noted the marginalized position
that African American spatial claims and struggles hold in the traditional right to the
city literature. He has argued for a broader and more inclusive notion of rights that
address the legacies of racial segregation and exclusion and the history of uneven
access to urban spaces by people of color. Our analysis of street naming examines
the right to participate and appropriate within the broader context of African
American opposition to the legacies of racism and white privilege, allowing us to
identify some of the distributive and procedural injustices that characterize the
naming process and the central role that space, especially scale, play.
The right to appropriate and the distributive injustices of

street naming
When African Americans use street naming to exercise their right to appropriate
urban space in the name of King, they employ a strategic mapping of the city,
figuratively and sometimes literally, to find a street that best fits their political and
commemorative agenda. According to Purcell (2002, 103), the right to appropriate
means “not only the right of [marginalized social groups] to occupy already-
produced urban space” but also “the right to produce urban space so that it meets
the needs of inhabitants.” In other words, to rework the spatial and social relations
that have historically reproduced racially segregated urban space, street naming
proponents pay close attention to and try to achieve a distributive justice in which
King and the African American community are recognized publicly. Distributive
justice has long been a foundational concept in social justice studies (Rawls 1971),
and it continues to be important (Boone et al. 2009). Distributive justice is
traditionally concerned with ensuring a fair allocation of goods and opportunities
among social groups, but it can be defined in spatial terms (Harvey 1973) and thus
include a focus on public access to certain place-based resources or services as
well as the geographical distribution of social groups relative to certain
opportunities and hazards (Bullard and Johnson 1997; Walker and Day 2012).
In applying a spatial justice framework to street naming, it is important to
consider the intra-urban location of the toponym and how the appropriation and
production of urban space through naming is situated in relation to wider
geographical distributions of people, wealth, and transportation within cities. The
distributive reach of named streets affects who will have direct contact with the
name (and conversely, who will not) as well as the general landscape prominence
of the name—all of which impact a minority group’s power to reshape the city so
that they are seen and heard. The ability of street names to (re)distribute certain
meanings and identities across the city does not simply raise the visibility of King
and the black community, but signals an important widening of the “distribution
of citizenship” (Dunn 2003) and broader messages about who matters and belongs.
Larger questions of geographical distribution and access to urban space are
important in shaping the meaning and efficacy of naming streets after King.
Assessing whether the streets achieve a distributive justice requires asking
questions such as: Where are King’s namesakes located in relation to the spatial
distribution of race and class distinctions within cities? To what extent do streets
named for King occupy central civic spaces and are they geographically accessible
to the larger community, especially whites? To what extent do King streets,
because of their location, operate as a bridge or boundary between different social
and economic areas of cities? Martin Luther King streets—depending upon their
place relative to wider distributions of people and resources—could work to
marginalize or raise the visibility and public importance of African Americans. As
Raento and Watson (2000, 728) contended: “Naming and re-naming are strategies
of power, and location matters, because this power is only truly exercised when it
is ‘seen’ in the appropriate place.”
The theme of distributive justice appears in the comments of many African
Americans who push to have a street named. Important to their vision of
appropriating and producing a legitimate place for King is making sure that,
relationally, the named road transcends traditional racial boundaries and occupies
a location situated within a social geography that embodies integration and
inclusiveness rather than marginalization and segregation. Facing public
opposition to such proposals, municipal authorities tend to pursue a distributional
tactic that does the exact opposite. They agree to rename only part of a major
street that aligns with the geographical boundaries of the African American
community, not allowing the name change to encroach on white, often wealthier
parts of the same street. While officials believe this spatial confinement strategy
effective in minimizing (white) controversy and appeasing the black community,
vocal street naming proponents have frequently interpreted it as racist and have
called to have King’s name extended spatially down the entire length of road.
The social construction of scale lies at the heart of controlling the distributive
justice of street naming and the right of African Americans to appropriate the
production of space beyond their neighborhoods (Alderman 2003). Scale plays an
important, but often under-theorized role, in the politics of place naming (Hagen
2011). Toponymic disputes do not simply happen at different fixed scales. Rather,
proponents and opponents compete to determine the geographical scale at which
King and African Americans will be recognized and, in turn, the scale at which
associations or linkages would (or would not) be created between the wider white
community and its black citizens. Maintaining racial segregation requires a policing
of scale. Certain activities by African Americans are allowed in certain places as
long as they are not scaled beyond the black community and disrupt segregated
space. In fighting to maintain or redefine this scale of racial power relations,
proponents and opponents deploy different scalar configurations of identity and
citizenship through street naming. Proponents of achieving a distributive justice
through King street naming advocate for a “toponymic rescaling,” hoping to
reframe the spatial identities of places in new ways that make more room for
African American belonging (Rose-Redwood 2011, 38). In contrast, opponents to
this rescaling rely on, and publicly perform, a traditional urban scalar narrative that
uses racial fear, residential segregation, and the rhetoric of neighborhood invasion
to justify keeping the black community and King in their place.
A street naming dispute in Greenville, North Carolina, exposes how opponents
impose scalar limits on the right of African Americans to appropriate the identity of
urban space and how African Americans react to this distributive injustice in
different, conflicting ways. Greenville is located in eastern North Carolina
approximately 85 miles from the state capitol of Raleigh. Greenville’s West Fifth
Street became Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive in 1998. Originally, the African
American leaders who brought forward the request wanted all of Fifth Street
renamed—not just part of it—but residents and business owners on the eastern end
strongly opposed the proposal. King’s namesake marks a downtown area that is
predominantly African American whereas East Fifth is mostly white (Batchelor
2006a). Moreover, a clear difference in wealth and development exists between the
east and west segments of the street. This racial and economic boundary has long
been in place and some older Greenville African Americans have spoken about how
East Fifth Street was “forbidden territory” for them historically (Namaz 2006, A12).
Proposals to extend King’s name down the rest of Fifth Street were made by
local African Americans in subsequent years. However, these efforts failed to win
approval of the Greenville City Council, leading to deep frustration within the
African American community. One prominent black leader, Michael Garrett, was
quoted as saying: “Having a street that runs straight through town with a different
name in the black section is a throwback to the old Jim Crow Days” (Batchelor
2006b, B1). Of course, Jim Crow was not simply about separating the races, but
also about normalizing unequal power between the races. One proponent for
extending King down all of Fifth Street, Rufus Huggins (2006, D2), sought to
challenge the taken-for-granted nature of white privilege at work through the
street name controversy:
Greenville citizens do not realize [that] most streets in the predominantly

black community are named after someone white … our white brothers and
sisters have a problem with just having one street [in the white community]
… being named after someone black.
In January 2006, the local chapter of the SCLC led a boycott of the Martin Luther
King Prayer Breakfast in protest of the city’s failure to rename all of Fifth Street.
This action sparked several months of public debate, with many residents along
East Fifth continuing their adamant opposition to the renaming. King supporters
held marches down Fifth Street, including the eastern section. One of these
marches drew resistance from a group of young white men who taunted the
marchers, yelled “Fifth Street Rules,” and displayed the Confederate Battle Flag,
long a symbol of white racist resistance in the region (White 2006). While
proponents for renaming the entire length of Fifth sought to rescale the identity of
the street and to assert their right to appropriate a previously forbidden portion of
urban space, opponents clearly placed boundaries around King’s meaning and the
legitimacy of local black citizenship. Many East Fifth Street residents claimed
that their street name had historical value and was part of their heritage (Spell
2006), angering some African Americans who thought King was more historically
important than a numeral. Others suggested that King’s name would bring down
property values and invite crime, gangs, and illegal drugs into their neighborhoods
and that limiting the scale of the street naming was essential to the social
preservation of the East Fifth neighborhood (Gabbard 2006). Critics pointed to the
depressed condition of the existing King Drive. African Americans were, in effect,
blamed for being the victims of broader processes of inequality, discrimination,
and segregation, and opponents called into question their identity as responsible
citizens and whether they had the right to appropriate other urban spaces when
they supposedly could not take care of their own.
Seeking to settle what they saw as a contentious issue and unwilling to force
East Fifth Street to undergo an address change, municipal leaders voted along
racial lines in late 2006 to place King’s name on the then-undeveloped U.S. 264
Bypass that partially encircled Greenville. The bypass had been identified as a
possible alternative to Fifth Street by an ad hoc committee organized by East
Carolina University, who claimed neutrality even though it owned property on
East Fifth. Believing that there was a state rule against roads having duplicate
names, the council also voted to have the existing Martin Luther King Jr. Drive
revert back to West Fifth Street (Batchelor 2006c). Even after discovering that
such a rule did not exist, white municipal leaders approved the removal of King’s
name, prompting some African Americans to argue that the name change was part
of a larger plan of redevelopment and black dispossession planned for the area
(Batchelor 2007).
Not all whites opposed renaming all of Fifth Street and several outspoken white
citizens protested the decision to move King’s name to the bypass. African
Americans also held different views about how (and where) best to honor King.
Indeed, three prominent black leaders who had initially called for the renaming of
East Fifth Street later reversed themselves and supported the bypass option, much to
the shock and anger of other African Americans, including two city council
members. White city council members took advantage of the situation, asserting
that the dissenting African American leaders represented the “real” views of the
black community and that the presence of ideological differences among African
Americans somehow made the campaign to name all of Fifth Street less legitimate.
These assertions drew upon a longstanding racist supposition that African Americans
form a monolithic community with a single voice. The leaders who now advocated
for naming the bypass were motivated by personal rivalries with other black leaders
and the belief that renaming East Fifth was increasingly out of reach and naming a
new road was better than King’s name remaining segregated. Also important to
them were arguments from white citizens that the street name debate was
unnecessarily dividing the local community along racial lines and thus a peaceful
compromise was needed (Johnson 2006). But what kind of peace was produced? To
use King’s own words, by moving the civil rights leader’s name to the bypass, white
city council members constructed a “negative peace” or an absence of tension (for
whites) rather than constructing a “positive peace,” which King characterized as a
presence of justice for African Americans (King 1986 [1963], 295).
Positive peace-building practices, on the other hand, are “practices that encourage
the growth of social, political and legal solutions that address the underlying
causes” of inequality and often focus on supporting institutions and processes that
try to break cycles of discrimination (Inwood and Tyner 2011, 448). By engaging
in the process to rename only portions of Fifth Street, the political leadership in
Greenville was promoting a process that recognized King, but failed to address the
underlying histories of discrimination, segregation, and uneven access to resources
that have characterized the separate and unequal geographies of Jim Crow
segregation. As a consequence, the fundamental questions of who belongs where,
and on whose terms, are obscured from the debate (Schein 2009). Thus the decision
by the white political leadership to rename only part of Fifth Street was a none-to-
subtle reinforcement of historical geographies of exclusion and discrimination,
which while conforming to negative peace-building practices, ultimately obfuscated
the larger question of resources that is at the heart of struggles around belonging.
Street naming matters because it is often the first step in broader struggles over
social, political, and economic capital that may fundamentally alter historical
patterns of exclusion and discrimination.
Accordingly, even though some opponents to renaming East Fifth, and even
some black leaders, saw the naming of the bypass as a legitimate appropriation of
urban space in the name of King and African Americans, it ultimately was a
production of space that never really achieved the distributive justice and the
rescaling of urban spatial identity and race relations that was originally intended.
In fact, Greenville’s naming dispute speaks, more forcefully, to the power of the
white community to access and reshape urban space through street naming and
indicates potential limitations to the politics of belonging that do not outline and
connect to broader struggles over economic and political resources. African
Americans living along King, now West Fifth Street, had to bear the expense and
inconvenience of changing their address, to ensure, in effect, that white property
owners on East Fifth Street would not have to do so. Tragically, one might argue
that African Americans lost the right to appropriate and produce space in their
own neighborhood, especially in light of the many Martin Luther King birthday
celebrations and marches historically held on the once named road and the
impossibility of holding those same activities on a busy four lane bypass.
Moreover, the controversial decision to move King out of downtown ensured that
the geography of the civil rights leader’s commemoration would not violate the
territorial limits and sense of divided racial order of the white community on East
Fifth Street. Because proponents sought to use the re-scaling of the street’s identity
as a way of testing as well as creating racial integration, the city’s decision
represented a bypassing of King’s proverbial dream.
The right to participate and the procedural injustices of street naming

