The political life of urban streetscapes : naming, politics, and place / edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Rose-Redwood, Reuben, editor.

Alderman, Derek H., editor.

Azaryahu, Maoz, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cities and towns--Political aspects.

Cities and towns.

Streetscapes (Urban design)--Political aspects.

Streetscapes (Urban design).

Public spaces--Political aspects.

Public spaces.

Cultural landscapes--Political aspects.

Cultural landscapes.

Sociology, Urban.

Physical Description:

xxii, 334 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.

Summary:

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. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The urban streetscape as political cosmos

Reading street names politically: a second reading

Colonial urban order, cultural politics, and the naming of streets in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Singapore

Revisiting East Berlin and Haifa: a comparative perspective of renaming the past

"Armed with an encyclopedia and an axe": the socialist and post-socialist street toponymy of East Berlin revisited through Gramsci

Building a new city through a new discourse: street naming revolutions in Budapest

Locating the geopolitics of memory in the Polish streetscape

Toponymic changes as temporal boundary-making: street renaming in Leningrad/St. Petersburg

The spatial codification of values in Zagreb's city-text

Nationalizing the streetscape: the case of street renaming in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

The politics of toponymic continuity: the limits of change and the ongoing lives of street names

Toponymic complexities in Sub-Saharan African cities: informative and symbolic aspects from past to present

Coloring "Rainbow" streets: the struggle for toponymic multiracialism in urban post-apartheid South Africa

Street renaming, symbolic capital, and resistance in Durban, South Africa

Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr.

From number to name: symbolic capital, places of memory, and the politics of street renaming in New York City

Toponymic checksum or flotsam? Recalculating Dubai's grid with Makani, "the smartest map in the world"

Contemporary issues and future horizons of critical urban toponymy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

9781472475091

1472475097

OCLC:

975371585