F Nuessel Street Names-2005

Journal of Critical Incidents, 2017

Providence, RI had a 1,980-street municipal grid, wherein 75 street names were identified as nonunique, having one or more similar sounding or duplicated matches in the metropolitan area. This spelled disaster for Providence's emergency response services as well as its in-home nurses, taxi cabs, and tow trucks. Providence was the combination of several small colonial towns that grew together over time. Each town had its own set of street names, which were not reconciled upon merging into present-day Providence. After years of confusion, Providence had enacted a plan to identify and rename similar-sounding streets. Businesses and residents of the affected streets, however, faced extra costs and challenges if they were forced to adopt a new address. As such, Providence's city planners were left with a difficult choice when deciding which of two similar-sounding streets was to be renamed. How could decision makers ethically choose who gets to keep their original address and who must change?

Onoma: Journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, 2021

Street names (odonyms) and their academic study constitute an important part of onomastic research. This paper takes stock of the growing literature on street naming processes and provides a meta-analytical systematic review of odonymic scholarship. To this purpose, a collection of 121 peer-reviewed articles on street names published in English language academic journals in the social sciences and the humanities were identified in the Scopus database. The statistical analyses conducted on these materials indicate (1) the temporal dynamics of knowledge production and the geographical hotspots in toponomastic scholarship, (2) the geopolitical settings and historical contexts framing these studies, (3) the theoretical perspectives employed to conceptualise street naming practices, and (4) the methodological outlines characterising the research done on street names in the literature. The conclusions point out four main clusters of toponomastic research and indicate directions for future inquiry in street name scholarship.

Social Change Review, 2021

As toponymic means of inscribing urban space, street names have been addressed mainly by human geographers, who have articulated the field of critical place-name studies. In this paper, I continue the endeavor started in the previous issue published in Social Change Review of reading street names through sociological lenses. Whereas in the first part of this two-part contribution the analysis was made from functionalist and conflictualist perspectives, this second and final part employs social constructionism and the utilitarian theoretical tradition in making sociological sense of street nomenclatures. First, conceiving of street names as forming discursively constructed linguistic landscapes, the paper shows how urban namescapes – the “city-text” – are written, erased, and rewritten to reflect the shifting political powers. Second, the paper examines the neoliberal processes of place branding and toponymic commodification by which street names are turned into sought-after urban commodities with transactional value on the real estate market. The paper concludes by inviting sociologists to join the conversation on street names, which should become an important topic of sociological reflection.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016

Street names provide important insights into the local culture, history, and politics of places. Linked open data provide a wealth of knowledge that can be associated with street names, enabling novel ways to explore cultural geographies. This paper presents a threefold contribution. We present (1) a technique to establish a correspondence between street names and the entities that they refer to. The method is based on Wikidata, a knowledge base derived from Wikipedia. a The accuracy of this mapping is evaluated on a sample of streets in Rome. As this approach reaches limited coverage, we propose to tap local knowledge with (2) a simple web platform. Users can select the best correspondence from the calculated ones or add another entity not discovered by the automated process. As a result, we design (3) an enriched OpenStreetMap web map where each street name can be explored in terms of the properties of its associated entity. Through several filters, this tool is a first step towards the interactive exploration of toponymy, showing how open data can reveal facets of the cultural texture that pervades places.

This paper introduces a new web app to visualize the spatial distribution of street names and download the underlying dataset. First, we motivate the relevance of street-name data for researchers in social sciences. Second, we describe the data sources employed as well as the data cleaning process. Third, we present a web search app that allows to spatially visualize and download street-name data for Spain, with a time coverage spanning from 2001 to 2022

Social Change Review, 2020

Street names are mundane spatial markers that besides providing a sense of orientation inscribe onto the landscape the ideological ethos and political symbols of hegemonic discourses. This review article takes stock of the existing scholarship done on the politics of street naming practices in human (political, cultural, and social) geography and rethinks these insights from sociological perspectives. Drawing on Randall Collins’ taxonomy of sociological theory, the paper interprets urban street nomenclatures along functionalist, conflictualist, constructionist, and utilitarian lines. The analysis is delivered in two installments: Part I addresses urban nomenclatures from functionalist and conflictualist perspectives, while Part II (published in the next issue of this journal) approaches street names as social constructions and examines their utilitarian value. In doing so, the paper advances the argument that urban namescapes in general and street names in particular should make an important object of sociological reflection and empirical analysis. It is one of the key arguments developed in this paper that toponymy encapsulates broader and intersecting issues of power, memory, identity, language, and space which can be rendered visible through sociological analysis.