Interestingly, the politics of belonging also stresses the importance of the “right to
participate,” which gives “inhabitants the right to take a central role in decision-
making surrounding the production of urban space” (Purcell 2003, 578). Exercising
the right of participation (along with appropriation), citizens can assert their use-
rights and directly challenge the hegemony of property rights and the valuing of
urban space as a commodity to exchange (Purcell 2002). Rose-Redwood and
colleagues (2010) have called for a greater consideration and protection of the use
value of place names in the face of growing efforts to commercialize the toponymic
process. While the actual selling and buying of naming rights is an important
infringement on the right of ordinary people to participate in the production of
space, the socially exclusionary nature of toponymic decision-making is felt across
cities beyond merely financial transactions, especially when public authorities
view place naming rights as a natural extension of property rights. This is
particularly evident when examining the procedural injustices that hinder African
American participation in the renaming of streets outside of their neighborhoods.
Procedural justice, like distributive justice, has an established history in social
science (Boone et al. 2009). Scholars recognize that a lack of fairness in how public
disputes and decisions are made and legally resolved can impact one’s right to
participate as well as produce and sustain unequal distributive outcomes and
access. Naming and renaming places involve decision-making procedures and
policies. A procedural or participatory justice perspective would address the factors
that limit the full participation of African Americans in local government decisions
about whether to name a street for King and which specific street to rename. Even
when a street is renamed for the civil rights leader, it can still work to exclude
African Americans if they have no actual voice in the naming process. This can
happen when municipal leaders reject initial requests to rename major thoroughfares
and elect instead to attach King’s name to smaller streets, sometimes overriding the
protests of the activists who brought the original proposal to city leaders.
There is frequently a spatial context to the procedural injustices of naming
streets for King. Local governments increasingly enforce a rather narrow
geographical as well as social scaling of cultural citizenship when renaming a
street. One’s citizenship or right to the street is defined by where one is located in
relation to the street and the economic conditions underlying that locational
relationship. In many street name debates, those who own property along
potentially renamed streets often play a deciding role in name changes, even
though the street (and by extension, its name) is theoretically a public space rather
than a private good. Indeed, some cities have responded to controversy over
selecting a street to rename for King by establishing ordinances that require a
majority (and sometimes even a supermajority) share of property owners located
on a particular street to approve a proposed name change. The interests and
opinions of a road’s property owners are considered over those who rent or simply
work or travel on the road in question. Placing such clear territorial and class
limits on cultural citizenship and whose voice matters in the street naming process
has seriously limited the ability of African Americans to honor King on roads
upon which they are not the majority of property owners.
These restrictive street naming ordinances work to frame African Americans as
“outside agitators” within their own cities, continuing a tactic begun during the
Movement to discredit the African American struggle for equality as non-local
and thus ignoring what King (1986 [1963]) referred to as the mutuality and
interrelatedness of all communities. Even when these procedural hurdles are not
used in direct opposition to King street naming, they nevertheless affect the
process. Recognizing the difficulty in getting approval from the many white
property owners on a major road, some African Americans will propose renaming
a smaller or a less racially diverse road segment that appears winnable even if it is
not their first choice. In this respect, even when black activists are leading the
toponymic process, these ordinances rescale the structure of political membership
and democratic participation in regressive ways that reproduce a segregated
geography of street naming, prompting us to consider yet another way that scale
is strategically manipulated to control and limit the right to (name) the city.
The impact that procedural injustices can play in shaping the location and
racially distributive scale of the street eventually named for King was especially
apparent in Statesboro, Georgia. Statesboro, which is the county seat of Bulloch
County, lies between the two population centers of Macon, in central Georgia, and
Savannah, on the coast. In February of 1997, African American leaders from the
NAACP and the Bulloch County Ministerial Alliance proposed to have Northside
Drive renamed for Martin Luther King Jr. (Hackle 1997). Northside Drive, one of
the longest and busiest commercial arteries in Statesboro, is part of U.S. Highway
80 and passes by the city’s mall and nearly 200 businesses. Donnie Simmons, one
of the local NAACP leaders behind the proposal, expressed it best when he said:
Dr. King lived a highly visible life and should have a highly visible place
named … I can never agree to renaming a street restricted to the black
community. This would bury Dr. King in the black community and say that Dr.
King was only for blacks. … King was against injustice for every man [sic].
(Simmons 1997)
Not unlike similar struggles across the country, the proposal to rename Northside
drew significant resistance from the street’s white property and business owners,
many of whom signed a petition against the name change and complained about
the financial burden of changing their address. Opponents downplayed the use-
value of the road’s name to African Americans as a public symbol and stressed the
exchange value of maintaining the name for customers, suppliers, and their bottom
line (Rogers 1997). While this argument was represented to the public simply as
a matter of cost and convenience, it actually masked a deeper anxiety about white
discomfort and protecting racial boundaries for the sake of commercialism. The
owner of a business on Northside argued: “When someone calls me up asking for
directions to the store and I say ‘We’re located on MLK road,’ those people might
think I’m located on the black side of town. Now, I’m not a racist but that fact may
keep people from coming to my store” (Henry 1997).
Arguments made by property interests on Northside Drive proved influential,
prompting the Statesboro City Council in May of 1997 to unanimously pass an
ordinance that required 75 percent of property owners on a street to approve a
proposed name change before it could be formally voted on by council members.
The ordinance also required the petitioners of a street name change to pay half the
cost for new street signage, a policy that spoke to: (1) how much the city sought to
discourage renaming, especially for major roads; and (2) the extent to which street
name rights were clearly defined in terms of exchange value and revenue (Gross
1997). Even though the King street debate began before the passage of the
ordinance, supporters of renaming Northside were required to follow the newly
created decision-making rules, which led some black leaders to claim that the
ordinance targeted their request. NAACP leader Donnie Simmons argued that the
ordinance thwarted the efforts of African Americans. He contended: “They [the
city council] know good and well we’re not going to get 75 percent of the whites
to name a street for King” (quoted in Gross 1997, 1A). Moreover, because Northside
Drive was a major highway, the estimated cost of the renaming would be $8,000–
10,000 (USD), a sizable sum for the local NAACP or any minority organization.
The situation was further complicated by the approval of the new ordinance by
African American city councilman David Shumake, who argued that the ordinance
provided blacks a mechanism for demonstrating public support for renaming to
the city council. In fact, he argued that the ordinance would actually protect black
interests by preventing city leaders from later removing King’s name from
Northside once it was changed. In contrast to Simmons, Shumake suggested that
“Blacks can get Northside renamed if they organize, shake bushes, and mobilize,”
although this was difficult to envision given the level of vitriolic opposition
expressed by Northside’s businesses and property owners. Shumake expressed
hesitancy about “forcing a street address change down the throat of the [white]
community” (Shumake 1997). As this situation illustrates, even when it appears
that African Americans have a place in the decision-making process, such as
having a seat on the city council, this does not guarantee that procedural or
participatory justice is achieved. The ordinance, by putting the power to initiate a
name change in the hands of those on Northside rather than the city council,
worked not only to limit the place naming rights and participatory power of the
broader Statesboro African American community but also Shumake himself.
Ultimately, Statesboro’s street renaming ordinance facilitated the renaming of
a street for King, but it was not Northside Drive. In December 2002, the city
council voted to rename two connecting roads (Blitch and Institute) after receiving
a proposal from African American city councilman Gary Lewis. Following
ordinance guidelines, Lewis spent six months going door to door to collect
signatures from property owners along the two streets (Martin 2002). Blitch and
Institute Streets were smaller, poorer, and more African American than Northside.
Some opponents, including members of the NAACP, questioned the extent to
which the chosen streets were prominent enough to bear King’s name. Statesboro’s
ordinance not only made the renaming of a major road difficult, it also forced
black leaders to limit their commemorative agenda to streets that could be renamed
in light of the property owner and signage cost requirements, specifically roads
largely limited to the confines of the black community. While the ordinance gave
proponents such as Lewis a means of ensuring that King’s memory would be
emplaced in the landscape, it nevertheless territorialized street naming and the
right to participate, legally sanctioned the privatization of public space, and
contributed to the growing power of property owners and commercial interests to
define the limits of urban citizenship and belonging.
Conclusion
The critical place name literature has not widely examined street naming in terms
of the struggle for equality and civil rights from the standpoint of spatial justice and
struggles over belonging. The naming of streets for King provides a glimpse into
where we in the USA are in terms of race relations, casting doubt on conservative
declarations that we have moved into a post-racial or post-civil rights era.
Recognizing King within the official streetscape is not simply a dry retelling of
important histories. Rather, for African American activists, place naming can be an
emotion-laden and politically charged spatial tool for redefining the scale at which
they belong in the American city and the right to claim urban space and memory.
More than that, however, the struggle to (re)name streets for King and its
connection to broader scholarly work on the politics of belonging illuminates the
contradictory and sometimes incommensurate goals of activists who seek to claim
urban space. On the one hand, the struggle over King streets illustrates the way
portions of the African American community are attempting to assert themselves
symbolically and materially. However, as African Americans pursue street naming
as part of the right to belong, they encounter obstacles—both outside of and within
their own communities—that limit their ability to redistribute the resources of the
city and to rescale naming rights in ways that achieve King’s vision of positive
peace-building practices that address racism, citizenship, and justice.
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16 From number to name
Symbolic capital, places of
memory, and the politics of street
renaming in New York City
Reuben Rose-Redwood
Introduction
Places of memory are sites where the symbolic imaginings of the past interweave
with the materialities of the present. The production of place is generally part of a
socio-spatial project “to institute horizons, to establish boundaries, to secure the
identity of places,” but as Massey (1994, 5) argues, “such attempts at the stabilization
of meaning are constantly the site of social contest.” Places should be viewed,
therefore, less as clearly delineated “objects” with distinct spatial identities and
more as always-unfinished products of social relations (Massey 2005). Each place
of memory is constructed in relation to other places, and it is this relationality of
place that requires critical analysis. A relational conception of place and space thus
provides a useful starting point for examining urban street naming systems as sites
of symbolic struggle over the politics of public remembrance.
In his analysis of symbolic power, Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes the important
role that naming practices play in the mobilization of symbolic capital:
In the symbolic struggle for the production of common sense or, more
precisely, for the monopoly of legitimate naming as the official—i.e.
explicit and public—imposition of the legitimate vision of the social world,
agents bring into play the symbolic capital that they have acquired in
previous struggles.
(1991, 239, italics in original)
For Bourdieu, the notion of “symbolic capital” refers to the various forms of
distinction and prestige acquired through cultural recognition. He maintains that
the accumulation of symbolic capital can serve different ends, being converted
into economic capital in some instances and used to establish social solidarities
(social capital) or consolidate cultural status (cultural capital) in other
circumstances (Bourdieu 1986; Painter 2000). A number of scholars have
suggested that Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital is directly applicable to
understanding the politics of place naming. In particular, Alderman (2008)
provides a conceptual framework that examines place naming as both a form of
“symbolic capital” and “symbolic resistance,” where the former emphasizes the
role of place naming as a marker of prestige and the latter focuses on the various
From number to name 275
ways in which marginalized groups resist the imposition of elite naming practices.
While it is important to examine the symbolic struggles over commemoration
between groups, there are also tensions within both elite and marginalized groups
that deserve attention (Forest, Johnson, and Till 2004). Consequently, the binary
opposition between “elite” dominance and the symbolic resistance of the
“marginalized” has a tendency to oversimplify the multiple layers of contestation
over social recognition among myriad groups.
This chapter argues that an exclusionary politics of symbolic erasure can be
found in both elite attempts to rename streets as a means of converting symbolic
capital into economic capital as well as among historically marginalized groups that
seek cultural recognition yet in the process privilege one subset of the group over
another. The exclusionary dimension of street renaming is most evident not at the
scale of the individual street name change but in relation to the “city-text” as a
whole (Azaryahu 1996). The cultural meaning of a toponym differs greatly
depending upon the socio-spatial context within which it is placed. Naming a small
street in a predominantly African American neighborhood after Martin Luther King
Jr., for example, will have a very different commemorative effect than renaming a
major thoroughfare that traverses an entire city in honor of King (Alderman 2003).
Similarly, if a street naming system has historically been dominated by the
commemoration of men, then the naming of a street after a woman may take on
additional symbolic importance (Dwyer 2000). It is for these reasons that street
names can best be understood intertextually as part of a relational theory of place.
If the streetscape can indeed be seen as a “memorial arena” (Alderman 2002), it
is also a space in which “public forgetting” is inscribed into the very texture of the
landscape itself (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004, 347). Understanding the relation
between spatial designation and discursive-material erasure requires a critical
analysis of the very notion of commemorative place naming. Traditionally, scholars
have made a distinction between commemorative and non-commemorative
toponyms, following the influential work of George Stewart (1954, 1958). From this
perspective, a place or street name is seen as “commemorative” if it honors the
memory of a specific individual, group, prior settlement, or abstract ideal. While
acknowledging that there are “border-line cases,” Stewart (1954, 2) nevertheless
contrasts commemorative names with other classes of toponyms, such as descriptive,
possessive, and euphemistic place names, among others. Such a toponymic
classification system certainly has its practical uses, yet it underestimates the
commemorative dimension of all naming practices and thereby elides the inseparable
relation between memory and place naming. A descriptive toponym may appear to
simply describe the geographic features of a place (Stewart 1954), whereas
possessive place naming privileges the owners of property and is a central strategy
of land appropriation (Carter 1988). However, I argue in this chapter that the very
act of place naming is an attempt to discursively reconfigure a given space as a place
to be remembered. Naming a place, therefore, is itself a commemorative practice,
whether those names are descriptive, possessive, or otherwise.
Take the example of a street in Manhattan named Minetta Lane (Moscow
1978). When the Dutch settled New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, they
276 Reuben Rose-Redwood
named a small brook in the area Mintje Kill (or “little stream”). After the British
took control of Manhattan Island, this descriptive name was then Anglicized,
becoming Minetta Brook, and the street that later covered the brook was named
Minetta Lane. There are several different levels of memory-production at work
here. First, the original act of naming the stream brought it into the sphere of
language as an “object” to be remembered by a given name. After being translated
from one toponymic lexicon to another, the brook was then commemorated by
the street name. From this simple example, we can see how even descriptive
toponyms are commemorative in that they bring geographic features within the
realm of public remembrance. The same argument can be made with respect to
possessive place names that commemorate the owners of property in a given
locale. If all place names are commemorative, the key question then is precisely
what is to be remembered or forgotten at a particular place of memory? Should
the memory of geographic features, prior owners of property, or national heroes
be toponymically associated with a specific site? It is clear that different place
names come with their own associations of memory, ontological priorities, and
cultural politics, but they all take part in constructing places of selective
remembrance and oblivion.
In this chapter, I examine New York’s streetscape as a “memorial arena” in
which multiple layers of socio-spatial exclusion are at work in the production of
commemorative landscapes. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic
capital, I maintain that street naming is a strategic element of an “economy of
practices” for marking geographical space as both a place of memory and erasure.
The practice of symbolic erasure is most evident in the act of street renaming,
where one name is officially replaced by another. However, places of memory do
not exist in isolation but as part of broader networks of commemorative spaces.
To understand the spatial politics of memory and forgetting, therefore, it is
necessary to consider the intertextuality of spatial inscription as well as the
relationality of place-making more generally.
After providing a brief overview of the history of street naming in New York,
the remainder of the chapter is divided into two case studies that both involve the
renaming of Manhattan’s numbered streets and avenues. The first example focuses
on the project to rename the numbered avenues on the Upper West Side during the
latter-nineteenth century, while the second case explores the history of renaming
Harlem’s streets to commemorate civil rights leaders a century later. By
juxtaposing these two street renaming projects side by side, I emphasize how the
complex interplay between different forms of capital (symbolic, cultural, social,
and economic) and the dialectic of memory/erasure have historically resulted
from different social configurations and may produce divergent outcomes. Both
cases consider attempts to rename formerly numbered streets and avenues, and the
benefit of considering them together is that they illustrate the multiple interests—
as well as the exclusionary politics of race, class, and gender—involved in such
shifts from “number” to “name.” In doing so, this chapter extends the current
literature on street naming as a commemorative practice by linking it to a broader
relational view of place-making, memory, and symbolic capital.
Naming and numbering the streets of New York: a historical overview
As the city of New York grew from the small Dutch trading post of New
Amsterdam in the seventeenth century to the expansive metropolis of today, its
cultural landscape witnessed dramatic material and symbolic transformations.
Prior to European settlement, the Munsee-speaking Lenape referred to the area as
“Lenapehoking,” which translates as “The Land of the People,” and the name
Manhattan itself is believed to have come from the Lenape word for “Island of
Hills” (Burrows and Wallace 1999). The Lenape established numerous paths and
trails throughout the region, including a portion of what is now Broadway in
Manhattan. Much of the Lenape presence was both physically and symbolically
erased from the landscape as the Dutch and British took possession of the area.
Just as most historical narratives have traditionally begun at the moment of
European arrival, street names have primarily commemorated the city’s European
heritage. The Dutch began formally naming streets in New Amsterdam under the
regime of Peter Stuyvesant, who ruled from 1647 to 1664, and many of the Dutch
street names were later Anglicized by the British. Streets were often named after
landowners, or members of landowning families, and were thus markers of
property ownership. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, streets in
lower Manhattan were also named in honor of merchants, war heroes,
philanthropists, surveyors, politicians, inventors, religious leaders, publishers,
writers, urban institutions, and topographical features (Raulin 1984).
Although many streets were named during the colonial period, few street signs
were actually posted at the corners of intersections prior to the Revolutionary
War. The issue of constructing a comprehensive system of street signs proved to
be a significant challenge to municipal authorities well into the nineteenth century.
As Henkin (1998, 41) remarks, “what is most striking about the street signs of
antebellum New York is that their coverage of the city was so inadequate,
incomplete, and even, at times, contested.” As the city expanded northward,
municipal officials adopted a state-authorized street plan, known as the
Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which consisted of a grid of streets and avenues
that were numbered rather than named (Spann 1988). On Manhattan’s East Side,
two additional north–south thoroughfares—Lexington and Madison Avenues—
were added to the original plan in the 1830s, and part of Fourth Avenue was later
renamed Park Avenue in 1888 (Feirstein 2001).
Just as the “anonymous” numbered streets and avenues of the original grid
plan were beginning to be laid out in the 1820s, spatial designations such as
“Place” and “Square” became fashionable as a mark of social distinction among
property owners, who in some cases rechristened streets as “places” without the
approval of city officials. The publisher of the local city directory, Thomas
Longworth, criticized such “places of exclusiveness” by arguing that they
bestowed special privileges on a select few to the detriment and “confusion” of
the many (1833, 685). Longworth eventually agreed to include the informal
names of “places” in his directory. However, he nevertheless could not help but
disparage such attempts at acquiring prestige by the propertied classes. As he
rather sarcastically put it:
if there be any honour or dignity resulting from the adoption of the tag Place,
it ought to be enjoyed by the citizens at large … it is therefore to be hoped that
… [the Common Council] will cause the subject to be investigated, expunge
the word street, and substitute the word place throughout the city—let us all
have a place.
(1841, 813, emphasis in original)
Certainly, we should not take Longworth at his word here, but he does draw our
attention to the way in which the construction of “place” was a means of obtaining
symbolic capital in nineteenth-century New York. He also raises the important
question, albeit in jest, of the equitable distribution of recognized “places” in the city.
Given its symbolic import, the renaming of streets has become a major political
issue in New York and has ignited social tensions over the politics of memory.
While most street renaming bills pass without much debate, there have been a
number of cases involving considerable controversy (e.g., Ranzal 1976; Roberts
1988; Edozien 2007). The City Council has often been criticized for devoting too
much time to the renaming of streets, since it was not uncommon for more than 40
percent of all local laws passed annually in New York City to consist of street
name changes (Gargan 1981; Feeney 1990; Garcilazo 1992; Siegel 1993; Lee
2001; Haberman 2002). Critics often charge that the city should devote its time to
more “serious” matters, while proponents insist that street naming is an important
component of public recognition in a multicultural society.
Drawing upon archival materials, the remainder of this chapter demonstrates
the important role that street naming has played throughout the city’s history. By
examining the meeting minutes of the West Side Association, among other
sources, I demonstrate how the renaming of the West Side avenues in the
nineteenth century was part of a deliberate strategy among property owners to
reshape the material and symbolic landscape of the Upper West Side. I then
compare the renaming of the avenues on the West Side with the commemorative
street renamings in Harlem during the second half of the twentieth century to
illustrate the multiple layers of exclusion involved in the accumulation of symbolic
capital and the construction of places of memory.
“Freedom from shanties” and the renaming of the West Side avenues
The cultural politics of “appropriate” socio-spatial signification

Between 1880 and 1890, the numbered avenues west of Central Park in Manhattan
were renamed as Central Park West, Columbus, Amsterdam, and West End
Avenues in an attempt by property owners to garner symbolic capital and thereby
facilitate the development of the West Side (Table 16.1). For several decades, the
West Side was home to German, Irish, and Dutch working-class immigrants who
rented plots of land from property owners and constructed make-shift wooden
houses and cultivated gardens in what came to be known in the popular press as
“Shantytown.” According to some estimates, there were as many as 10,000 shanty
Table 16.1 The renaming of the West Side avenues, 1880–1890
New Street Name Previous Street Name Year of Street Name Change
West End Avenue Eleventh Avenue 1880

Central Park West Eighth Avenue 1883
Columbus Avenue Ninth Avenue 1890
Amsterdam Avenue Tenth Avenue 1890
dwellers on the West Side by 1880, with ground-rents ranging from $20 to $100
per year (Stern, Mellins, and Fishman 1999; Neuwirth 2005). The renaming of the
West Side avenues occurred at precisely the moment when property owners
sought to evict the shanty dwellers from the West Side, and I shall explore the
interconnections between these processes of material and symbolic erasure below.
In 1866, a group of influential landowners founded the West Side Association,
which lobbied the city for the extension of public works projects on the West Side
to enhance property values (Burrows and Wallace 1999; Stern, Mellins, and
Fishman 1999; Scobey 2002; Neuwirth 2005). As Scobey (2002, 34–35) points
out, the Executive Committee of the Association consisted of “every large
commercial interest in New York” at the time. While they may have disagreed on
other matters, the members of the West Side Association were all deeply concerned
that the shanty dwellers would scare off more affluent tenants and permanently
make their mark upon the cultural landscape through the common use of place
names that might eventually become codified after continuous usage. That fear
was, I argue, one of the major impetuses that led the West Side Association to
lobby for the renaming of the avenues on the West Side.
The project to rename the West Side avenues was first conceived in the early
1870s. In 1871, A. W. Colgate read a paper before the West Side Association on
the subject of “Appropriate names for the new avenues and public places on the
West Side.” “We all know how it is,” Colgate explained to his audience, “that any
name, good or bad, once fastened to a locality is pretty sure to stick.” He went on
to note that:
It passes readily into conversation, appears in print, and soon finds its way,
not only into literature, but also into titles, mortgages, and other instruments
pertaining to the transfer of real estate. … We should also remember that
good names cost no more than bad ones, and that the only way to avoid the
bad, is to be beforehand with the good. The present inhabitants [read: shanty
dwellers], such as they are of the West Side, are not likely to give any names
that property owners would care to see adopted, and yet they may
unconsciously christen many of the main streets, with names not easily got
rid of. Witness in London—Rotten row, Hog lane, Crab-tree street, Peacock
street, Shoe lane, and others equally as absurd, which had there [sic] origin in
this way, and which generally retain their homely names, even though their
neighborhoods become aristocratic.
(Colgate 1871, 22)
Right from the very beginning, Colgate insisted on the necessity of fixing “good”
street names before the shanty tenants could do so, and he hoped to ensure that the
names given by property owners, not tenants, would be “sure to stick” to the
cultural landscape of the West Side. Colgate’s call for “appropriate” street names
was based upon a recognition that such spatial designations readily circulated as
symbolic markers of distinction through the various “instruments pertaining to the
transfer of real estate.” The symbolic capital associated with a “good” street name,
Colgate argued, might translate into economic capital, whereas a “bad” name
could have the opposite effect.
For landowners to maximize the symbolic capital of their property, Colgate
suggested that three categories of street names were generally appropriate: historical
(i.e., “the names of famous men”), geographical (i.e., “names suggested by the
topography of the place”), and proprietary names (i.e., “names of the original holders
of large parcels of real estate through or near which the streets run”). Unsurprisingly,
he favored proprietary names, at least in principle, since “[t]he names of the original
landholders afford the largest and perhaps the best selection of all, and precedent is
largely in favor of their adoption, especially as many of these old families were
distinguished in the early history of the city” (Colgate 1871, 25). Colgate’s preference
for proprietary street names was more than a mere aesthetic preference but should
rather be situated within the context of struggles between landowners and shanty
inhabitants on the West Side. Calling for the West Side’s numbered avenues to be
rechristened to commemorate the “original holders” of real estate in the area was a
clear sign that Colgate sought to remake the cultural landscape as a symbolic marker
of property and propriety, thereby excluding the shanty-dwelling immigrant
population from the realm of legitimate socio-spatial signification.
Colgate concluded that the early adoption of at least some type of nomenclature,
before the colloquialisms of Shantytown gained legitimacy, “would aid in bringing
the adjacent property into notice and would give it a locality and even a value
which it does not now possess” (1871, 26). He was confident that whatever the
West Side Association recommended would “no doubt be favorably received by
the Department of Public Parks, and thus soon find its way into the maps, and so
become part and parcel of the city” (Colgate 1871, 27). After Colgate’s speech,
the president of the West Side Association, William Martin, concurred with his
assessment, and, according to the Proceedings, Martin reiterated that:
it was important to consider the subject maturely, and in advance, lest names
not well selected, should attach to these new names and places, which it
would not be easy to get rid of. … We must take care lest names not so
appropriate … become started and adhere to these new and unnamed places.
(see Colgate 1871, 28–29)
The new streets and avenues being laid out on the West Side already had names—
the numerical designations from the Plan of 1811—yet West Side property
owners, such as Colgate and Martin, thought that a numbered street did not have
the same distinguishing qualities and symbolic power as a “proper” street name.
Symbolic erasure, forced eviction, and “warfare” on the West Side
By the end of the 1870s and beginning of the 1880s, the West Side Association
began lobbying the municipal authorities to legally rename the West Side avenues.
The Association’s decision to lobby for street names was inseparable from its
desire to displace—both figuratively and literally—the inhabitants of the shanties.
At a West Side Association subcommittee meeting on September 27, 1879, the
Committee on Streets and Avenues was called on to report again at the following
meeting on the “proper course to pursue to legalize” the names chosen by the
Association. On the very same page of the meeting minutes, the Committee on
Buildings was asked to consider the dilemma of “what action is necessary in order
to ensure freedom from Shanties and other Nuisances on the West Side” (West
Side Association 1879–1885, 62, emphasis added). The renaming of the avenues
and the eviction of the shanty inhabitants were both part of the same struggle to
market the West Side as a site of social exclusivity.
In 1880, the West Side Association lobbied the city to rename Eleventh Avenue
as “West End Avenue,” given its associations with the elite section of London
Figure 16.1 “Freedom from Shanties” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 1880)

bearing the same name (Raulin 1984). The matter was considered by the city’s
Committee on Streets and Street Pavements, and the resolution was later approved
by the Board of Alderman (Proceedings of the Board of Alderman 1880). The
West Side Association then petitioned city officials to rename Eighth Avenue,
which was formally rechristened as “Central Park West” in 1883. New designations
for Ninth and Tenth Avenues were eventually adopted in April of 1890, being
changed to Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, respectively, which have “stuck”
into the present. The renaming of avenues on the West Side occurred at the same
time that a boom in property development opened the prospects of increasing
profits for West Side landowners and speculators (Scobey 2002). All the incentives
were now in place to render the tenants of Shantytown superfluous, at least from
the perspective of their landlords. “Freedom from Shanties” was the rallying cry
among property owners, yet the residents of Shantytown were not willing to be
displaced so easily. In 1880, the same year that the West End Avenue was
christened, West Side landowners began what the New York Times (1880) referred
to as all-out “warfare” against their shanty tenants. Landowners generally went to
the courts to get official eviction notices and then attempted to physically force
their tenants off the land and demolish their wooden dwellings (Figure 16.1). The
tensions ran high when the eviction notices were delivered to the tenants. Dogs
were often unleashed on the deputy marshals and bailiffs who brought the notices,
and most landowners “never visit[ed] the locality without being well armed”
(New York Times 1880, 8). By 1890, however, the West Side property owners had
successfully removed the vast majority of the shanties and all of the numbered
avenues on the West Side had been renamed.
Taking history to the streets: Harlem and the spatial politics of

collective memory
Cultural recognition and commemorative street naming in Harlem

A century after the renaming of the West Side avenues, many of Harlem’s streets,
avenues, and parks were renamed to commemorate African American civil rights
leaders (Table 16.2). The renaming of streets in Harlem was part of a nationwide
movement calling for the cultural recognition of African Americans and other
historically marginalized social groups (Rhea 1997; Alderman 2000). The city’s
streetscape was seen as a potential site where African American achievements
could be recognized through the construction of places of memory. The primary
aim was less the conversion of symbolic capital into economic capital, as we saw
with the renaming of the West Side avenues, but rather the creation of a
commemorative space in which the symbolic capital of a street name could
provide a “place” for acknowledging the important contributions of African
Americans to the city and the nation. While Harlem’s streetscape became a space
of recognition, it was also a site of symbolic erasure, with the exclusion of African
American women from places of memory throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The
subsequent effort to create a “place” for African American women among
Table 16.2 A select list of commemorative place names in Harlem, 1925–2007
New Place Name Previous Place Name Year of Name

