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.
"Themes across this edited collection include the legacy of colonial and postcolonial naming practices (as in Southeast Asia and South Africa), the use of street naming to stoke nationalism (as in postsocialist Europe), and the way street names intersect with racial, gender, and class identities (as in the identity-conscious US). These chapters make it abundantly clear that urban street naming is often a political process, rather than an innocently commemorative or descriptive exercise." - Christine Ro, Environment & Urbanization Journal