PloS ONE, 2021

Recent scholarship in critical toponymy studies has refashioned the understanding of street names from innocent labels to nominal loci of historical memory and vectors of collective identity that are embroiled with power relations. Urban nomenclatures consist of more than mere linguistic signposts deployed onto space to facilitate navigation. Street names are also powerful signposts that indicate the political regime and its socio-cultural values. Drawing on these theoretical insights, this paper is focused on Sibiu (Romania) and explore the city’s shifting namescape in a longitudinal perspective spanning one century and a half of modern history (1875–2020). The analysis is based on a complete dataset of street names and street name changes registered across five political regimes (Habsburg Empire, Kingdom of Romania, Romanian People’s Republic, Socialist Republic of Romania, and post-socialist Romania). A series of multiple logistic regression models were carried out to determine the factors that influence toponymic change. The statistical results point out several significant predictors of street renaming: (1) the streets’ toponymic characteristics (politicized or neutral name); (2) artery rank (public squares and large avenues or ordinary streets and alleys); and (3) topographic features (a street’s size and centrality). Such a quantitative approach coupled with a longitudinal perspective contributes to the scholarly literature on place-naming practices in three major ways: firstly, by advancing an innovative methodological framework and analytical model for the study of street name changes; secondly, by delineating with statistical precision the factors that model toponymic change; and thirdly, by embedding these renaming practices observed especially after significant power shifts in the broader historical context of the changes brought in the city’s street nomenclature.

Voices of the Streets: Trends in Naming Practices of Singapore Odonymy, 2018

Past studies on Singapore toponymy have mainly focused on etymological aspects of individual street names as distinct units, overlooking the relevance of naming practices across different languages. Singapore odonymy is still a largely unexplored field. An investigation into naming strategies in Singapore street names can provide deeper insights not only into the field of Historical Toponomastics, but also shed light on both the history of Toponymy in the local context and among different ethnic groups „en masse‟. This paper explores trends in naming practices in Singapore odonyms belonging to three different languages, namely English, Malay, and Chinese. A randomized sampling of 50 street names from each language was collected and analyzed according to specific naming strategies, highlighting the following categories: descriptive, commemorative, thematic, and borrowing. Results show tendencies towards naming strategies of commemoration and borrowing for English-derived odonyms, descriptive for Malay street names, and a strong preference for commemorative naming for the Chinese-derived ones. Further examination of the odonyms suggests a combination of social, political, and historical-geographical factors underlying these multi-faceted naming processes. This paper aims at being a starting point for a series of studies on the almost unexplored field of Singapore Toponymy, developed through an approach that considers the social and sociolinguistic perspectives besides the conventional historical and etymological methods.

DEVELOPMENT TRENDS OF PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCES, 2019

2022

Globally, many scholars in toponymic studies are looking at naming and renaming from a critical point of view. Subsequently, there are many studies that interrogate place-naming practices and processes from a critical toponymic perspective in Africa, and particularly in South Africa. As a result, this article analyses the perceptions of the residents of the City of Tshwane (Pretoria) regarding the process of renaming streets in the city. We saw the need to critically analyse the perceptions of black and white residents to check if the process was consultative enough as this is a requirement set out by the South African Geographical Names Council. The article uses a case study design. A sample consisting of 14 participants was selected through convenience sampling. The data were thematically analysed. The article establishes that black and white residents of the city hold divergent views regarding the renaming process. While blacks largely view the renaming as a necessary exercise meant to celebrate the struggle of the anti-apartheid political heroes and heroines, whites feel that the process was racially biased as it targeted old, perceived apartheid names. Some suggested that the renaming process of the streets should have been done in a balanced way, while others suggested that the renaming could have used neutral language, for example, names drawn from flora and fauna. They suggested this would have avoided creating polarisation among the residents of the city. The findings of this study show that the perceptions of the residents of the City of Tshwane are still based on race, with whites perceiving that there was no need to rename the streets, while, on the other hand, the blacks thought the process of renaming the streets in the city was necessary and long overdue.