(or Co-Name) Change
Dorrence Brooks Square — 1925

A. Philip Randolph Square Admiral George Dewey Park 1964
Marcus Garvey Park Mount Morris Park 1973
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. Seventh Avenue 1974
Frederick Douglass Blvd. Eighth Avenue 1977
Jackie Robinson Park Colonial Park 1978
Langston Hughes Place — 1982
African Square — 1983
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. 125th Street 1984
Malcolm X Blvd. Lenox Avenue/Sixth Avenue 1987
Sugar Ray Robinson Corner — 1989
Mary McLeod Bethune Place — 1993
Fredrica L. Teer Square — 1994
Duke Ellington Circle — 1995
Harriet Tubman Avenue St. Nicholas Avenue 2002
The Honorable Percy E. Sutton Avenue Fifth Avenue 2007
Harlem’s street names during the 1990s illustrates how street naming provides a
“memorial arena” within which different commemorative strategies are contested.
Harlem holds a special place in the public imagination as the “capital of black
America” (Jackson 2001, 19). Yet during the latter-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries, white property owners used restrictive covenants in order to prevent
African Americans from buying, or even renting, property in Harlem. It was only
after a steep decline in the real estate market in 1905 that property owners began
renting to African Americans, and both white and black realty companies sold
properties in Harlem to blacks (Taylor 2002). The fear of a so-called “Negro
invasion” led many whites to leave the area in an early instance of “white flight.”
Unlike the eventual displacement of the inhabitants of Shantytown, however,
Harlem remained a predominantly black community throughout the twentieth
century (Osofsky 1996 [1966]; Boyd 2003).
During the 1920s, the black population in Harlem increased dramatically to over
200,000, and the number of white residents continued to sharply decline. Between
1925 and the Great Depression, Harlem was the site of considerable cultural and
artistic experimentation, with black writers, artists, and musicians taking part in what
came to be known as the “Harlem Renaissance” (Wintz and Finkelman 2004; Carroll
2005). This period has, in many respects, become a sort of “golden age” to which
historical representations of Harlem continue to harken back. By the mid-1920s, the
African American presence in Harlem was beginning to make its cultural mark on
the city’s symbolic landscape. In 1925, one of the first public squares to honor an
African American in New York City was dedicated as Dorrence Brooks Square at
136th Street and Edgecombe Avenue, named after a black soldier who had fought
and died in World War I. It was not until the 1970s, however, that the commemoration
of African Americans would completely reshape Harlem’s streetscape.
One of the earliest of such renamings occurred when the African Nationalist
Pioneer Movement successfully lobbied to rechristen Harlem’s Mount Morris
Park as Marcus Garvey Park in 1973, as a way to honor the Jamaican-born Pan-
African nationalist. Over the course of the next two decades, Harlem witnessed a
proliferation of street renamings to honor slain civil rights leaders as well as black
artists, musicians, and athletes. New York City Councilman Frederick Samuel
sponsored many of these street renaming bills and explained their purpose by
remarking that “[w]e’re trying to say, particularly to our young people, that more
happened to black folks than slavery to welfare” (as quoted in Quindlen 1983, 27).
Renaming Harlem’s streets, then, was a strategy of reshaping collective memories
within the African American community as much as it was a demand for
recognition by society at large.
The majority of the street renaming bills sailed through the City Council without
much debate, most likely because they were generally confined to Harlem. The
one exception was the unsuccessful proposal to rename Fifth Avenue as “Marcus
Garvey Boulevard,” which sparked one of the most significant street naming
conflicts within Harlem’s recent history. The African Nationalist Pioneer
Movement lobbied for the street name change in part because it was the centennial
year of Garvey’s birth. When two community boards approved the new name, a
number of politicians—including US Congressman Charles Rangel—initially
came out in favor of the change (Browne 1988). However, many of the middle-
class black residents of Riverbend Co-op and the Riverton Houses, near 139th
Street and Fifth Avenue, bitterly opposed the name change. Gloria Harrison, a
resident of the Riverbend Co-op and a professional accountant, led a petition drive
in opposition to Marcus Garvey Boulevard. The vice chairwoman of Riverbend
likewise ridiculed the Garvey designation by exclaiming, “Imagine, ‘Saks Marcus
Garvey’” (as quoted in Roberts 1988, B1), implying that Saks Fifth Avenue had a
more prestigious ring.
The president of the Uptown Chamber of Commerce went so far as to argue that
“if there’s one avenue we would like to maintain its name, its Fifth, for everything
it connotes to the country and for the continuity between Harlem and the rest of
the city” (as quoted in Roberts 1988, B1). Fifth Avenue may be a numerical
designation, but over the years it has accumulated a considerable amount of
symbolic capital with many proclaiming it “an international symbol of fashion
and wealth” (Patterson 1998, 216). When the president of the Uptown Chamber of
Commerce enlisted the prestigious connotations of Fifth Avenue as a means of
shooting down the Marcus Garvey name change, therefore, he was tapping into a
politics of cultural recognition of a very different sort—one that privileged the
image of wealth and economic status associated with Fifth Avenue. While some
opponents may very well have been critical of Garvey’s political philosophy, it is
worth noting that they framed all of their arguments against the street name change
largely in terms of its impact on the symbolic capital of a Fifth Avenue address.
Eventually the critics prevailed, yet after all the controversy surrounding the
renaming of Fifth Avenue in the 1980s, it is remarkable that the city renamed
upper Fifth Avenue as The Honorable Percy E. Sutton Avenue in 2007,
commemorating one of Harlem’s prominent African American leaders, and
challenging the symbolic power of Fifth Avenue.
A “rightful place” for African American women in Harlem’s streetscape

What is striking about the commemorative street names in Harlem dating from the
1970s and 1980s is that they are all named in honor of African American men. The
first street in Harlem to be named after an African American woman was Mary
McLeod Bethune Place, also known as 134th Street, which was renamed in 1993.
The proposal to rename one of Harlem’s streets for an African American woman
was the work of a class of second-grade students at P.S. 92 (also known as Mary
McLeod Bethune School). In the Fall of 1992, elementary school teacher Syma
Solovitch was giving a history lesson on the famous African American men honored
with commemorative street names in Harlem when one of her seven-year-old
students, Rondu Gantt, asked a simple yet perplexing question: “Why isn’t there any
street in Harlem named after an African-American woman?” (as quoted in Allen
1993, 33). Gantt’s question led to a year-long class project not only to study the
matter but also to lobby for such a commemoration (Allen 1993; Bernstein 1993;
Solovitch 1993). Solovitch and her students began by studying the achievements of
African American women and eventually decided to choose Bethune because of her
distinguished career and support of education (Hanson 2003). The fact that their
school was already named in her honor was, no doubt, also a consideration.
The measure was supported by the local community board as well as the City
Council’s Committee on Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs. The bill was
officially sponsored by C. Virginia Fields and various other council members,
unanimously approved by the Council, and signed by the Mayor in 1993 (Allen
1993; Bernstein 1993). During the public hearing, one of the supporters of the bill,
council member Stanley Michels, was very explicit in his condemnation of the
exclusion of women in general, and African American women in particular, from
the writing of American history. Michels explained that he, along with various
other council members, was “very enthusiastic” to co-sponsor the bill, because
“those of us who have studied American history, know her [i.e., Bethune’s]
rightful place and the fact that she has not been recognized for many years, her
rightful place in American history” (Public Hearing on Local Laws 1993, 10).
“Too often in American history,” he observed:
we find lack of women because the historians were men, I think, and therefore
they didn’t give them their rightful place. … But Mary McLeod Bethune, I
hope and pray, when the history books are rewritten to really start to be fair,
they will give her her rightful place in American history, certainly rightful
place in the history of our time, because she did so much.
(Public Hearing on Local Laws 1993, 11)
There are several significant points worth making with respect to Michels’
comments. First, he emphasized the phrase “rightful place” a total of five times
and in some cases twice within the same sentence. His insistence that Bethune
deserved a “place” had a double meaning, both historical and geographic. On the
one hand, Michels hoped that Bethune and other women would be acknowledged,
and therefore have a “place,” within history textbooks in order to recognize their
achievements. Yet he also saw the renaming of 134th Street as a way to quite
literally give Bethune a “place” within the cultural landscape of New York City.
The commemoration of Bethune laid the groundwork for subsequent
commemorative street names in honor of African American women, such as
Fredrica Teer and Harriet Tubman, and it will likely inspire additional
commemorative practices in the future.
Conclusion
In the present chapter, I have argued that the renaming of streets opens a space in
which the symbolic struggles over remembrance and erasure are anchored in
specific sites that serve as places of memory. The attempt to legally rename a
street has historically been adopted by myriad groups as an important strategy for
acquiring legitimacy, prestige, and cultural recognition in the form of symbolic
capital. This chapter has highlighted two key moments in the history of renaming
New York’s streets to demonstrate how the symbolic capital associated with
street naming may be linked to an elite project of symbolic erasure and forced
eviction, on the one hand, and the cultural recognition of a historically
marginalized group, on the other. These two case studies confirm Alderman’s
(2000, 672) claim that street naming can be “used for resisting the hegemonic
order as well as reproducing it.” Yet, it is both theoretically and politically
important not to reduce the symbolic struggle over street naming to a binary
opposition between the “elite” and the “marginalized,” because such a
characterization obscures the multiple axes of exclusion at stake in the production
of commemorative spaces. The case of gender exclusion in the renaming of
Harlem’s streets is instructive in this regard, and it is hoped that future studies of
the politics of street naming will explore the different layers of exclusion and
erasure in struggles over commemoration and place-making.
I have also argued that the relation between street naming and memory is more
complex than most traditional accounts of commemorative street names would
suggest. The distinction between commemorative and non-commemorative street
names limits our understanding of the symbolic power of toponymy in constructing
places of memory and oblivion. As the renaming of the West Side avenues
illustrates, the designation of descriptive street names such as “Central Park West”
and “West End Avenue” was a means of bringing the West Side into the realm of
public memory as a site of social exclusivity, which was linked not only to the
symbolic erasure but also to the physical removal of the working-class immigrant
population that resided in that section of the city. Similarly, the renaming of Ninth
Avenue to commemorate Christopher Columbus reveals more about the perception
of prestige among property owners in nineteenth-century New York than it does
about Columbus himself. While Columbus Avenue is “commemorative” in the
traditional sense of a street name honoring a famous individual, we must also
explore the commemorative dimensions of descriptive, possessive, and other
street names as well.
Although this chapter has focused primarily on the shift from “number” to
“name,” it is worth noting that numbered streets make up commemorative spaces
despite their seemingly strict utilitarian function for spatial orientation. The
symbolic capital of a Fifth Avenue address should remind us that numerical
inscriptions also have a “place” in the landscape of public memory. This line of
argument leads to a much broader conception of commemorative space, which
moves beyond the traditional view that confines commemorative street naming
primarily to those designations that honor specific individuals. Since
commemoration takes numerous different forms in the streetscape, future critical
place-name studies should explore the multiple ways in which memory and
erasure are implicated in the production of place.
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17 Toponymic checksum
or flotsam?
Recalculating Dubai’s grid
with Makani, “the smartest map
in the world”
Maral Sotoudehnia
Introduction
Makani is the new geo-address system for the city of Dubai. It consists of 10
digits. Each Makani number gives you the location of the entrance of a building.
(Makani 2015)
The spatial practices of street addressing—the naming of streets, numbering of

buildings, and construction of street signage systems—have a larger political
significance, because they have historically played an important role in the
social production of calculable spaces that make up the “geo-coded world.”
(Rose-Redwood 2012, 297)
Software challenges us to re-inscribe what we comprehend as inscription.

(Thrift and French 2002, 331)
The Government of Dubai is currently phasing in Makani, a “first-of-its-kind

smart system for geographic addresses” (“Hamdan Launches” 2015). Designed
by the municipal branch of Dubai’s Government, Dubai Municipality, Makani
uses ten digit codes to “identify locations and intended destinations instead of
having to determine the areas [sic] name, street number and building number”
(Dubai Smart Gov. 2015, 5). Arabic for “my place” or “my location,” Makani
provides users equipped with smartphones and internet access with an accurate
wayfinding tool to navigate the Emirate (Dubai Smart Gov. 2015; Makani 2015).
The application relies on satellites to digitally codify urban space, which can then
be accessed haptically via smart devices or desktop computers. These Makani
numbers are also etched onto each entrance of every building (Makani 2015). The
application enhances existing geo-location services by offering voice navigation
to destinations, allegedly improving emergency response times and providing
real-time traffic information.
The promise of an effective wayfinding system for a rapidly expanding city like
Dubai offers local residents and visitors an undeniable civic service, but what
interests me, here, is how applications like Makani function as spatial inscription
Toponymic checksum or flotsam? 291
technologies that encode urban space (Zook and Graham 2007; Kitchin and Dodge
2011). Through Makani’s code, the application reformats Dubai as a “text” with a
“coherent ‘page layout’” (Rose-Redwood 2009, 201). This new typography of the
city-text enables smart users to “touch the ontic” of the city’s newly re-ordered
grid (Spivak 1993, 30; cf. Thrift and French 2002, 312). Makani opens up Dubai’s
map by bringing every spatial object online, regardless of any previous toponyms
or identifiers. The application offers a singular case to illuminate how power
operates through digital addressing to enact another “‘theory of the world’ …
contingent on the ruling social and moral order” (cf. Azaryahu 1992, 351; Light,
Nicolae, Suditu 2002). Much like toponyms and other spatial nomenclature,
Makani numbers are “more than a means of facilitating spatial orientation”
(Azaryahu 1992, 351). In Dubai’s case, the application transforms street names
into ornamental signposts and offers evidence of the increasing role smart geo-
addressing conventions play in the cultural production of “calculable spaces” and
behavioral data (Rose-Redwood 2012, 297; Zegras et al. 2015).
The aim of this chapter is to present an initial investigation of Dubai’s smart
geo-addressing application, Makani, as a new line of inquiry for critical toponymy
and the study of spatial inscription practices more generally. I examine Makani,
and offer a preliminary analysis of digital geo-coding systems as “key technologies”
that automatically produce urban space (Thrift and French 2002). Following
Zegras et al. (2015, 125), I am interested in examining the role that code, through
smart geo-addressing practices, plays in place-making and “how smart geo-spatial
inscription technologies are developed, targeted, disseminated for ‘public’ use,
and interpreted by consumers.” Despite an emerging interest in the geo-web or
Web 2.0 applications, there continues to be a significant lack of recent research
investigating the spatial and cultural politics associated with GIS technologies
(Kingsbury and Jones 2009; Rose-Redwood 2012; Lin 2013). Very little research
currently examines smart GIS applications and their related discourses from non-
Western perspectives (Lin 2013). While many studies look to Dubai as an urban
“mecca of conspicuous consumption” (Bagaeen 2007; Davis 2007; cf. Acuto
2010, 272; Kanna 2011, 2013), few geographers examine the political role that
smart spatial technology plays in the Emirate’s “hyper-entrepreneurialism” and
continued expansion (Acuto 2010, 272).
In the present chapter, I begin by reviewing key ideas about the spatiality of code
and how they have been enlisted by dominant smart city narratives (Hollands 2008,
2015; Kitchin and Dodge 2011). I bring both in dialogue with contemporary debates
about the critical study of place naming, numbering, and inscription more generally
(Rose-Redwood, 2006, 2009, 2012; Alderman 2009; Azaryahu 2011). Next, I offer
an initial analysis of Dubai’s Makani application. In particular, I interrogate Dubai’s
smart “spatial regime of inscriptions” and query how the application alters existing
place-identities associated with concurrent commemorative street naming practices
(Rose-Redwood 2009, 201, italics omitted). I pay close attention to the vagaries of
Makani’s code, how geo-addressing might lead to misdirection and produce new
spaces of exclusion or inclusion made possible through the smart application’s
implementation (Graham 2002). Finally, I cast my attention to Makani’s proprietary
292 Maral Sotoudehnia
framework, focusing on some of the challenges associated with government-
designed smart applications and policies that encourage the uncritical creep of code
into daily life through the information that users give up, often unknowingly.
Makani, I argue, serves as a unique example of the “toponym-as-commodity”
(Rose-Redwood and Alderman 2011, 3), since the app’s proprietary limits facilitate
the commodification of space through its identifiers and associated user data (Thrift
and French 2002; Dalton and Thatcher 2015).
From number to name … to number? Code/spaces and the

