The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place [Hardcover]

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 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 Zagrebs City-Text 10. NationalilÃd