The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes

Naming, Politics, and Place

Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, Maoz Azaryahu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317020707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

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.

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 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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The urban streetscape as political cosmos
• 2 Reading street names politically: a second reading
• 3 Colonial urban order, cultural politics, and the naming of streets in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Singapore
• 4 Revisiting East Berlin and Haifa: a comparative perspective on renaming the past
• 5 “Armed with an encyclopedia and an axe”: the socialist and post-socialist street toponymy of East Berlin revisited through Gramsci
• 6 Building a new city through a new discourse: street naming revolutions in Budapest
• 7 Locating the geopolitics of memory in the Polish streetscape
• 8 Toponymic changes as temporal boundary-making: street renaming in Leningrad/St. Petersburg
• 9 The spatial codification of values in Zagreb’s city-text
• 10 Nationalizing the streetscape: the case of street renaming in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 11 The politics of toponymic continuity: the limits of change and the ongoing lives of street names
• 12 Toponymic complexities in Sub-Saharan African cities: informative and symbolic aspects from past to present
• 13 Coloring “Rainbow” streets: the struggle for toponymic multiracialism in urban post-apartheid South Africa
• 14 Street renaming, symbolic capital, and resistance in Durban, South Africa
• 15 Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• 16 From number to name: symbolic capital, places of memory, and the politics of street renaming in New York City
• 17 Toponymic checksum or flotsam? Recalculating Dubai’s grid with Makani, “the smartest map in the world”
• 18 Contemporary issues and future horizons of critical urban toponymy
• Author name index
• Subject index