production of Dubai’s smart city-text
Geographers are beginning to examine software and how it affects material life
(Thrift and French 2002; Graham 2005; Zook and Graham 2007; Kitchin, Dodge
and Zook 2009; Graham and Zook 2011; Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Townsend
2013; Kitchin 2014, 2015). Most investigations of the spatiality of code attend to
the mounting “cultural hold” (Thrift and French 2002, 310) that software,
information and communication technologies (ICTs), and other “coded worlds”
(Graham 2005, 563) have over daily urban experiences. Thrift and French’s
(2002, 311) now seminal study on the automatic production of space emphasizes
code’s growing significance to urban dwellers: “Software is more like a kind of
traffic between beings, wherein one sees, so to speak, the effects of the relationship.
What transpires becomes reified in actions, body stances, general anticipations.”
Although invisible, code enacts lasting effects. Kitchin and Dodge’s (2011, 16)
concept of code/space similarly acknowledges the ineluctable relationship
between code and space by positioning the two as co-constitutive, while Graham’s
(2005, 563) study of software-sorted geographies attends to the ways by which
neoliberal and Keynesian practices are “continuously brought into being through
code.” Graham and Zook (2011, 116) further draw our attention to the matter of
digital mapping practices by stating that, “digital and online palimpsests now
undoubtedly have become an important shaper of many people’s mental maps.”
Much of the critical research on the topic focuses on the rising ubiquity of code
and what it means for urban space, the activities that animate it, and the “digital
traces” left behind (Elwood 2010, 353).
Recent critical urban scholarship on software-enhanced spaces often concerns
itself with technological innovations that render the city computable, intelligent,
or smart (Komninos 2002; Hollands 2008, 2015; Angelidou 2014, 2015; Kitchin
2014). As with any neologism, many investigations attempt to flesh out what
constitutes a “smart city” (Angelidou 2014, 2015; Hollands 2015; Luque-Ayala
and Marvin 2015). A number of authors tackle the “definitional impreciseness”
surrounding smart cities that exhibit “some kind of positive urban-based
technological change via ICTs” (Hollands 2008, 302; see also Angelidou 2014,
2015; Kitchin 2015; Zegras et al. 2015). Luque-Ayala and Marvin (2015, 2107)
point out that present studies on urban smartness “lack a critical perspective
compounded by an undue emphasis on technological solutions that disregard the
social and political domains” in which they operate. The authors call for research
to focus on specific smart “political rationalities and governmental techniques”
(Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015, 2108). Shelton, Zook, and Wiig (2015) similarly
suggest that future work should attempt to move beyond essentializing
constructions of exceptional or paradigmatic smart cities and focus instead on
actually existing examples of smart urbanism.
Given that code has become a ubiquitous and often unseen presence in many
cities, critical and empirical examinations of smart urbanism would equip
researchers to begin uncovering how, as Lin (2013, 902) points out, “GIS embodies,
and is embedded in, complex social relations with wide-ranging societal
implications.” Researchers could consider the context-specificity of space and the
various and inconsistent ways it is “beckoned into existence by code” (Thrift and
French 2002, 311). One way forward is to bring discussions about code/space in
conversation with geographical ideas about place, its construction, performance,
and politics. Current debates in critical toponymy can help fill this gap.
Recent investigations in critical toponymy acknowledge that place names,
numbers, and spatial objects produce, contest, and reconfigure social space as well
as privilege specific and “official” histories (Azaryahu 1996; Light, Nicolae, and
Suditu 2002; Rose-Redwood 2008a). As Light, Nicolae, and Suditu (2002, 143)
explain, “[s]treet names can be ‘read’ as the micro-scale or local level outcome of
much broader structures of power and authority.” What is commemorated and
decommemorated reifies a certain politics or ideology and determines who or
what gets remembered, forgotten, and omitted. Alderman (2009, 178), for
instance, explains that place names can “become embroiled in the politics of
defining what (or who) is historically significant or worthy of public remembrance.”
Although a street name can recognize local events or histories, it can also enable
“active” or “public forgetting” (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004, 347; Rose-
Redwood 2008a). But, as Azaryahu (2011, 29–30) suggests, critical place name
studies should not only consider how a street name functions as a legible “text of
memory” but should also take into account “the possibility of ostensible
incoherence, polysemy and heterogeneity … to explain the contradictions and
inconsistencies that reflect the history of the ‘text’ itself.”
And yet, little scholarship has explored the interconnections between spatial
ordering strategies, the inscription of “memorial arenas” into the urban landscape,
and smart geo-addressing practices (though, see Rose-Redwood 2006, 2009,
2012; Alderman 2009). Rose-Redwood’s (2009, 201) study of early U.S. house-
numbering practices illustrates how the numerical identification of houses
rationalized urban space and helped imagine “the city as a ‘text’.” Rose-Redwood
(2009, 220) concludes by arguing that future research should probe spatial
inscription conventions that depend upon GIS to organize the city (see also Curry,
Phillips, and Regan 2004; Elwood 2010). In a more recent article on rural
re-addressing practices in West Virginia, he restates the need for a greater
understanding of all geo-coding applications, be they analog or “machine-
readable,” in order to better illuminate how “spatial representations, ontologies,
and the world” intersect (Rose-Redwood 2012, 298–299). Alderman’s (2009,
268) examination of domain names and the politics of misdirection makes the
pointed case to interrogate the “virtual equivalent of place names.”1 Few
researchers have followed Rose-Redwood’s (2008a, 433) call to interrogate the
processes and effects of digital spatial ordering and erasure through various, “if
not all, acts of spatial designation” (also, see Rose-Redwood 2012). Meanwhile,
critical geo-web studies interested in the political rationalities of smart or digital
spatial inscription technologies seldom investigate “the imaginations and
discourses that motivate spatial technology development” (Wilson 2014, 538; see
also Leszczynski and Wilson 2013; Wilson and Graham 2013; yet Thatcher 2013
offers a compelling counter-example to the studies cited here). Minimal research
has considered how software, namely through smart technologies designed,
trademarked, and rolled-out by governments as a public service, produces or
transforms space, and to what effects (Vanolo 2013). With this in mind, I turn my
attention to geo-addressing technologies in Dubai.
Geo-addressing in Dubai
Dubai’s basic road infrastructure was initially built during the 1970s and 1980s and
has included a variety of naming conventions (Wippel et al. 2014). Following the
city’s astronomical development throughout the last forty years, it is no secret that
Dubai’s grid has changed dramatically and quickly (Pacione 2005; Bagaeen 2007;
Elsheshtawy 2008; Acuto 2014; Buckley 2013). As a result, spatial nomenclature
in Dubai currently involves a combination of numeric, descriptive, and
commemorative identifiers to provide users with a variety of ways to understand
and navigate the grid. Dubai’s highways and major roads, for instance, rely on a
codified letter and number system. Roads containing the prefix E followed by two
or three numbers connect Dubai to other Emirates (e.g., the E11 highway), whereas
intra-Emirati roads use a D prefix instead (e.g., the road D94). Many such identifiers,
however, exist alongside descriptive or commemorative toponyms. Highway E11,
for instance, also refers to the famous Sheikh Zayed Road, while highway D94 is
also commonly known as Jumeirah Road. In short, although Dubai does indeed
have a designated naming convention, it is one complicated by rapid construction
that expands and re-configures the grid. Multiple conventions often cause confusion
as streets are simultaneously named according to a hybrid letter–number system
and commemorative or denotative toponym.
These polysemic toponymic conventions result, in part, from the city’s
unmatched and unrelenting urban development. Called everything from the
“instant city” (Bagaeen 2007) to the “superlative city” (Kanna 2013), Dubai’s
rapid expansion has often been linked to entrepreneurial logics that seek to
position the city as an example of urban exceptionalism (Acuto 2010, 2014;
Kanna 2011, 2013; Buckley 2013).
Dubai would certainly benefit from the implementation of a coherent spatial
identification system that enables people to get from point A to point B easily. With
rapid growth and expansion, navigation has become difficult and frustrating for
many (Lala 2012; “New Street Names” 2012). Various governmental ministries
have worked continuously over the past two decades to create spatial nomenclature,
including thematic place names and numeric signifiers, to alleviate the Emirate’s
incongruent and often confusing grid (Lala 2012). One recent news article sums up
the issue by stating that “[m]any residents don’t know the official name or number
of their street. It is common for people to use landmarks or unofficial street
descriptions for reference” (Masudi 2015). Spatial inscription has become so
inconsistent that even cab drivers often struggle to locate addresses, many of which
are often duplicated across the city (“New Street Names” 2012). Makani, a smart
geo-addressing application, promises a solution to improve wayfinding in Dubai.
Smart geo-addressing in Dubai: Makani

In 2012, the Government of Dubai announced that it would partner with Garmin,
the navigation products and services company, in order to introduce a digital map
for the Emirate (“Dubai Addresses” 2012). Intended as a civic service to improve
record keeping, reduce emergency response times, and navigational frustration,
Makani, which is currently being introduced across Dubai, uses a Military Grid
Reference System (MGRS) in order to identify locations in Dubai with undeniable
accuracy and precision (“Dubai Addresses” 2012).
Makani is officially under the purview of Dubai Municipality’s GIS Department,
who, under the auspices of Emirati Law “is considered to be the only official body
which allows producing geographical data in the Emirate” (Dubai Municipality
2015). In addition, Makani’s “logo and the concept of geographic addressing
system and the content of this application are owned by Dubai Municipality and
protected by intellectual property laws” (Makani 2015). Both points are important
to unpack, as they point to significant propriety restrictions coded into Makani and
the user data associated with the application.
It is in this underexplored conceptual space that I make the following
intervention. My primary interest lies in demonstrating how smart geo-addressing
applications are spatial ordering technologies that produce new and varied spaces
of the city-text (Rose-Redwood 2008a, 2012; Azaryahu 2011). In what follows, I
consider some of the possible challenges and complications surrounding smart
geo-addressing inscription practices through a close reading of Makani. Makani
offers an initial glimpse into the spatial politics of smart geo-addressing
applications and how they have the capacity to produce code/space.
Code/space and the politics of Makani
Makani and misdirection

Makani functions much like other geo-addressing platforms: it presents a satellite
map, which is framed by a search bar equipped with a drop-down menu for advanced
searches, an address book icon near the top of the screen, and a toolbar near the
bottom left. Despite promotional messages de-emphasizing the need to cite any
specific place names (Dubai Municipality 2015), the application’s search function
offers a series of alternative inputs to Makani numbers (Figure 17.1). Chief among
these substitutes is a header that reads “search by place name” (Makani 2015). The
application still allows for the input of existing place names in English and Arabic to
identify spatial objects, but the spelling and specific categorization of typed-in
toponyms can complicate navigation. Spelling errors in Makani slow down and
impede the identification of a particular place, thus bounding what can be accessed,
and how. Various places on the famous Palm Jumeirah, for instance, are misspelled,
or express “Jumeirah” as “Jumeriah,” “Jumeria,” or “Jumaira” (Figure 17.2).2
Locating specific sites with the word “Jumeirah” becomes an onerous task as the user
can only use the geo-coded grid through its encoded orthography, which is
inconsistent (Makani 2015). Makani’s orthographical errors do not involve domain
names, but they nonetheless bring to mind what Alderman (2009, 273) calls “typo
squatting,” a practice whereby slightly misspelled popular domain names are
purposefully purchased to capture any user-error and misdirection. It is unlikely that
typographical errors in Makani’s smart map are consciously guided by competitors,
interest groups, or the Government, yet such miscalculations undermine Makani’s
professed efficacy (Zaske 2015).
Figure 17.1 Navigating the geo-coded world of Dubai with Makani

Figure 17.2 Miscalculating encoded orthography with Makani
Spatial inscription blunders also illustrate how easy intended misdirection could
be, whether by government, or by future corporations with partial or full control
of Makani’s code. As Zook and Graham explain of the internet, it is:
not some purely randomized network in which all nodes have a relatively
equal position. Instead it is best described as a scale-free network in which a
small proportion of nodes function as highly connected hubs while the much
larger group of remaining nodes have a relatively low degree of integration
into and influence over the network.
(2007, 1323)
While I am inspired, like Elwood (2010, 354) and Kingsbury and Jones (2009), by
the notion that the “transformative potential of technologies lies in their
indeterminacy,” smart geo-addressing applications like Makani are often
considered low-hanging fruit for cities seeking to maximize entrepreneurial logic
and monetize urban space (Hollands 2015). Although it is imperative to avoid
uncritically adopting fatalistic interpretations of digital geo-addressing applications,
it is also fruitful to begin thinking about the digitization of urban space, and what
the possible enclosure of such spaces might look like (Zook and Graham 2007).
Looking for answers: code/space in Makani’s Help and FAQ

Makani’s Help button offers another entry point to consider smart software as a
technology of spatial inscription. The Help portion of the application is further
organized by three sub-headers: FAQ, Quick Tutorial, and the user guide. I will
focus on the FAQ and user guide sections. The majority of the FAQs are standard
questions one can expect from any navigation application, such as “What is
Makani?” or “What is geo-address?,” but other inclusions highlight some of the
politics associated with smart technologies that encode the very spaces they bring
into existence. The answer listed for the question, “Can I search for shops or other
points of interest POI in Makani?,” signals an active attempt to promote what
Elsheshtawy (2008) refers to as the Dubai spectacle, exemplified by a “culture of
consumption.” The response that Makani provides reads: “Yes you can search for
point of interest by inputting its name. You can also search more than 25000 shops
by inputting its name in the general search field” (Makani 2015). By emphasizing
toponyms of consumption, or “shops,” the Government uses Makani numbers to
promote investment through user consumption and thus memorializes economic
growth above all else.
The user guide walks individuals through annotated screenshots of the
application’s coordinate inputs and provides basic information about Makani
connectivity and interoperability. The first page shows the user the Apple Store,
Google Play, and Blackberry icons, the only compatible smart phone operating
systems (OS) listed for the application (Makani 2015). Despite any attempt by
Dubai Municipality to “Provide integrated Geospatial information of the Emirate
of Dubai and enable everyone to utilize it” (Makani 2015), Makani only targets
users with access to exclusive smart devices and reliable wireless internet
connections (though, the Makani website can be accessed via wired connections
as well). By design, Makani shuts out anyone using a non-dominant smartphone
or OS (e.g., Windows Phone), “dumb” mobile technology, or unconnected users
without internet, computers, or a mobile device. The version of Dubai on offer by
Makani becomes a luxury only available to the hyper-wealthy and hyper-
connected, or what Vanolo (2013, 5) calls “smart people.” Instead of improving
wayfinding, Makani has the capacity to further stratify a city already divided by
wealth, class, and status. This brings to mind Azaryahu’s (1996) concern that
place-identifying practices may legitimize particular ideologies, function as a
hegemonic tool of governance, or be used as a calculative technology (also, see
Rose-Redwood 2006). Makani, a smart geo-addressing app promoted as a “public”
navigational aid further limits access to an already segregated city (Davis 2007;
Kanna 2011; Buckley 2013; Thatcher 2013).
The text in Makani’s user guide makes visible how “data are always expressions
of power … that are never ontologically prior to their interpretation” (Dalton and
Thatcher 2015, 3), since use of the app volunteers individual data for the
Government to collect, commodify, monitor, and interpret for whatever uses it
deems suitable. By recoding Dubai’s toponymic landscape with apps like Makani
and collecting user information about how the apps and the spaces they physically
calculate are being used, the Government can access greater and richer information
about its population. The Government can use data collection and transformation
techniques to convert the individual into a commodity and “produce social
relations and geographic spaces of consumption” (Dalton and Thatcher 2015, 5;
Zook and Graham 2007).
Makani’s proprietary framework also precludes, “through a royal decree (Law
No. 6, 2001),” any other body from “producing geographical data in the Emirate”
(“Makani” 2015). This proprietary condition takes entrepreneurial governance to
unforeseen levels, where government-designed smart applications can be
transformed into commodities to be trademarked, copyrighted, sold, and
manipulated by governments who produce them exclusively.
Smart geo-coding and Dubai’s commemorative toponyms

The new Makani e-map application has many benefits, and will provide new
names for streets, simplify the address system and coordinate location
databases for government and private bodies.
(“Dubai’s E-Address” 2015)
For many navigating Dubai’s grid day-to-day, Makani’s ten-digit identifiers

simplify navigation throughout the city. Yet the application renders current
commemorative place names ornamental, as users “have no need to mention street
or area names” anymore (Dubai Municipality 2015). By replacing the need to
read, enunciate, or interpret toponyms with a simple finger-tap or swipe, the
production of place can take on an extreme form of what Berg and Kearns (2009)
call “norming.” The “‘linguistic settlement’ that produces place through simple
enunciation” continues to operate through the “code/space” made possible by
geo-addressing applications like Makani, but how that settlement occurs and what
it memorializes becomes opaque (Berg and Kearns 2009, 19, italics in original;
Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 16).
Makani’s de-commemorative capacity becomes all the more apparent as one
scrutinizes its implementation alongside other wayfinding projects underway. The
Government of Dubai’s municipal branch, Dubai Municipality, and its Roads and
Transport Authority, have committed to an Emirate-wide toponymic overhaul by
introducing a commemorative naming project. The campaign intends to inject a
sense of nationalism “inspired by Emirati culture” through the renaming of the
city’s streets (Jacotine 2015). As the Director-General of Dubai Municipality
explains in a press interview, the project considers “the entire element of Dubai’s
history, culture and traditions with the aim at introducing Dubai’s heritage to the
generations to come in all ways possible” (Sambidge 2014). Central to the renaming
campaign is an active attempt to imbue over 22,000 streets across the city with
toponyms that pay homage to “the history and culture of the area to reflect Dubai’s
heritage” (Jacotine 2015).
In addition to celebrating Dubai’s history, culture, and natural features, the
commemorative renaming project promises to, like Makani, ease navigation.
Throughout the project’s implementation, Government officials have stressed the
navigational benefits of an “easier and simpler” toponymic landscape (“430
Streets” 2013). In a statement about the initiative, the CEO of the Traffic and
Roads Agency expressed the locational advantages of themed, commemorative
street names:
Under the theme system areas in the vicinity of the sea … will have street
names reflecting the marine environment like the names of fish, traditional
boats and ships as well as other elements of the sea. Similarly, street names in
the Financial District will reflect various traditional currencies. This will help
locate the streets easily.
(“430 Streets” 2013)
Such statements call into question the logic and practicality underpinning a
simultaneous commemorative and numeric-GPS geo-addressing system, especially
one that aims to create “a language understood by everyone” through satellite-
generated ten-digit codes that otherwise hold no semantic value for users (Dubai
Municipality 2015). Whereas toponyms can function as commemorative tools
(Azaryahu 1996), Makani numbers accrete symbolic value through the very act of
digital and physical spatial encoding. Makani’s ten-digit codes follow Rose-
Redwood’s (2009, 201) argument that the “encoding of geographic space often
entails the creation of a spatial regime of inscriptions that is literally inscribed on
the spaces it thereby constructs.” The Government nonetheless acknowledges that
a commemorative “naming convention will help motorists and road users identify
locations easily compared with the earlier system which uses street numbers” while
also promoting Makani’s smart geo-locational abilities (Jacotine 2015). Makani,
according to one government-sponsored ad, universalizes the grid so that “no place
in Dubai is difficult to find anymore” (Dubai Municipality 2015). The ad further
lauds Makani’s unmatched ability to help users “get a location in seconds” by
stating that “future business cards will only have Makani numbers for its location”
(Dubai Municipality 2015). Although both projects claim to achieve the same
goal—that is, rendering the grid navigable and improving locational services—the
simultaneous implementation of both technologies appears at the very least
confused, if not contradictory altogether, as both spatial ordering systems use
opposing spatial identification methods.
Through the commemorative renaming project, the Government of Dubai
actively recognizes, as Berg and Kearns (2009, 44) do, that “place names are
important signifiers of meaning, providing symbolic identity to people, place and
landscape.” The renaming initiative, after all, attempts to construct and celebrate a
national identity. Yet the very governmental department involved in a nation-
building toponymic exercise is also promoting a “universal” navigational tool that
strips away any need to utter local names at all (Dubai Municipality 2015; Makani
2015). The histories and existing place-identities associated with street names and
landmarks become even more difficult to access for a variety of user groups.
Makani may increase the efficiency and utility of nomenclature across the city, but
it also undercuts any attempt to commemorate local histories, events, or people.
Both the app and commemorative naming project exemplify entrepreneurial
logic and focus on creating an easy-to-navigate grid for a “global” population. As
Dubai Municipality’s GIS Director emphasizes, Makani will make traveling
through the Emirate “fast, easy and accurate” so that “[t]here will be no problems
with addresses” (Masudi 2014). For instance, the response listed for “Why Makani
system uses only numbers?,” under the application’s FAQ page, caters entirely to
the construction of an ethnically diverse and global userbase: “Everyone can read
numbers easily … For example the word Beirut could be difficult for a Chinese
[sic] to pronounce but 1234 is very easy.” The professed efficacy of a universally
legible city-text is redolent of other entrepreneurial tactics that seek to eradicate
established “lucrative niches” (cf. Acuto 2010, 275) and exploit any resulting
locational and comparative advantages. During an inaugural installation of a
Makani plaque at the base of the famed Emirates Towers, Sheikh Hamdan, the
ruler overseeing Makani, proclaimed that the application “would help transform
Dubai ‘into the smartest city in the world, and consequently, offer a model for all
others to follow suit’” (Zaske 2015). Persistent world-making rhetoric employed
by Dubai’s ruling class illustrates, as Acuto (2010, 274) points out, the Emirate’s
continued commitment “to diversify and rapidly reinvent its function to external
needs.” Such superlative aspirations illustrate the political purchase of constructing
smart cities as paradigmatic, exceptional, or models for other governments to
follow (Hollands 2015; Kitchin 2015; Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015). By
pitching two very different wayfinding conventions to a “global” population,
Dubai’s Government is drawing upon a narrative of unparalleled innovation and
modernity in the hopes of attracting the world’s attention (Acuto 2010).
As Makani’s adoption increases, individuals unfamiliar with Dubai’s grid will
have decreasing exposure to symbolically relevant toponyms. This may result in
multiple and competing spatial texts, accessible only to a select few. Both Makani
codes and commemorative place names could, as Rose-Redwood (2008b) suggests,
be read differently by different local and supranational populations. As he notes,
“Local communities … are generally far from homogeneous and competing
factions may define the ‘local’ in very different ways” (Rose-Redwood 2008b,
878). Locals or residents with historical knowledge of the city’s grid may, for
instance, be aware of memorial arenas or historically important place names
whereas tourists or migrants new to the city may never even invoke them.
Dumbphone users or those lacking mobile technologies of any kind, conversely,
may only get exposure to Makani and, by extension, the city’s grid, through its
physical inscription at every geo-codable location. Those excluded from the
augmented realities of smart-mapping technologies may be denied symbolic
admittance to the code/spaces Makani numbers designate (Kitchin and Dodge
2011; Masudi 2014). Although dumbphone users can still relay Makani numbers to
friends or emergency service providers via text, or over the phone (which still
presumes mobile access), those without smart capabilities will likely navigate the
grid much differently (and perhaps with greater difficulty) than smart users (Vanolo
2013; Al Serkal 2014). This disparity not only highlights the inherent polarization
of urban spheres enhanced by smart applications, but it also illuminates one way by
which urban space is rationalized into different, exclusionary strata: individuals
who can access all spaces, including newly enhanced, digitally mediated locations,
those who may have partial admittance to the city’s smart grid, and users who are
relegated to using an analog version of the city.
Finding “locatable addresses” with Makani

Soon it will be nearly impossible to get lost in Dubai.
(Zaske 2015)
In addition to diminishing the symbolic value of commemorative place names,

Makani identifies spatial objects.3 Like other geo-addressing systems, Makani
transforms difficult-to-identify-or-find places into “locatable addresses” (Rose-
Redwood 2012, 299). In particular, Makani makes visible and navigable a number
of migrant worker camps, which Kanna (2011, 69) describes as “[i]mprovised or
illegitimate dwellings” that “exist in a sort of interstitial space developed neither
by the state nor by its allied merchants.” Labor camps in Al Muhaisnah, Al
Naboodah, and the Lamprell camp in Sonapur, are all encoded with Makani’s ten-
digit identifiers, thus making them easier than ever to locate. While transforming
these camps into codified spatial objects could be read as yet another extension of
Makani’s efficient civic service, their presence on a government-designed and
controlled smart-map can also lead to more advanced and refined forms of
technologically led discrimination (Curry, Phillips, and Regan 2004; Rose-
Redwood 2012). Dubai’s new smart map can thus “open up new areas of the city,
previously unknown or effectively unreachable to residents” (Zegras et al. 2015,
125). Zegras et al. (2015, 125) suggest that making these “new areas” could
empower local residents to comprehend a city’s “spatial potential,” but it remains
to be seen whether or not Dubai’s Makani coordinates will function to include or
exclude marginalized populations.4 Makani’s new spatial references might, as
Rose-Redwood (2012, 314) suggests, “be mobilized within the centres of
calculation to enhance the security mechanisms of the modern state” or succeed in
their professed goal of improving in-city navigation.
Makani nevertheless exposes some of the uneven development of ICTs. Graham
(2002, 35) suggests that innovations in ICT can lead to the “‘disembedding’ of
dominant economic, social, and cultural activities, and the social and technological
distancing of the powerful from the less powerful.” “Urban societies,” he explains,
“become separated into the ‘on-line’ and the ‘offline’ in complex tapestries of
inclusion and exclusion which work simultaneously at multiple geographical
scales” (Graham 2002, 37). This polarization cannot be reduced to a simple
connected/disconnected duality; rather, connectivity to ICTs is variegated,
shifting, and fraught with contradictions. The world is thus not stratified into those
who are plugged in and those who are not, but to what degree people can be
plugged in, and in what ways they can access ICTs or, by extension, the city. This
re-contouring of the digital divide calls into question previous interpretations of
ICTs and connectivity by advancing, instead, the idea that communication through
technology occurs horizontally and vertically (Graham 2002).
Regardless of Makani’s ability to clarify Dubai’s confusing grid, the app
demonstrates that “the technical itself has a politics which opens the possibility of
viewing the realm of the technical as a potential site of democratic struggle and
contestation” (Rose-Redwood 2006, 482). Dubai is not a democratic city-state,
but Makani is nonetheless promoted to would-be users as a wayfinding tool to
improve daily life that also rationalizes urban space into calculable places that
become easy to govern, control, and monitor.
Black-boxed worlds: closed-source code, Makani, and the

proprietary smart city
Makani uses closed-source software, which means that nobody but its creator (the
Government of Dubai) can see or change its underlying code. This may appear
banal to most readers, but as source-code for civic apps continues to move towards
open data and collaborative platforms, such as government-sponsored app contests
(Townsend 2013), Makani’s proprietary architecture makes it impossible for
users to integrate with or derive any information from the code/spaces in question
without having to rely on the app’s (extremely limited) interaction model. From
the perspective of an end-user (or any well-meaning programmer hoping to extend
Makani’s underlying system), the only thing to be done with a Makani code is to
type it into the Makani app. By comparison, freely available and well-documented
geo-locating interfaces like GPS allow users to freely transform, embed,
recalculate, and reconfigure navigational data to serve any number of use cases.
While Makani’s FAQ includes text about the app’s interoperability with other
mapping platforms (e.g., Google Maps), Dubai’s smart visitors and residents have
little choice about how navigation will be delivered, and how the technology will
order their experiences (Thatcher 2013). As the Director of Dubai Municipality’s
GIS division explains, “Makani is … getting great feedback and everyone will be
forced—in a positive sense of the word—to use it” (Masudi 2015). Such comments
suggest that users will be “forced” to use a world-class government mapping
service, but they also expose the political risks of closed-source code. Mandatory
use of a spatial identification system facilitates the collection of data from all
users, who have little to no detail of the spaces encoded, how Makani codes are
designated, what personal information can be read, by whom, who it may be
shared with, or (possibly) sold to (Kitchin 2014).
Makani can also facilitate the commodification of urban space. Since Dubai
Municipality holds proprietary rights over the application, the Government could
ostensibly sell behavioral or personal information collected through the application
to a third party if it ever decides to monetize user information. While it is currently
impossible to determine what information Dubai Municipality may be collecting
through the application, data for sale could range from personal information
accessed and stored through the application (such as details from one’s address
book, or frequently “tapped” Makani numbers) to aggregate data such as transit
network usage and real-time traffic information. Though not toponyms, Makani
and similar apps redefine Rose-Redwood and Alderman’s (2011, 3, italics omitted)
notion of the “toponym-as-commodity,” wherein data collected through smart
geo-addressing software could become commodities for sale in and of themselves.
In other words, the code itself, through its outsourcing to third parties, has the
capacity to monetize space.
Conclusion
Makani illustrates the growing political role that smart, spatial technology plays
in the production and ordering of urban space and how it has the capacity to be
enlisted by hyper-entrepreneurial rhetoric now widely discussed by most critical
scholars studying Dubai and the Middle East more generally. In Makani’s case,
spatial identification takes on new entrepreneurial meaning as code produces new
instantiations of the “toponym-as-commodity.” The identifier itself, based on
closed-source and proprietary code produced by the state, could easily be
manipulated, rented, or sold for monetary gain should the Government of Dubai
choose to do so. Moreover, smart geo-addressing systems like Makani enact new
worlds by bringing anything that can be identified as a spatial object online while
effacing symbolic values not coded into the application. This striates the city by
augmenting realities for “smart” citizens, while reconfiguring or omitting “dumb”
users from new, code-produced spaces.
Makani exposes ethical issues pertaining to smart governance and how it
facilitates the collection and manipulation of user-generated information. Despite
rising interest from scholars on the topic, most governments approach smart
technologies with awe and interest (Townsend 2013). Part of the attraction of
smart governance is that it can furnish governments with the information necessary
to determine which services are being appropriately delivered and how best to
increase or improve user access to civic services. Tied to any perceptible benefits
of code-led governance are a suite of unanticipated pitfalls that threaten to
reconfigure what services all residents and visitors can access, how smart
technologies change daily practices in the city, and to what effects. This, despite
the fact that most governments continue to court smart policy measures in the
name of progress, transparency, and improved civic experience (Townsend 2013).
In addition to the Government of Dubai’s decision to rename local streets to
showcase Dubai’s cultural and geographical histories, Makani adds a digital layer
to Dubai’s existing grid in order to simplify navigation and eradicate the eventual
need to utter any place names (Dubai Municipality 2015). While this may appear
to offer a much needed solution to a city that has undergone rapid development
(Bagaeen 2007), the implementation of a geo-addressing system that relies on
smart technology and users to function brings with it some serious questions about
urban life, the grid, and how code can alter place-identities, amplify existing
disparity, and function as an insidious tool of surveillance for a government
already in control (Vanolo 2013). Both Makani and Dubai’s commemorative
renaming project have yet to be fully phased in and used by residents and visitors
alike, so it is impossible to draw any conclusions about the effects of two very
different uses of spatial identification conventions. The preliminary account
offered above, though, identifies the need to bring such discussions about the
spatial politics of inscription practices in dialogue with emerging debates about
“code/space” and how both can be enlisted by governments hoping to create a
“smart” or “intelligent city” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 16; also, see Komninos
2002; Townsend 2013). In particular, this chapter has highlighted the growing
need to investigate Emirati and Middle Eastern smart geo-addressing practices in
order to shed much needed light on how spatial technologies produce, order, and
calculate space in non-Western cities. As Dubai, its neighboring Emirates, and
cities around the world continue to enlist “smart” tools to rationalize urban space
(e.g., what3words), geographers should question the growing role that code plays
in the production of a city-text. Software, after all, has the capacity to change life
and enact new, smart, geo-coded worlds.
Notes
1 Although Alderman (2009, 268) frames internet domain names as the “virtual equivalent
of place names” in order to expose the spatial injustices made possible through the
manipulation of Internet Domain Names, his study also illustrates a broader need to
engage with digital place-naming practices that rationalize space anew.
2 This is the only fully operational terraformed island in Dubai, which is shaped like a
palm tree.
3 Not all Makani codes are online yet, but government officials have stated that each
“building in Dubai will have a plate with its 10-digit number inscribed on it” (Zaske 2015).
4 In Zegras et al.’s (2015) study, the authors examine paper maps in Dhaka, Bhangladesh.
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18 Contemporary issues and
future horizons of critical
urban toponymy
Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman,
and Maoz Azaryahu
Critical urban toponymy and the spaces of polyvocality

The naming of streets is a political act, but it is much more than this as well. As
the contributions to this book illustrate, street naming is an act of signification that
produces a city-text, a form of public commemoration that constitutes places of
memory, a medium through which struggles for social justice are materialized,
and a performative enactment of sovereign authority over the spatial organization
of cities. It is both a political technology of governmentality as well as a taken-for-
granted practice of everyday urban life. A seemingly mundane aspect of urban
administration, street naming systems also make up the very foundations of urban
spatial imaginaries. Naming streets therefore plays an important role in the making
of “urban worlds,” and the act of street naming is one of the primary means of
historicizing space and spatializing history. It is little wonder, then, that political
regimes have sought to employ street naming to naturalize their own authority and
that the renaming of streets is one of the first acts to accompany political
revolutions. Although the agents of sovereign power seek to establish and maintain
the urban streetscape as a well-ordered “cosmos,” the temporal succession of
political regimes often produces urban toponymic spaces that are defined as much
by “incoherence, polysemy and heterogeneity” as by any semblance of coherent
ideological order (Azaryahu 2011, 30).
Just as the urban streetscape is a heteroglossia of many voices juxtaposed in a
common space, so too is the present book a collection of diverse perspectives on
a common field of inquiry. This applies just as much to the editorial collective as
it does to the chapter contributors. Although the introductory chapter to this book
is presented to the reader in a singular voice, its polyvocality shines through when
one considers that each of the editors has approached their own scholarship on the
politics of street naming from a different viewpoint. Maoz was one of the earliest
scholars to examine the politics of street naming during the 1980s, and he has
devoted much of his career to exploring the political semiotics of the city-text.
Derek came to the field of street naming studies in the 1990s, and his work has
been instrumental in calling attention to the urban streetscape as a cultural arena
of social justice. Inspired by the work of both Maoz and Derek, Reuben entered
the field toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and he has
drawn upon theories of performativity to rethink the power of street naming as a
spatial practice. While there are certainly conceptual differences among such
approaches, we view these as creative tensions that have the potential to spark
synergies across theoretical divides.
Given the polyvocal nature of our collective editorial endeavor, we decided to
conclude this book by giving each of the editors a chance to share their own
thoughts on the field of critical urban toponymy and what opportunities and
challenges lie ahead for future scholarship. In the sections that follow, each of us
has selected a recent example of the politics of street naming to provoke critical
reflection on the political life of urban streetscapes as an opening to consider
contemporary issues and future horizons of urban toponymic scholarship.
Banal commemoration, the written word, and beyond

Maoz Azaryahu
During the summer of 2015, Israeli media widely and almost excessively reported
a juicy story involving the name of a small alley in a city at the outskirts of the
metropolitan area of Tel Aviv (Hovel 2015). The print and electronic media were
busy reporting the revelations about the scandalous activities of the city’s mayor,
which came to light following a police investigation. Charged with dozens of
counts of sexual harassment and corruption, the story that attracted the most
media attention was about how the mayor had named an alley after his lover not
by her name but by a moniker known to the two lovers only. As it transpired, City
Hall approved the name put forward by the mayor without any deliberation or
explanation. Public indignation was laced with ridicule. Soon enough the offensive
street signs were removed. A year later, in August 2016, the vacancy was filled
with the name of Golda Meir, the first woman to serve as Israel’s prime minister
between 1969 and 1974. With the new street signs, an explicit commemoration
replaced an implicit and illicit one, and the moral order reflected in the street signs
of a small alley in an Israeli city was seemingly restored.
The source of indignation was the sense that the clandestine naming of an
alleyway after the mayor’s lover was not a legitimate honorific gesture since it
violated the understanding that the commemorative naming of streets should be
reserved as a measure of public faming for those who deserve it. The cultural
norm in modern democratic societies is that public commemoration is a mechanism
for converting reputation into fame. Unwarranted fame, especially when coupled
with abuse of power, provokes resentment.
Inscribed on name plates, street signs are trivial in the original sense of the
Latin word, triviālis, which translates as that which “may be met with anywhere;
common, commonplace, ordinary, everyday, familiar, trite” (Oxford English
Dictionary 2016). Street signs are found everywhere and hence are commonplace.
Since they belong to the language of urban space, they are mostly used in ordinary
situations and when invested with remembrance, they perform as banal
commemorations. Interestingly, academics were slow to realize what officials,
activists, and lobbyists of different ideological persuasions and orientations had
been amply aware of without any attempt at theoretical grounding—namely, that
Future horizons of critical urban toponymy 311
a street name is also a political resource. Behind the veneer of the trivial and the
banal associated with street names as signifiers of location, there is often the
possibly contentious politics of symbolic allocation of prestige and glory. Media
coverage of street names, and recent academic attention to street naming evinced
in publications in prestigious venues, expresses contemporary interest in identity-
politics. Concurrently, they also articulate fascination with unmasking the politics
woven into the everyday, a fascination which is a by-product of a contemporary
Western concern with the ostensible omnipresence of Power.
As an expression of human curiosity, etiological stories about how place names
come into existence and what they “really” mean pervade ancient mythologies.
The linguistic orientation underlying toponymic studies has focused on the
philological analysis of older names. The lack of credible historical records
rendered etiological concerns with the reasons behind place naming speculative.
Street names, on the other hand, are a feature of urban modernity, and their origin
and genealogy are largely well documented. As this edited volume clearly shows,
the availability of documentation offers exciting possibilities for a rigorous and
fruitful analysis of how, and to what extent, street names are contingent on power
relations. It is noteworthy that focusing on (re)naming streets effectively integrates
ostensibly old-fashioned etiological concerns into contemporary, theoretically-
based and critically-oriented interpretations of urban toponymies.
The politics of urban streetscapes extends beyond street names and naming to
also include street signs. Street signs communicate a plethora of additional
political messages. Significantly, the authority of official street names is conveyed
and communicated by means of “the intense visuality of the written word” in the
public domain (Gade 2003, 430). A related issue is the politics of language in
multi-lingual societies, evident not only in the choice of toponymic language(s)
but also in the hierarchy signified by the geometric arrangement of names on a
street sign: “above” and “below” are an expression of power. Graphic design
also belongs to the politics of signification. The colors chosen are one thing. In
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, name plates are blue and white to accord with the colors
of Israel’s national flag. Notwithstanding the seemingly identical form of the
street signs in East and West Berlin, the different fonts used in respective parts
of the formerly divided city indicated partition; the proliferation of the thicker
“western” font in the former East Berlin after reunification implied western
hegemony. The design form of a street sign also merits critical consideration.
The fact that street signs in Romania’s capital city of Bucharest emulate in their
design and color the distinct street signs in Paris is a powerful statement about
identity and cultural orientation.
When aimed at rewriting the historical narrative inscribed on street signs,
renaming streets is an unequivocal expression of power. However, when
considering the political life of urban streetscapes, attention should also be
accorded to the possible survival of former street names in the names of shops.
Such traces of former periods bear witness to the limits of official damantaio
memoriae. A case in point is the former Belle-Alliance-Platz in Kreuzberg, Berlin
(Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu 2016, 151–152). The name was given in 1814 by the
Prussian state to commemorate the victory over Napoleon. In 1886, it also became
the name of a pharmacy located there. In 1946, the square was renamed after
Franz Mehring, a prominent left-wing historian of the German workers’
movement. However, the pharmacy was not renamed, thereby preserving the
former name and its Prussian connotations in the streetscape.
The understanding that commemorative street names belong to the symbolic
foundations of identity has yielded many useful insights into processes of social
formation and the geopolitics of public memory. However, the lure of critical
analysis should not divert our attention from some fundamental issues regarding
streets and their names that transcend power politics per se. One such issue
concerns how place names in general, and street names in particular, partake in
the social and individual dynamic of place-making (Foote and Azaryahu 2009).
Names are enmeshed in a web of signification that both distinguishes and
constitutes places in the geography of culture. As this edited collection
demonstrates, naming involves politics. Yet naming is the necessary condition for
transforming space into place only. The political economy of place-making
transcends place naming.
Street naming, violence, and memory-work

Derek Alderman
On July 13, 2015, Sandra Bland, an African American woman, was found hung to
death in a Waller County, Texas, jail cell. She had been arrested after a minor
traffic violation (switching lanes with no turn signal) erupted into an argument
with the police officer who had stopped her and the subsequent use of excessive
force by that officer. Although the death of Bland was ruled a suicide, jail
authorities eventually settled a wrongful death lawsuit with her family (Bacon
2016). Coming in the immediate wake of the Charleston, South Carolina, massacre
at the Emanuel AME Church and numerous highly publicized instances of police
brutality against African Americans, the case of Sandra Bland was a lightning rod
for national media attention and the outrage of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Protesters argued that the arrest, motivated by racism, should never have happened
in the first place and that Bland might still be alive if not for the negligence of her
jailors and a law enforcement system long criticized for the disproportionate
incarceration of people of color (Alexander 2012).
Street renaming later became an important chapter in the Sandra Bland story.
Little more than a month after her tragic death and at the request of demonstrators,
the City Council of Prairie View, Texas, voted to rename University Drive as
Sandy Bland Parkway. University Drive was the road where Bland had been
pulled over and assaulted by police. As a memorial and political statement, the
proposed name change became the center of emotionally charged calls for greater
racial justice in America, with hundreds of Prairie View A&M University alumni
and students marching from the campus down to the site of Bland’s arrest and
then on to city hall. There were even calls for Chicago—Bland’s hometown and a
city with its own legacy of racialized police violence—to rename a street for the
fallen woman (Solomon 2016). Prairie View Council members said they hoped
the street naming would remind “law enforcement to always follow best practices
when making [traffic] stops” on the road (Chapin 2016). For some, the renaming
had even broader meaning and symbolic power as a means of keeping Bland’s
name in the public’s view and memory. The street renaming became connected to
the wider #SayHerName campaign, which highlights the frequently forgotten
experiences of black female victims of police brutality.
The making of Sandy Bland Parkway reflects what many contributors to this
book recognize. Street naming, as a social and spatial practice, is not an empty
gesture; rather, it reflects and projects broader struggles over material relations,
political rights, and social power. Prairie View’s new street moniker not only
memorializes the name and death of one woman, it also locates the roadside
victimization that many African Americans fear and face at the hands of the state.
Moreover, the Bland Parkway reaffirms a central theme in this volume: street
naming has consequences for the distribution of recognition within urban
communities and who is remembered in those communities. In an American
landscape traditionally consumed with valorizing histories of white male privilege
and supremacy, Sandy Bland Parkway represented a corrective to that racialization
and gendering of the streetscape—if only temporarily. The renaming will remain
in effect for only up to five years without another city council vote. Given recent
presidential election politics and the resurgence of hate speech and groups in the
United States, one may fear that Bland’s namesake will be white-washed away in
the not-too-distant future.
It is difficult to know if affixing Bland’s name on a road will do all that
proponents hope for, partly because of the nation’s current racial politics and
partly because of the inherent narrative and political limits of street naming as a
form of resistance and counter-memory (Alderman 2015). Yet the case of Sandra
Bland and the growing number of cases that employ naming as a form of reparation
prompt a question not yet fully addressed in critical toponymic studies, both inside
and outside the confines of this book. What is the exact relationship between street
naming and violence? In other words, what role have urban streetscapes played in
marking and even perpetuating histories of injury, trauma, and discrimination?
And, conversely, what is the potential for street naming to participate in what
Karen Till (2012) calls the “memory-work” of remembering and recovering from
past structures of violence and exclusion as well as imagining and materializing
more just urban futures?
Analyzing street naming in terms of its complicity in reproducing, and hopefully
overcoming, the legacies of violence might put some readers on their heels, but
such a perspective is meant to capture the important impact that urban streetscapes
have on the psychosocial well-being of people as well as the still under-theorized
material and symbolic connections between the “right to name” and the “right to
the city.” In other words, what exactly is the involvement of street naming in the
struggles of subaltern groups not only as they claim, use, and identify with urban
spaces but also as they carry out the biopolitics of inhabiting, surviving, and
overcoming unequal life chances in the city? Asking such questions is essential to
addressing Azaryahu’s (2011) important criticism that scholars have failed to
fully understand the place-making practices, memory-work, and the accumulated
lived experiences and meanings that surround street naming.
Given the violence inherent in settlement and urbanization—from the displacing
and genocidal effects of colonialism and imperialism to the more contemporary
destructiveness of neoliberal accumulation (Berg 2011)—the naming and claiming
of space has always had a close and intimate relationship with violence. While
seemingly new to some scholars, this naming–violence nexus has never been lost
on those marginalized groups who are the recipients, victims, and sometimes the
challengers of these meanings and materialities. Because these unjust patterns of
street naming have existed for so many generations, they have taken on the power
of becoming an unquestioned norm or habit. While streetscapes inflict trauma in
immediate and direct ways, the power of place naming also comes from producing
a “slow” or “attritional” violence that wounds how we see and define ourselves to
the point that many people, even some members of marginalized groups, are not
aware of these effects (Nixon 2011). This violence is especially insidious since it
skews how we narrate the past and undermines our ability to root modern
inequalities within their historical contexts.
In closing, as critical street naming scholars call for more investigation into the
reception of naming among urban residents in their everyday lives, one should not
lose sight of those groups with a history of being violently written out of streetscapes.
The last thing our scholarship should do is reproduce these injurious silences.
Indeed, in developing a socially responsible research agenda for the future, critical
toponymic scholars will need to reflect further on the role of their own practices
within the politics of street naming and possibly identify opportunities for engaging
and assisting public debates and struggles over memory-work.
Envisioning urban toponymic activism beyond the politics

of recognition
Reuben Rose-Redwood
On September 15, 2016, a number of prominent street signs in Toronto were
officially changed as part of a project to reclaim the indigenous names for places
in the city. Although the streets were not formally renamed, honorary signs listing
the Anishinaabe name for each place were affixed above the official English
settler-colonial street signs. Several years earlier, when the Idle No More
movement was in full swing, two Anishinaabe scholar-activists, Susan Blight and
Hayden King, posted stickers with the “Indigenous translations of Toronto street
names, plastering them over the English signs” (CBC News 2016). They started by
renaming a section of Queen Street as Ogimaa Mikana, which translates as
“Leader’s Trail,” in honor of “all the strong women leaders of the Idle No More
Movement” (Ogimaa Mikana Project 2016). This caught the attention of the local
Business Improvement Area, which subsequently led the effort to install officially
sanctioned street signs in 2016. In an editorial published in the Globe and Mail a
month after the street signs were put in place, Blight and King (2016) acknowledged
that these “efforts contribute to reinserting indigenous peoples into a landscape
historically intent on their erasure.” However, they also cautioned that “[t]here is
a danger that these gestures become mere performance rather than actively helping
to repatriate indigenous land and life.”
This example of street name changes brings together a number of important
issues that have been raised throughout this book. As Maoz Azaryahu notes above,
the political life of urban streetscapes extends not only to the renaming of streets
but also to the very design of, and hierarchical ordering of different languages on,
systems of street signs. Yet if we focus our attention upon the production and
reception of street signs alone, we run the risk of losing sight of how particular
histories and peoples have been “violently written out of streetscapes,” as Derek
Alderman reminds us. It is therefore crucial not to fetishize processes of
signification or habits of speech in an uncritical fashion but rather to critically
interrogate the ways in which the practices of street naming are implicated in the
naturalization of urban space through the material and symbolic erasure of
subjugated knowledges and place-based ontologies.
In this respect, the field of critical toponymy has much to learn from
contemporary indigenous resurgence movements and the efforts to reclaim
indigenous toponymies. Why so? Because they can help us better understand the
limits to the politics of recognition that underpin most discussions of street naming
as a form of memory-work. When urban streetscapes are rightly critiqued as
spaces of white masculinity, this often leads to a call for more public recognition
of racialized groups and women through the naming of streets. I fully acknowledge
the importance of these political struggles for recognition within contexts of white
supremacist and patriarchical domination. Yet it is important to point out that
while such struggles for recognition aim to construct more inclusionary street
naming systems, they generally leave the sovereign authority of the state to
maintain a monopoly over legitimate naming unquestioned. In other words, we
have yet to cut off the king’s head in critical toponymic theory. This issue is not
merely a philosophical matter but has a pressing sense of political urgency within
the context of indigenous struggles for self-determination, because indigenous
peoples are increasingly not asking for recognition from the settler-colonial
authority but are instead affirming their own authority to name places following
their own customary traditions (Rose-Redwood 2016). This political move takes
such struggles beyond the politics of recognition by revalorizing the practices of
self-affirmation (Coulthard 2014).
This is precisely what we saw with the Ogimaa Mikana Project discussed
above, where stickers with indigenous place names were initially posted on street
signs without the approval of city officials. It is tempting to dismiss this as a
temporary symbolic gesture and to instead place more emphasis on how these
names were eventually granted legitimacy by appearing on official street signs.
Yet this narrative plays right into the hands of the settler-colonial state, because it
presupposes that the latter possesses the authority to name as a fait accompli.
However, if we take theories of political performativity seriously, it becomes
clear that the power to name does not precede the act of naming itself, just as
sovereign power does not pre-exist the performative enactment of sovereignty but
rather depends upon the repetitious assertion of political authority (Rose-Redwood
and Glass 2014). This has implications not only for studies of indigenous
toponymies but for the politics of place naming more generally, because it leads
us to question the taken-for-grantedness of the monopoly powers over naming
that sovereigns claim to possess. This is particularly important to consider in
contexts where there are competing claims to sovereign authority, but it also
encourages us to critically re-examine the prosaic assertions of sovereignty over
naming that we encounter in our daily lives. And if the sovereign power to name
depends upon the reiterative enactment of toponymic practices to sustain its
authority, this suggests that the naturalized norms it seeks to legitimate are far
more fragile than is often supposed.
How we approach the study of street naming says a lot about our own political
persuasions, yet it is surprisingly rare to find self-reflexive accounts of the social
and political positionality of scholars themselves within critical toponymic
studies. Most accounts of the politics of place naming appear to narrate the
struggles over toponymy from seemingly Olympic heights. Yet surely there can
be a place for scholar-activism within the field of critical toponymy, since the
claim to neutrality in toponymic conflicts has the effect of maintaining existing
power assymmetries. The question then becomes: shall we seek to conserve
existing toponymic regimes, advocate for reformist naming policies, or support
insurrectionary toponymic movements?
The case of the Ogimaa Mikana Project emerged as an insurrectionary
reclamation of indigenous toponymies by a pair of scholar-activists but was
subsequently transformed into a reformist initiative by the Business Improvement
Area. While the greater visibility of indigenous place names in Toronto’s
streetscape has indeed enhanced the recognition of indigenous toponymies in the
city, it has also reinforced the legitimacy of the settler-colonial state, under the
auspices of the business community, to authorize the “official” naming of places.
All of which leads to the question: how might we envision the political life of
urban streetscapes beyond the politics of recognition? Or, put differently: how
might we re-imagine the spatial practices of public memory as part of an
affirmative politics of urban space that moves beyond the dependency which
accompanies the quest for recognition by the sovereign gaze?
Future horizons of critical urban toponymy

The publication of this edited collection marks a significant milestone for the field
of critical urban toponymy, since it is the first edited book to focus specifically on
the politics of street naming as a subject of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry. It
has been a decade since we first considered the publication of such a book, and,
during this time, street naming studies has matured as a field of critical urban
scholarship. No longer the purview of onomastic specialists alone, the present
volume demonstrates that studies of street naming have much to contribute to
historical and contemporary scholarship in the fields of urban politics, cultural
landscape studies, and memory studies. Although considerable ground has already
been covered over the past three decades, there are new interdisciplinary
connections that have yet to be fully explored, and we are hopeful that this book
will inspire future studies of the political life of urban streetscapes that extend the
horizons of urban toponymic scholarship in new directions.
The field of critical toponymy is currently witnessing a period of theoretical
innovation and experimentation. We view the theoretical pluralism of this field as
one of its key strengths, but it is also important for such theoretical differences and
disagreements to be examined and debated. Given that the prospect of a singular
paradigm of critical toponymy achieving hegemonic status will not likely
materialize anytime soon, embracing the agonistic ethos of dissensus will surely
be more productive than seeking to impose a forced consensus on the field. That
being said, there are a number of theoretical avenues and thematic areas that we
hope future scholarship will pursue, including: the political economy of urban
place naming as a neoliberal strategy of city branding; the use of street naming as
a form of urban place-making; emotional and affective geographies of urban
toponymy and the reception of place names in everyday life; the role of place
naming in the racialization and gendering of urban space; the relation between
toponymic erasure, material dispossession, and violence; the reclamation of
indigenous toponymies; and the virtual life of street naming in online digital
environments, among other themes.
In methodological terms, archival and cartographic research methods have long
been indispensable to urban toponymic scholarship and will likely remain essential
resources well into the future. However, the methodological toolkit of critical
toponymy has now expanded to include an assortment of qualitative methods,
from semi-structured interviews to ethnographic techniques, and there is even
potential for recent developments in critical quantitative geography to make
important contributions to the field as well. The in-depth case study approach has
proven to be a particularly fruitful method for teasing out the nuances of toponymic
politics, and while broader meta-level typologies and general frameworks are
important as efforts of synthesis, the empirical richness of the case study approach
will necessarily continue to be a mainstay of critical toponymic research. One
methodological area which we have barely scratched the surface of is how the
politics of place naming is playing out in the virtual spaces of social media, which
are now just as much a part of the archival record as conventional governmental
archives. Such new virtual arenas of social and political life provide a treasure
trove of multi-media materials for future toponymic studies, including video
recordings of official street naming ceremonies, personal commentaries, and even
comedy sketches related to place name changes.
The theoretical and methodological developments in critical toponymy over the
past three decades have greatly enhanced our understanding of the political life of
urban streetscapes. Yet pressing questions must continuously be raised anew if the
field of critical toponymy is to have any relevance in the world of contemporary
urban politics. Most importantly, what is the “political life” of critical toponymic
scholarship itself? How is toponymic scholarship being employed in public
discourse, and what political interventions ought we to make in current political
struggles over place naming? The answers to these questions will differ from one
scholar to the next, but if the critical turn in toponymic studies has taught us
anything, it is surely that we can’t afford to remain neutral as the “life” of spatial
politics is unfolding in the streets all around us.
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Author name index
Abu-Lughod, J. 211 Bagaeen, S. 291, 294, 304

Acuto, M. 291, 294, 301 Baker, A. 116
Adamczewski, J. 126 Bakša, Z. 159
Adebanwi, W. 15–6, 17, 18, 220 Bar-Gal, Y. 4
Ainiala, T. 75 Batchelor, S. 265, 266
Alderman, D. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6–7, 11, 12, 17, Bawumia, M. 203, 204
18, 42, 79, 99, 100, 100–1, 115, 116, Beall, J. 224, 229
133, 146, 147n2, 150, 151, 152, 161, Beavon K. 224
168, 171, 185, 189, 195, 203, 212, Beevor, A. 81
219–20, 242, 254, 256, 261, 262, 264, Bell, J. 133, 185
274, 275, 282, 286, 291, 292, 293, 296, Benjamin, W. 19, 28
304, 305n1, 309, 313, 315 Berg, L. 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 42, 75, 78,
Alexander, M. 312 79, 115, 116, 133, 152, 185, 191, 195,
Allen, M. 285 222, 259, 261, 299, 300, 314
Al Serkal, M. 302 Bernstein, E. 285
Anderson, B. 83, 116 Bigon, L. 10, 11, 17, 18, 41, 202, 204, 209,
Angelidou, M. 292 210, 220
Anson, J. 204 Biti, V. 157
Areff, A. 233 Black, K. 12
Arendt, H. 28 Bodnár, E. 92, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107
Argenbright, R. 117 Boia, L. 188
Aristotle 38 Boone, C. 263, 268
Árvay, A. 102, 117 Borneman, J. 171
Ashworth, G. J. 83 Boros, G. 108
Assmann, J. 116 Bourdieu, P. 18–9, 134, 135, 252–3, 274,
Atkinson, D. 152 276
Austin, J.L. 15, 25–6 Boyd, H. 283
Azaryahu, M. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 10, 11, Brandt, Willy 58
17, 18, 28, 58, 70, 72, 74, 76, 79, 80, 81, Brodnjak, V. 155
82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 99, 100, 102, Bromberg, A. 263
105, 106, 114, 115, 116, 122, 123, 124, Broszat, M. 119
126, 133, 134, 135, 135–6, 146, 147n1, Browne, J. 284
147n2, 150, 151, 152, 159, 161, 162, Brown, K. 171, 224, 231
168, 169, 170, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, Buckley, C. 43, 46, 47
191, 192, 195, 202, 203, 212, 219, 220, Buckley, M. 294, 298
221, 223, 230, 233, 234, 256, 275, 291, Bullard, R. 263
293, 295, 298, 300, 309, 312, 314, 315 Burleigh, M. 119, 120, 121, 122, 124
Burrows, E. 277, 279
Bácskai, V. 104 Burzyńska, A. 154
Baesjou, R. 202 Butler, J. 1, 15, 248, 255
Bylina, V. 187, 194, 197 Duncan, N. 2–3
Byrnes, G. 42 Dunn, K. 115, 259, 262, 263–4
Dwyer, O. J. 3, 8, 11, 92, 151, 152, 242,
Caliendo, G. 261, 262 254, 261, 275
Carlos, J. 220
Carroll, A. 283 Ebert, F. 60–1, 61
Çelik, Z. 1 Edkins, J. 116
Chapin, J. 313 Edozien, F. 278
Chavez, R. 203 Eick, V. 88
Christopher, A.J. 218 Elsheshtawy, Y. 294, 298
Chwalba, A. 120 Elwood, S. 293, 297
Coetser, A. 223 Emmerson, D. 42
Coetzee S. 203 Engelstoft, S. 133, 179, 182n8
Cohen, A. 48 Entrikin, J.N. 15
Cohen, B. 41 Enzensberger, H.M. 30
Colgate, A. W. 279–80 Esaulov, I.A. 161
Colomb, C. 86, 90
Colton, T. 137 Faraco, G. 220
Connerton, P. 116 Faraco, J. 5
Cooper, A. 203 Farvacque-Vitkovic, C. 203, 214
Cosgrove, D. 4, 152 Favro, D. 1
Coulthard, G. 315 Feeney, S. 278
Cousin, J. 9, 10 Feirstein, S. 277
Coutinho, C. N. 76 Feischmidt, M. 110
Crang, M. 154 Femia, Joseph 77
Crankshaw, O. 224, 229 Ferguson, P. 5, 8, 19, 99
Creţan, R. 3, 16, 80, 199 Ferro, M. 124
Creuzberger, S. 132 Finkelman, P. 283
Csepeli, G. 106 Firmstone, H.W. 44–5, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52
Curry, M. 293, 302 Fishman, D. 279
Czepczyński, M. 83, 90, 152, 160, 185 Flierl, T. 27, 29
Foote, K. 8, 86, 99, 102, 108, 117, 152,
Dahamshe, A. 10, 41 159, 312
Dalmacija, S. 182n6, 182n9 Forest, B. 117, 152, 187, 189, 275
Dalton, C. 292, 298–9 Forty, A. 178
Darnton, R. 250 Foucault, M. 220–1, 222, 235
Davie, L. 230 French, S. 290, 291, 292, 293
Davies, N. 119, 123, 126
Davis, M. 291, 298 Gabbard, D. 266
Day, R. 263 Gade, D. 311
Deane, J. 219 Galasiński, K. 119, 126, 127
Dean, M. 220, 235 Garcilazo, M. 278
de Certeau, Michel 180–1, 182n11, 196 Gargan, E. 278
de Haas, Mary 226 Geiger, V. 159
Derrida, J. 15 Gerõ, A. 104
De Soto, H. G. 75, 84, 88, 89, 92, 195, Getz, A. 221
197 Giliomee, H. 253
Dizdar, Z. 159 Gill, G. 10, 91, 114, 126, 133, 142, 145,
Dodge, M. 291, 292, 299, 301, 305 169, 185, 187, 189, 195
Domański, B. 124 Gillis, J. 99
Donia, R. 173 Giraut, F. 2, 7, 11, 13, 80, 218, 219, 220,
Drozdzewski, D. 17, 18, 116, 117, 185 221, 222, 223, 224
Duminy, J. 14, 16, 17, 18, 42, 223 Glass, M. 14, 316
Duncan, J. 2–3, 4 Goble, P. 197
322 Author name index
Godin, L. 203 Inwood, J. 3, 7, 12, 17, 18, 79, 115, 189,
Goerg, O. 209 195, 263, 267
Goldstein, I. 158
Goldstone, C. 218 Jackson, J. 283
Gorbachevich, K.S. 147n3 Jacotine, S. 299, 300
Goren, T. 59 Jaffe 13
Graham, M. 291, 292, 297, 298, 299 Jenkins, E. 222–3, 223, 224, 226
Graham, S. 291, 294, 302–3 Joenniemi, P. 132–3, 143
Gramsci, A. 18, 75, 76–80, 82, 86, 89, 90, Johnson, G. 263, 267
90–1, 91, 92–3 Johnson, J. 117, 152, 153, 187, 189, 275
Gregory, D. 152, 154 Johnson, N. 115
Gregson, N. 255 Johnson, R. 76
Gricanov, A. 159 Jones, J.P. 291, 297
Gross, D. 270 Jones, R. 10
Gross, J. 122 Judt, T. 125
Guyot, S. 185, 223, 242
Gyáni, G. 104 Kaiser, M. 132
Kaiser, R. 85
Haberman, C. 278 Kang, P. 169
Hackle, A. 269 Kanna, A. 291, 294, 298, 302
Hagen, J. 127, 264 Kansteiner, W. 180
Hajdú T. 107 Karadžić, V. 155
Halbwachs, M. 4 Katz, C. 154
Hamadeh, Sh. 215n6 Kearns, R. 3, 6, 15, 42, 152, 191, 195, 259,
Harding, L. 196, 197 261, 299, 300
Harvey, D. 4 Khablo, E.P. 147n3
Harwood, J. 43 Khumalo, F. 234
Haughton, H. 49, 51, 52 King, A. 207, 209
Haushofer, Karl 120 King, M.L. Jr. 267, 269
Hebbert, M. 1, 115 Kingsbury, P 291, 297
Hellberg-Hirn, E. 132, 136, 143, 146 Kitchin, R. 291, 292, 299, 301, 303, 305
Henkin, D. 277 Klemenèić, M. 154–5
Henry, D. 270 Kligman, G. 185
Hercus 12 Kliot, N. 41, 169
Hill, T. 219 Kluczewski, M. 122, 123
Hitler, A. 120 Komninos, N. 292, 305
Hobrack, V. 89 Kong, L. 115
Hobsbawm, E. 122 Kook, R. 152
Hodgkin, K. 169–70 Koopman, A. 219, 225, 226
Hoelscher, S. 275, 293 Koselleck, R. 25
Hollands, R.G. 291, 292, 297, 301 Kožarić, I. 153, 156
Home, R. 207, 208 Krausnick, H. 119
Honecker, E. 65 Kubinyi, A. 104
Hook, D. 152 Kundera, M. 56–7
Houssay-Holzschuch, M. 2, 4, 7, 11, 13,
80, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224 Lacan, J. 101
Hovel, R. 310 Laclau, E. 18, 76, 98, 101, 110
Hromadžić, A. 172 Lacombe, P. 4, 9, 10
Hrytsak, Y. 133 Ladd, B. 81, 88, 89, 90
Hrženjak, J. 153, 156, 161 Laing, A. 221
Huggins, R. 265 Lala, A. 294, 295
Huyssen, A. 89, 90 Lanchester, H.V. 208
Lee, D. 278
Ingersoll, R. 1 Lee, K. 46
Lefebvre, H. 87 Milo, D. 4–5, 27, 32
Legg, S. 154 Moníková, L. 28
Leith-Ross, S. 208 Monmonier, M. 12
Leitner, H. 169 Morin, K. 13
Lemanski, C. 224 Morozov, V. 132, 143, 146
Leroux, H. 203 Moscow, H. 275–6
Lessing, D. 206 Mouffe, C. 18, 76, 98, 101, 102
Leszczynski, A. 294 Muhajir A. 208
Levinson, S. 99–100 Murphyao, A. 12
Light, D. 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, Murphy, M. 5, 220
18, 80, 90, 92, 109, 122, 124, 133, 136, Murray, J. 80, 83, 86, 133, 136, 138,
137, 151, 152, 161, 169, 171, 179, 185, 147n4
188, 189, 195, 196, 197, 220, 291, 293 Muzaini, H. 171
Lindroos, K. 99 Myburgh, J. 253
Lin, W. 291, 293 Myers, G. 5, 15, 19, 152, 195, 196, 203,
Lóderer, B. 107 208, 220, 222
Longworth, T. 277–8
Lotman, Y. 150, 151, 154, 162 Nada, S. 7
Lowenthal, D. 4 Nagy, L. 104
Lugard, F. D. 207–8, 215n3 Namaz, N. 265
Lukowski, J. 119 Närhi, E.M. 28
Luque-Ayala, A. 292, 293, 301 Nash, C. 11, 185
Ndletyana, M. 223, 228, 231
Mabanckou, A. 203 Nel, E. 219
Mabin, A. 207 Neuwirth, R. 279
Mac Aodha, B. 152 Ngozo, A. 232
Mach, Z. 153 Nicolae, I. 3, 122, 124, 137, 152, 188, 291,
McIntyre, J. 243, 245 293
McRobbie, A. 91 Niculescu-Mizil, A-M. 92
Maharaj, B. 219 Nietzsche, F. 128
Makepeace, W. 51 Nikitenko, G. Y. 80
Mak, L. 48 Nixon, R. 314
Malcolm, N. 176 Njoh, A. J. 17, 41, 202, 203, 204, 206, 214
Mannteufel, J. 132 Nora, P. 4
Mansfield, Y. 169 Norval, A. 98
Marin, A. 17, 18, 80, 92, 132, 185, 187, Nyyssönen, H. 106, 107
189, 195
Marjomäki, H. 87 Ochman, E. 126
Markowski, M.P. 154 Oèak, I. 153, 156
Martin, L. 271 Olsen, J. B. 83, 84, 86, 90
Marvin, S. 292, 293, 301 Orgeret, K. 223, 226, 227
Massey, D. 1, 11, 19, 171, 274 Orttung, W. 132, 138
Masudi, F. 295, 300–1, 301, 303 Osofsky, G. 283
Matsubara, K. 11 Ó Tuathail, G. 120
Matthews, P. 3, 16, 80
Mattingly, M. 215n1 Paasi, A. 85, 133
Mayell, P. 152 Pacione, M. 294
Mbembe, A. 208, 218 Palmberger, M. 17, 18, 169, 171, 172, 174,
Mellins, T. 279 180, 181
Mencken, H.L. 4 Palonen, E. 3, 10, 11, 17, 18, 102, 103,
Merrill, S. 90 104, 108, 110, 142, 150, 152, 161, 162,
Merriman, P. 10 169, 185, 189, 198, 223
Mevius, M. 84, 86 Palonen, K. 1, 5, 15, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27,
Miles, J.C. 9 100, 150
324 Author name index
Papritz, J. 119 Said, E.W. 151, 154
Parkhurst-Ferguson, P. 134 Šakaja, L. 3, 7, 11, 17, 18, 92, 153, 157,
Parnell, S. 224, 229 162
Passerini, L. 171 Sambidge, A. 299
Patel, K. 219, 234 Sänger, J. 82, 84, 85, 90, 93n2
Pavlu, R. 122, 123 Saparov, A. 86, 133
Pekonen, O. 35 Sappok, G. 119, 120–1, 122
Peteet, J. 12 Sauer, C. 4
Philipsen, D. 87 Saunders, A. 87
Phillips, D. 293, 302 Saunders, C. 253
Pinchevski, A. 3, 134, 152 Schechner, R. 1
Pirie, G. 44 Schein, R. 259, 267
Pobrić, A. 152 Schlemmer, L. 253
Pobric, A. 133, 179, 182n8 Schulz zur Wiesch, L. 90
Poon, L. 13 Schuman, H. 171
Poór, J. 104 Scobey, D. 279, 282
Porter, B. 122 Scott, J. 171, 250
Pótó, J. 105 Seethal, C. 185, 223, 242
Pred, A. 5, 9 Sekulić, D. 155
Pribersky A. 108 Sereda, V. 133
Purcell, M. 263, 268 Sharp, J. 115
Pusch, L.F. 32 Shelton, T. 293
Puzey, G. 17, 18, 78, 80 Shortridge, J.R. 4
Shoval, N. 16, 186, 191, 195, 196
Quindlen, A. 284 Shumake, D. 270
Sibley, D. 152, 154
Ráday, M. 103, 104, 105 Sidaway, J. 152
Radstone, S. 169–70 Siegel, J. 278
Raento, P. 264 Silberman, M. 117
Raja-Singam, S. 45, 51 Simmons, D. 269, 270
Ranzal, E. 278 Sindalovskij, N.A. 147n3
Raper, P. 222 Šišić, F. 158
Raulin, A. 277, 282 Skelton, D. 232
Rawls, J. 263 Skinner, Q. 25, 27
Regan, P. 293, 302 Skowronek, D. 126, 127
Regier, A. 19 Slavuj, L. 153, 162
Rhea, J. 282 Smith, A. 155
Rich, N. 119, 120 Smith, D. 223
Ricoeur, P. 171 Smith, J. 110
Rihtman-Auguštin, D. 158, 169 Snyder, T. 89
Roberts, S. 278, 284 Soja, E. 221, 260, 263
Robinson, D. 41 Song, O. 51
Robinson, G. 133, 152, 179, 182n8 Spann, E 277
Rogers, D. 269 Spell, L. 266
Rose, G. 254, 255 Spivak, D. L. 145
Rosenthal, G. 171 Spivak, G.C. 291
Rose-Redwood, R. 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, Srkulj, S. 158
13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 42, 75, 79, 80, 92, Stanić, J. 3, 7, 11, 17, 18, 92, 153, 162
100, 110, 115, 116, 133, 135, 146, Stanisławska-Adamczewska, T. 126
147n2, 150, 152, 161, 168, 171, 185, Stavrakakis, Y. 101
186, 195, 197, 203, 212, 218, 219–20, Stern, R. 215n1, 279
220, 251, 256, 259, 265, 268, 290, 291, Stewart, George 4, 275
292, 293, 294, 295, 298, 300, 301, 302, Stiperski, A. 127
302–3, 304, 309, 315, 316 Stiperski, Z. 92
Stojanović, D. 170 Vetters, L. 182n10
Suditu, B. 3, 122, 124, 137, 152, 188, 291, von Henneberg, K. 99
293 Vuolteenaho, J. 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 17, 18, 42,
Susak, V. 133 75, 78, 79, 80, 115, 116, 133, 152, 185
Swart, M. 12, 169, 185, 220, 223, 233, 234
Walker, G. 263
Tantner, A. 9 Wallace, M. 277, 279
Tassin, J. 47 Wanjiru, M.W. 11
Taylor, M. 283 Ward, J. 117
Tenžera, M. 158 Watson, C. 264
Terho, O. 28 Weber, M. 18, 26, 28
Thale, C. 9 Weitz, E. D. 83
Thatcher, J. 292, 294, 298, 299, 303 Whelan, Y. 185
Therborn, G. 92 White, J. 266
Thomas, P. D. 76 Wieliński, B. T. 90
Thrift, N. 290, 291, 292, 293 Wiig, A. 293
Till, K. 117, 152, 161, 171, 179, 189, 275, Williams, R. 76
313 Wilson, M. 294
Tilove, J. 262 Winchester, H. 115
Todes, A. 241 Wines, M. 223, 225, 226, 227
Todorova, M. 151, 156 Wintz, C. 283
Tonkin, E. 171 Wippel, S. 294
Topalov, Ch. 209 Withers, C.W.J. 152
Topalović, D. 154–5 Woodman, P. 12
Torgovnik, E. 3, 134, 152 Wren, Ch. 208
Torsti, P. 173, 174 Wright, J. 4
Tóth, Á. 102, 108, 117
Townsend, A.M. 292, 303, 304, 305 Yarwood, J. 182n7
Tucker, B. 3, 7 Yeoh, B. 5, 17, 18, 52, 100, 152, 171, 185,
Tunbridge, J. E. 83 196, 205, 220
Turner, N. 227 Young, C. 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 80,
Tyner, J. 267 90, 92, 109, 124, 136, 161, 171, 179,
195, 196, 197
Ugarković, S. 153, 156
Ugrešić, D. 169 Zamoyski, A. 119
Uspensky, B. 151, 154, 162 Zaske, S. 296, 301, 302, 305n3
Užarević, J. 151 Zawadzki, H. 119
Zegras, P.C. 291, 302, 305n4
Vakhrusheva, A. 196 Zeidel, R. 12
Vanolo, A. 294, 298, 302, 305 Zelinsky, W. 4
Vendina, O. 145 Žižek, S. 157
Verdery, K. 1, 75, 89, 185, 188 Zook, M. 291, 292, 293, 297, 298, 299
Subject index
Page numbers in bold refer to figures, page numbers in italic refer to tables.
African Americans 6–7, 12–3, 18, 259–71, Street Name Changes 88–9; liberation of
282–6, 312–3; women 282–3 81; pluralized namescape 90–1;
African National Congress 224, 226, 240, post-socialist 87–93; reunification 72;
242, 243, 245, 248, 253, 254 Third Reich 58, 60, 63–4, 81; Weimar
AfriForum 232 Republic 57; see also East Berlin; West
Alexander I, Czar 33, 33–4 Berlin
Alexander the Great 9 Berlin Wall 87
Alexandria 9 biopolitics 313
Alliance of Croatian Anti-Fascist Fighters Black Lives Matter movement 12, 312
153 Bland, Sandra 312–3
Anglophone hegemony 4 Blight, Susan 314–5
Antioch 9 borders 154–5
Aotearoa 6, 42 Bosnia and Herzegovina, renaming policy
Art of Forgetting, The (Forty) 179 168–81, 181n1
Ashdown, Paddy 177 Bosniaks 172–3, 173, 177, 178, 179–80
authority, legitimization 8–9, 115 boundary-making 5, 18, 132–46, 154;
autobiographical memory 171, 181 temporal 132–3
automatic production of space 292 Bucharest 16, 124, 179, 188, 189, 190,
auto-referencing 151, 152, 157–8 191, 192, 193, 193, 194, 196, 197, 311
Avanti! 77–8, 108 Budapest 18, 98–111, 150;
Azaryahu 2–3 commemorative street names 105,
Aztecs 41 109–10, 110; German Occupation
Memorial 109; Interwar period 104–5;
Balkans, the 156–7 metropolitan growth 103–4;
Belarus 187 postcommunist 107–11, 110; renaming
Belgian Congo 209 98, 103, 106, 107–11; socialist period
Belgrade 170 105–7; street naming revolutions 98,
belonging 252; and identity 261; politics of 103
259–71; right to appropriate 263, 263–8;
right to participate 260, 263, 268–71; Caesarea 9
spatiality of 260; spatial strategies Cameroon 203, 205–6, 206, 211–4, 213
261–2 Cape Town 224, 227–9
Berkeley School 4 captured territory, renaming 169–70
Berlin 29, 74; 1945–1948 58; catharsis-type renaming 137
Belle-Alliance-Platz 311–2; division of Ceauşescu, Nicolae 188
59, 60, 60, 80; German Empire challenging 225
(Kaiserreich) 57; Gramscian approach circulatory flows 1
90–1; Independent Commission for cities, naming 9
Subject index 327
citizenship: cultural 268; distibution of control 76
264; politics of 259 counter-insubordination 251–4
city-text 2–3, 19, 29, 133–5, 256, 309; counter-toponymics 19, 50–3, 53–4
definition 150; ideal configuration 151; critical urban toponymy, future of 316–8
rewriting 136; role 150–1; smart 292–5; Croatia 174; anti-Fascist legacy 156;
spatial codification 150–63 auto-referencing 157–8; geopolitical
city-text analysis 7–11; Budapest 98–111; code 154–5; othering 155–7; unresolved
narrative structure 8 meanings 159–62; Vukovar 162–3;
city workers 192 World War II heritage 159–60
civil renaming 250 Croats 172–3, 173–4, 178, 179–81
Civil Rights Movement (US) 260, 261, cult names 82–4
262 cultural arena 3, 11, 16, 19
civil society 76 cultural capital 274
class power 17–8 cultural citizenship 268
cleansing 225, 228 cultural geography 4, 9
clerical names 30, 31 cultural hegemony 76
coded worlds 292 cultural indicators 4
Cold War 86 cultural landscape studies 4
collective memory 219–20 cultural mediators 76
colonialism 5, 10, 218, 314 cultural memory 115, 115–7
colonial urban order 17, 41–54; cultural power 260
commemorative street names 45; cultural signification 202
counter-toponymics 50–3, 53–4; Cyprus 169
municipal street names 49–50; public
health 44, 52; and race 46–8; street Dakar 210, 210
naming policies 42–3, 43–4; street Dayton Peace Agreement 168
naming process 44, 51; street naming decanonization 31
rationales 44–6; surveillance 52 decolonization 211
Columbus, C. 41 decommemoration 10, 57, 61, 66–7, 74,
commemorations, lifespan of 59–60 78, 137, 139, 168, 299–302
commemorative choice 116 digital mapping 292
commemorative rehabilitation 70 discourse theory 98, 99, 100–1
commemorative spaces 287 discrimination 260, 261, 267
commemorative street names 5, 6, 8–9, discursive elements 98
9–10, 18, 28, 31, 32, 99, 170, 276, discursive methods 134
311–2; African American women discursive political change 100
285–6; Budapest 105, 109–10, 110; discursive sets 101
choice 116; colonial 45; contestation discursive strategies 180
and resistance 248–51; Dubai 299–302; discursive tactics 181
explicit 310; Haifa 68; Helsinki 34, 36, discursive universe 100–2
36–7; location 260; Martin Luther King, dispositif 220, 235
Jr. 259–71; Mostar 175–6; New York distributive injustices, right to appropriate
282–5, 283, 285–6, 286–7; politics of 263–8
260; renaming 56, 57, 68–9; Singapore distributive justice 263
49; spatial injustices 259–71; symbolic Dubai 19; commemorative street names
prestige 245–8 299–302; Dubai Municipality 290;
commercialization 268 geo-addressing 294–5;
compensatory naming 29 hyper-entrepreneurialism 291, 304;
Confederate States of America 14 labor camps 302; Makani geo-address
contemporaneous plurality 1 system 290–305; Makani numbers 290,
contestation 195–7, 248–51, 255 291, 300–2, 304; renaming 300–1, 304;
contested spatial practice 116 smart city-text 292–5; spatial
contingency 98 nomenclature 294; spatial regime of
continuity, toponymic 185–99 inscriptions 291
328 Subject index
Durban 16, 42, 218, 224, 225–7, 227; feminist naming culture 32
approved name changes 245–6; civil Finland 32–8, 39
renaming 250; clean-up campaign 240; folk heroes 84–5
colonial history 243, 245; contestation forenames, use of 34
and resistance 248–51, 255–6; founding 225, 229
counter-insubordination 251–4; Group France 4–5; colonial urbanism 208–11,
Areas Act of 1950 241; renaming 218, 210; street naming policy 27, 29
224, 225–7, 227, 240–56, 244, 247; Frank, Hans 120
renaming process 243, 245–8, 251–2; French Revolution 10, 56
segregation 241; transformation
discourse 253–4; vandalism 240–1, 250 Gandhi, Mahatma 249–50
Durban City Council 226–7 Gaza 41
gender exclusion 282–3, 285–6, 286
East Berlin 5, 18, 57, 74–5, 106; Cold War gender politics 13, 17
86; commemorative rehabilitation 70; geo-address system 290–305;
creation of 59, 60; cult names 82–4; closed-source code 303–4;
decommemoration 61, 66–7; division of de-commemorative capacity 299–302;
86–7; Festival of Youth and Students, ethical issues 304; Help and FAQ
1951 64–5; folk heroes 84–5; Gramscian 298–9; key technologies 291; locatable
approach 75, 86, 87, 91; historical addresses 302–3; misdirection 295–8,
background 57–8; intra-national bonds 297; search function 295–6, 296; smart
84–5; Nazi names purged 63–4, 81; city-text 292–5
objectives 71; political-odonymic Geographic Positioning Systems (GPS)
identity 86; post-socialist 87–93; 204
pressures and incentives 63–5; geography 4
propaganda 85, 86; Prussian names geopolitical transformations 17
commemorative rehabilitation 70; geopolitics 15–6, 56, 146; definition 116;
recommemoration 67; renaming 60–2, Kraków 117, 118, 119–27, 119, 121, 125;
63–5, 69–70, 71–2, 80–91, 135; of memory 115–7; spatialization of 115
renaming of the monarchic past 64, 67; Georgia 192
renaming patterns 66–7; street naming geo-web studies 294
policy 29, 63–4, 80–91; street signs 311; Germany: 1945–1948 58; feminist naming
un-renamed streets 86–7; see also Berlin culture 32; German Empire
Ehrenström, J.A. 33, 34 (Kaiserreich) 57; Independent
Elwood 292 Commission for Street Name Changes
empowerment 302 88–9; post-socialist 87–93; reunification
empty signifiers 101 72, 87; Soviet Zone of Occupation 61,
Engel, C.L 33, 34 64; street naming policy 29; Third Reich
equality 260 58, 63–4, 81; Weimar Republic 57
Eurocentric lexicons 203–6, 205 Ghana 204
European Union 155 globalization 204
European Union Administration, Mostar Golan 41
176–7 governmentality 220
everyday life 185; performative space graphic design 311
14–6, 18; and toponymic continuity Graz 127
195–7, 199 Great Britain, colonial urbanism 207
everyday, the 115 Great Depression, the 283
exclusion 37; politics of 173–8; spaces of Greenville, North Carolina, street naming
291 dispute 265–8
exercitives 25–6
Haase, Herwig 88–9
Farrer, R.J. 53 habit 14, 16
female names 13, 285–6 Haifa 18, 57; Arab names purged 66, 69,
feminism 13 71; becomes part of Israel 60;
Subject index 329
commemorative street names 68–9, 68; King streets 6–7, 261–2, 275; and
historical background 58–9; Municipal distributive justice 263–8; Greenville
Council elections 65–6; objectives 71; street naming dispute 265–8; procedural
population 62; pressures and incentives injustices 268–71; and spatial justice
65–6; renaming 62–3, 70, 71–2; 262–3; Statesboro street naming dispute
renaming patterns 68–9, 68; Street 269–71; visibility 264, 269
Names Committee 66, 68–9, 71 Kraków 18, 114; Commission on
Hammarskjöld, Dag 29 Establishing the Names of Localities
Harlem, New York 278, 282–6, 283 120; Committee for Establishing Place
Harlem Renaissance 283 Names 124; cultural artifacts 123;
Hayti 13 cultural landscape 122–3; the
hegemony 18, 76, 76–7, 78–9, 87, 101, Generalgouvernement 120; geopolitics
134, 255 of memory 116; Institut für deutsche
Helsinki 5, 25, 27, 32–8, 39 Ostarbeit 120; memory narratives 117;
Henri IV, King of France 9 Nazi regime 120–4, 121; post-socialist
historical consciousness 170–1 126–7; propaganda 126;
historical memory 255 Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem 120–1,
history: control of 56; nationalization of 128n2, 128n4; renaming 117, 118,
173; re-invention of 136 119–27, 119, 121, 125, 128n4, 128n5;
Holocaust, the 102, 108, 109 Rzeczpospolitia Polska 126; sources 119;
honorific street naming, politics of 74 under Soviet-led Socialism 124–6, 125
Hungarian Democratic Forum 108–9
Hungary, street naming revolutions 102–3 Lagos 15–6, 208
landscape-as-text 2–3
identity 261; national 116, 116–7, 155, landscape cleansing 185
172; and power 127; recognition of landscape symbolism, politics of 4
11–4; relational 151, 154–5; scalar language: politics of 311;
configurations 265 representationalism 14–5; and street
identity-based antagonisms 152 signs 10
identity markers 182n4 leftover toponymies 190
identity politics 124, 219–20 legitimacy 248, 254, 254–5
ideological fervor 192 Leningrad 18, 134, 145; catharsis wave
imaginative geography 157–8 (1941–1952) 137; decommemoration
India 207 139; de-Prussianization 137;
indigenous place names, reclaiming de-Sovietization (1989–1990) 137, 138,
314–6 146; founding myth 132; geopolitical
information and communication subtext 146; politicization of renaming
technologies (ICTs) 292, 302–3 138–9; red wave (1918–1924) 135–6;
infrastructural power 1 renaming 132, 135–9, 139–41, 147;
Institut für deutsche Ostarbeit 120, 128n3 temporal boundary-making 132–3;
Instytut Pamiêci Narodowej 127 toponymic cleansing 135–9, 139–41;
internet domain names 305n1 Toponymic Commission 138–9;
intra-national bonds 84–5 Toponymic Council 147n3; see also St.
Irkutsk 197 Petersburg
Israel 41–2, 60, 68–9, 72, 310, 311 Limbé, Cameroon 212
linguistic landscape 102
Jerusalem 311 linguistic orientation 311
Johannesburg 224, 229–30, 234 linguistic settlement 299
linguistic textuality 15
Kennedy, John F. 29 locational discrimination 260
King, Hayden 314–5 Lodz 30
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 6–7, 18;
cross-racial resonance 262; toponymic Makani geo-address system 290–305;
commemoration 259–71 adoption 301; closed-source code
330 Subject index
303–4; de-commemorative capacity 172–3; renaming 168, 173–81, 175, 176;
299–302; ethical issues 304; Help and street naming commission 177–8; West
FAQ 298–9, 301; key technologies 291; 173, 174–6, 179, 181
locatable addresses 302–3; misdirection Mutengene, Cameroon 212–4, 213
295–8, 297; numbers 290, 291, 300–2,
304; politics of 295–9; proprietary NAACP 269–71
framework 291–2, 299, 303–4; satellites name–place associations 249–50
290; search function 295–6, 296; spatial name regime 30
regime of inscriptions 291; text 291 naming polity 30, 38–9
Mandela, Nelson 221–2, 223, 234 naming rights 259, 268, 270, 313, 316
marginalized groups 259–71 Napoleon 10
mass personal memory 89, 92 narrative structure 8
meaning, discursive production of 100 national collective memory 89, 92
memorial arenas 293 national heroes 35
memorial landscapes 16, 152 national identity 116, 116–7, 155, 172
memorials: Mostar 179–80; nationalism 17, 169–70
resemiotization of 161, 163 nation-building 10–1, 33, 103, 170–1
memory 12, 56–7, 178–9; autobiographical Native Americans 13
171, 181; collective 219–20; cultural naturalization 315
115, 115–7; and the everyday 115; negative Other, the 154–5, 156
expression of 116; geopolitics of neoliberalism 314
114–28; historical 255; manipulation of Netherlands, The 233
114; mass personal 89, 92; national New York 15, 19; appropriate street names
collective 89, 92; places of 274, 276, 279–80; commemorative street names
282; politics of 99, 115; public 10, 99, 282–5, 283, 285–6, 286–7; Committee
134, 287; sites of 4–5, 115, 116; on Parks, Recreation, and Cultural
transforming 234–5; usefulness 116–7 Affairs 285; Fifth Avenue 284–5, 287;
memory-building 133 “Freedom from Shanties” 281–2, 281;
memory makers 180 Harlem 278, 282–6, 283; Harlem
memory narratives 117 Renaissance 283; the Great Depression
memory-production 276 283; historical background 277–8;
memoryscapes, contested 117 Minetta Lane 275–6; Negro invasion
memory-work 313–4 283; numbered streets 277, 280, 284–5,
mental maps 292 286–7; proprietary names 280; renaming
methodology 317 275–87, 279; street renaming bills 284,
metro stations 194 285; symbolic erasure 279, 281–2, 281,
Mexico 41 282–3; Uptown Chamber of Commerce
Michels, Stanley 285–6 284; West Side Association 278,
Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) 279–80, 281–2; West Side avenues
295 278–82, 279, 281, 286–7; white flight
military names 30, 31 283
Minsk 187, 194, 197 New Zealand 6, 42
monarchic names 30, 31, 64, 67 Niger 209
monuments 8–9, 152, 153, 158, 160–1, norming 299
162 nostalgia 179–81
Moonshi, Dr H.S. 53 numbered streets 9, 277, 280, 284–5,
Moscow 145, 187, 196–7 286–7
Mostar 18, 169; city council 177–8;
commemorative street names 175–6; official public landscape 185
divisions 171–3; East 173; European Ogimaa Mikana Project 314–6
Union Administration 176–7, 182n7; oppression 261
House of Culture 174, 175; memorials organic intellectuals 76
179–80; nostalgia 179–81; population Orientalism (Said) 154
172, 182n2; religious territorial markers Osez le Féminisme 13
Subject index 331
Othering and Otherness 5, 18, 102, 151, Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem 120–1,
208; definition 152; Zagreb 154–7 128n2, 128n4
Paris 5, 9, 10, 13, 29, 311 race and racism 6–7, 12–3, 14, 17, 19,
parliamentary debates 27 46–8, 260
past, the: reconstructions of 180; renaming racialization 17, 219
56–7, 59–60, 63, 72 racial (re)signification 261
perestroika 136, 137 Raffles, Stamford 43
performative practice 256 recognition 248; political struggles for
performative space 3; everyday life 14–6, 314–6; politics of 3
18 recommemoration 10, 57, 67, 74, 78
performativity 16 regime change 18, 28, 42, 56, 57, 186–90;
personality cult model 83 and city-text analysis 7–11; and
Petrograd 132; see also St. Petersburg de-commemoration 10; and renaming
place: construction of 277–8, 282; and race 134–5, 169–71; toponymic cleansing
46–8; sense of 12; symbolic erasure 185
282–3 regulations 30
place-making 312, 317 relational identity 151, 154–5
Poland 117, 126, 127 relevant spatiality 249–50
political control 56 relocation 160–1, 163
political cosmos 1 remembering, politics of 260
political semiotics 186 renaming 1, 2, 10–1, 19, 25, 56–71, 101,
political society 76 311, 312–3; aftermath 69–70; Bosnia
politicization 26–7, 31–2, 38–9 and Herzegovina 168–81, 181n1; and
politicking 26–7, 28, 30, 33, 34, 38 boundary-making 132–46; Budapest 98,
politics 25–7 103, 106, 107–11; Cape Town 224,
polity 27 227–9; captured territory 169–70;
polyvocality 309–10 catharsis-type 137; civil 250;
possession, taking 41–2 commemorative street names 56, 57,
post-colonialism 11, 185, 219–20 68–9; conditions for 59–60, 60;
postcolonial toponymic ambiguity 211–4, contestation and resistance 248–51,
213 255–6; cost 188–9, 190–1, 252, 270;
post-conflict societies 12 counter-insubordination 251–4;
post-socialism 185 decommemoration 61; Dubai 300–1,
poststructuralist perspective 101 304; Durban 218, 224, 225–7, 227,
power 311; achieving 11; cultural 260; 240–56, 244, 247; East Berlin 60–2,
cultural arena 11; Gramsci’s analysis 75, 63–5, 66–7, 71–2, 80–91, 135;
76–7; and identity 127; and social effectiveness 195–7; everyday popular
justice 11; of street naming 41–2, 54; responses to 195–7; exclusionary
symbolic 247–8, 256 dimension 275; geopolitical subtext 146;
power relations 92, 211, 219 Haifa 62–3, 65–6, 68–9, 68, 70, 71–2;
Prague 28, 127 Helsinki 36; implementation 192–4;
Pretoria 224, 230–3 indigenous names 314–6; Johannesburg
procedural injustices 268–71 224, 229–30, 234; justification 29;
procedural justice 268 Kraków 117, 118, 119–27, 119, 121,
propaganda 85, 86, 126 125, 128n4, 128n5; Leningrad 135–9,
property ownership 17–8 139–41, 147; limits of 185–99, 186–90;
proprietary names 280 lower-level urban actors 190–5;
public commemoration 56 Moscow 145; Mostar 168, 173–81, 175,
public forgetting 275, 293 176; motivations 242; museum position
public health 44, 52, 207, 208 108; New York 275–87; objectives
public memory 10, 134 56–7, 71; opposition to 195–7; patterns
public memory-work 99 66–9; perceptions of 80; politicization
public space 10, 56, 158, 170–1 138–9; politics of 173–8, 198;
332 Subject index
preservationist position 108; pressures semantic displacement 8
and incentives 63–6; Pretoria 224, semiosphere, the 151
230–3; procedural injustices 268–71; semiotic markers 116
public performance 240–1; radical semiotic packaging 143
position 108; and regime change 134–5, semiotics 2–3, 15, 186
169–71; relevance 248–9; research Senegal 203
198–9; resistance 242; as a rite of Serbia 155, 170
institution 135; St. Petersburg 132, 136, Serbs 155, 172
138, 139–41, 142–5, 147n13, 187; and signifying system 4, 5, 116
social justice 12–3; South Africa Singapore 5, 18, 42; Asian communities
218–35; Soviet Union 135–9, 138, 46–8, 50; Asian street naming practices
139–41; symbolic acts 60; temporal 48–50, 51–3, 53–4; Chinatown 51;
boundary-making 132–3, 134–5, 135–9, commemorative street names 49;
139–41, 142–6; theoretical framework counter-toponymics 50–3, 53–4;
133–5; transformation discourse 253–4; municipal street names 49–50, 52–3;
Vukovar 162–3; Zagreb 153, 154–7, 155 naming process 44, 51; street naming
representationalism 14–5 policies 42–3, 43–4; street naming
reputational politics 17–8 rationales 44–6
resemiotization of memorials 161, 163 smart city-text 292–5
resilience 90 social communication 122
resistance 13, 16, 248–51, 255–6 socialist internationalism 107
restorative justice 219 socialist street naming discourses 80
restoring 225, 228 social justice 3, 11–4, 17, 18, 263, 309
revolutionary change 100 socio-spatial signification 278–82, 279,
right to appropriate 263, 263–8 281
right to participate 260, 263, 268–71 software-sorted geographies 292
Romania 6, 187–8, 191–2, 191, 311 South Africa 10, 16, 17, 18, 185, 207, 209;
Russia 135, 187; All-Union Toponymic anti-white re-racialization 231–3; Cape
Conferences 138; de-Sovietization 143, Town 224, 227–9; challenging 225;
146; othering 156–7; Toponymic cleansing 225, 228; Durban 218, 224,
Council 138 225–7, 227, 240–56, 244, 247; European
Russia, Imperial 32–8 settlements 222–3; founding 225, 229;
Rzeczpospolitia Polska 126 Geographical Names Council 223;
ideological conflicts 221–2;
sacralization, public space 158 Johannesburg 224, 229–30, 234;
St. Petersburg 18, 145; de-Sovietization legacies of apartheid 218–9; legitimation
143; geopolitical subtext 146; metro 222; and Mandela 221–2, 223, 234;
stations 145; multi-layered identity municipalities 225; Policy on the
134–5; renaming 132, 134–5, 136, 138, Naming and Renaming of Streets and
139–41, 142–5, 147n13, 187; semiotic Public Places, Johannesburg 229;
packaging 143; temporal Pretoria 224, 230–3; renaming 218–35;
boundary-making 132–3, 136, 142–5; restorative justice 219; restoring 225,
Toponymic Commission 139, 142; 228; Road Name Change Act 224;
un-renamed toponymies 144–5; see also Soweto uprising 229; state of change
Leningrad 253; toponymic cleansing 233;
saints 33 toponymic multiracialism 218–35;
Sarajevo 168, 169, 179, 182n8 toponymic politics 222–5;
scale, social construction of 264–5 transformation discourse 253–4; Truth
scholarship 1–2; critical turn 3–7 and Reconciliation Commission 234;
secondary sacralization 161, 163 Western Cape (Province) 228
segregation 202, 204, 207, 209, 218, 241, sovereign monopoly 16, 316
267 Soviet Union 10, 80, 133, 134, 187;
self-identification 157–8 de-Prussianization 137; perestroika 136,
self-referencing 151 137; renaming 135–9, 138, 139–41
Subject index 333
space: automatic production of 292; Sub-Saharan Africa 204, 210, 210, 211,
commodification of 292; contested 114; 212; West Berlin 311
racial (re)signification 261; taming 11 street, the 1
Spain 5 Sub-Saharan Africa 41, 202–15; Cameroon
spatial codification: auto-referencing 203, 211–4, 213; colonial authorities
157–8; monuments and street names 204–5; colonial roots 202; decolonization
153; and othering 154–7; unresolved 211; postcolonial authorities 204;
meanings 159–62; values 151; Zagreb postcolonial toponymic ambiguity
150–63 211–4, 213; postcolonial urban mapping
spatial cognition 222 215n2; Senegal 203; street naming policy
spatial injustices: commemorative street 205; street signs 204, 210, 210, 211, 212;
names 259–71; mechanism of 260 toponymic ambiguity 205; toponymic
spatial inscription practices 291 inscription, Anglophone 207–8, 214–5;
spatial justice 17, 260, 262–3, 263–4 toponymic inscription, Francophone
spatial narratives 5 208–11, 210, 214–5; toponymic-
spatial ordering 9 inscription problem 202–3, 212–4, 213;
spatial politics 114 townships 207–8; urban vocabularies
speech acts 15, 18 203–6, 206; Zimbabwe 206–7
stability principle 28 surveillance 52
Stalin, Josef 61–2, 80, 83, 106, 136 Sweden 9
Statesboro, Georgia, street naming dispute symbolic accretion 8
269–71 symbolic acts 60
state, the 26 symbolic capital 16, 17–8, 19, 62, 274–87;
Steinheil, Fabian 33 accumulation 284–5; appropriate street
Stockholm 9 names 280; definition 274–5; New York
street naming 1, 114, 198; appropriate 277–87
279–80; Asian practices 48–50, 51–3, symbolic erasure 275, 276, 279, 281–2,
53–4; colonial policies 42–3, 43–4; 281, 282–3, 286
colonial process 44, 51; colonial symbolic infrastructure 1
rationales 44–6; counter-toponymics symbolic power 247–8, 256
50–3; critical turn 2–3, 3–7; descriptive symbolic prestige 242, 245–8
49; discursive elements 98; East Berlin symbolic reparation 10, 234
policy 29, 63–4, 80–91; economic symbolic resistance 250–1, 255–6, 274–5
activities 49; Gramscian approach 75, symbolic retribution 10, 185, 234
76–80; Helsinki 32–8, 39; naming polity symbolic subordination 250
30, 38–9; normative criteria 28; policy
27, 27–8, 29, 32–8; politicization 27, Tbilisi 192
31–2, 38–9; politicking 28–9, 30, 33, 34, Tel Aviv 310, 311
38; politics of 3, 5, 11, 12, 25–39, 74–5, temporal boundary-making 132–46;
222–5, 310–2; polyvocality 309; power Leningrad 132–3, 135–9, 139–41;
of 41–2, 54; procedural injustices practice 133; and renaming 132–3,
268–71; proprietary names 280; and 134–5, 135–9, 139–41, 142–6; St.
race 46–8; regulations 30; rhetoric 38–9; Petersburg 132–3, 136, 142–5;
right to appropriate 263–8; right to theoretical framework 133–5
participate 260, 268–71; socialist territorial claims 12
discourses 80; spatial injustices 259–71; textual approaches 133–4
and spatial justice 262–3, 263–4; themantic displacement 195
Sub-Saharan Africa 205; Turin 77–80; theoretical pluralism 317
unofficial 27–8 Timişoara 191–2, 191
street naming revolutions 98, 102–3 toponymic ambiguity, Sub-Saharan Africa
streetscapes 2, 3, 114, 116 202–15
street signs 9, 127, 134, 170, 188–9, toponymic cleansing 185–99, 233;
190–3, 191, 193, 194, 240–1, 250, 256, Leningrad 135–9, 139–41; limits of 186,
310–2: East Berlin 311; language 10; 186–90
334 Subject index
toponymic continuity 185–99; and values, spatial codification 151
everyday popular responses 195–7, 199; vandalism 240–1, 250
limits of political power 187–90; victimization 174
lower-level urban actors 190–5, 198; Vietnam War 107
post-socialism 186–99 violence, legacies of 312–4, 315
toponymic inscription: Anglophone voting 26
Sub-Saharan Africa 207–8, 214–5; Vukovar 162–3
Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa
208–11, 210, 214–5 Washington Agreement 168–9
toponymic multiracialism 218–35; Cape West Bank 41
Town 224, 227–9; Durban 224, 225–7, West Berlin 37, 70–1, 72; street naming
227; ideological conflicts 221–2; policy 27, 29; street signs 311; see also
Johannesburg 224, 229–30, 234; Berlin
Pretoria 224, 230–3 white flight 283
toponymic rescaling 265 white privilege 260
toponymic silencing 133 white supremacy 17
toponymic studies: critical turn 2, 3–7; women: African Americans 285–6;
traditional approach 3–4 symbolic erasure 282–3
Toronto 314–6 World Bank 214
townships 207–8 world-making 19
transformation discourse 253–4 World War II 102, 105, 110, 120–4, 121,
transient regimes 171 159–60
Turin 75, 77, 77–80
typography 9 Yaoundé, Cameroon 214
Yugoslavia 155–6, 168, 170, 174, 177,
United States of America 4; Black Lives 180
Matter movement 312; Civil Rights
Movement 260, 261, 262; Greenville Zagreb 18; auto-referencing 157–8;
street naming dispute 265–8; heritage geopolitical code 154–5; imaginative
protection laws 14; King street presence geography 157–8; monuments and
260, 261–71; numbers as street names 9; street names 153, 158, 160–1, 162;
renaming 12–3; Revolutionary War 277; Othering 154–7; Othering the Balkans
social justice 12, 14, 18; Statesboro and Russia 156–7; Othering the
street naming dispute 269–71 international communist movement
unresolved meanings 152, 159–62 157; Othering the Serbs and Serbia 155;
urban management 202, 203, 215n1 Othering Yugoslavia 155–6; relocations
urban space: access to 264; 160–1, 163; renaming 153, 154–7, 155;
commodification of 303–4; digitally resemiotization of memorials 161, 163;
codified 290; digitization 298; gendering secondary sacralization 161, 163;
3; naturalization of 315; social sources 153; spatial codification
production of 2, 220 150–63; status 153; unresolved
urban toponymic activism 314–6 meanings 159–62; World War II
urban vocabularies, Sub-Saharan Africa heritage 159–60
203–6, 206 Zanzibar 5, 208
Ustashi movement 159–60 Zimbabwe 206–7

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The Political Life of

Reuben Rose-Redwood is an Associate Professor of Geography and Chair of

Derek Alderman is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University

Maoz Azaryahu is a Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Haifa,

Edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood,

Derek dedicates this book to Donna

Maoz dedicates this book to his parents Yaffa and Pessach

1 The urban streetscape as political cosmos 1

2 Reading street names politically: a second reading 25

3 Colonial urban order, cultural politics, and the naming of

4 Revisiting East Berlin and Haifa: a comparative perspective

5 “Armed with an encyclopedia and an axe”:

6 Building a new city through a new discourse:

7 Locating the geopolitics of memory in the Polish streetscape 114

9 The spatial codification of values in Zagreb’s city-text 150

10 Nationalizing the streetscape: the case of street renaming

11 The politics of toponymic continuity: the limits of change

12 Toponymic complexities in Sub-Saharan African cities:

13 Coloring “Rainbow” streets: the struggle for toponymic

14 Street renaming, symbolic capital, and resistance in Durban,

15 Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices

16 From number to name: symbolic capital, places of memory,

17 Toponymic checksum or flotsam? Recalculating Dubai’s grid

Author name index 320

4.1 Borough boundaries in Berlin with the boundary between the

6.1 “Populist” elements of Budapest’s city-text in the 2010s 110

Wale Adebanwi is a Professor in the Department of African American and

Through its street names, the city is a linguistic cosmos.

From cultural indicator to technology of power: contextualizing the

Street naming and the political life of urban streetscapes

Urban streetscapes as cultural arenas and the geographies of social justice

Beyond representationalism: from the city-as-text to the urban streetscape as a

Four aspects of politics

An exercitive is the giving of a decision in favour of or against a certain

Politicization names a share of power, opens up a specified horizon of chances

Nothing is political in itself but must be politicized by someone. Politicization

Street naming policy in the city

Street names as a means of politicking

From forenames to surnames: street names in Helsinki1

The rhetoric of street naming

In a similar fashion but a different context, streets christened Victoria, Albert,

Street naming and urban order in the colonial city

The official naming process

Rationales for colonial street names

Place and race

Asian street naming practices

Counter-toponymics in the colonial urban landscape

It is characteristic of the Chinese that in identifying streets, accuracy is the

Historical background: Berlin’s street names, 1813–1947

The German Empire (Kaiserreich)

The Weimar Republic

The Third Reich

Historical background: Haifa’s street names, 1934–1948

Renaming the past: the necessary condition

Priorities, constraints, and prolonged delays

“Renamings, at long last”

Pressures and incentives: East Berlin

As the announcement makes clear, the planned communist-oriented world festival

Prospects and incentives: Haifa

4.1 Borough boundaries in Berlin with the boundary between the

6.1 “Populist” elements of Budapest’s city-text in the 2010s 110

Figure 4.2 Ha’atzma’ut Road (Independence Road), Haifa, Israel (photograph by author)

Figure 7.1 Kraków’s Old Town in 1943

Figure 7.2 Kraków’s Old Town in 1964