Street Names, Placemaking and Cultural Capital (Issue #2)
The intersection of language, culture and urbanism
Intro
“What’s in a (street’s) name?” asked Shakespeare 400 years ago. I’ve also been thinking about that question. Why are most streets in the United States named after trees? Which historical figures appear most prominently in our streets and what are some patterns in the neighborhoods these people feature? Around the world, cities’ streets are named after artists, scientists, politicians, and fighters. Some are named after historical events and others after abstract concepts like “Liberty” or “Respect”. Some streets are only numbered, following a strict grid design like in Philadelphia and others, like in Tokyo, are not named at all. These names (or lack thereof) showcase what we choose to value and remember, and what gets left out. They show how we engage with our past, but they also hint at how we choose to organize our lives and what implications those choices have. Seemingly mundane, street names are an arena of discourse on issues of history, culture and organization.
Patterns in time and in place
Street names change over time together with the growth of a city itself. An interesting study of the city of Sibiu, Romania looked at exactly these trends over the period spanning 1875 to 2020 (linked here). The study found that streets named after people became more and more common throughout the centuries: from 22% in 1875 to 33.8% in 2020. “Descriptive” names, on the other hand, dropped from 77.21% to 49.72%. It is intriguing to see how changes in political systems accompany the changing landscape of a city’s streets. Note, for instance, that the peak in eponymous names happened in 1934 (Greater Romania) and in 1948 (Romanian People’s Republic). “Greater Romania” refers to the Romanian borders in between the two World Wars, and is a period of great nationalism in which these names serve to instill a greater sense of the Romanian national element among the people. In addition, the study finds that the communist regime established after the Second World War in fact renamed around 62 percent of Sibiu’s street names as part of state propaganda and ideological control.
Streetonomics
Street names, therefore, act as a sort of “spatial engineering”, codifying names into the collective memory, and molding values and beliefs. Thus, names become part of a city’s shared culture. Culture is a large part of collective life, and it ties people together in how they think and what they believe. Streetonomics is an interesting project studying culture as it appears in street names across New York, Paris, London and Vienna, with the aim of understanding how it gets represented through a geospatial lens. In an accompanying paper, Bancilhon et al. look at gender biases, historical eras, which professions had been celebrated the most, and whether culture had a local vs. global focus. Here are some findings:
On historical windows: London streets are named after figures living 1700s-1800s, in Vienna after people living in the 1900s, and in New York most streets were named after figures living in 1950-2000s.
How are foreigners celebrated? The overall proportion of streets named after foreigners is highest in Vienna (44.6%), followed by London (14.6%), Paris (10.9%), and then New York (3.2%).
Which are the most celebrated occupations? In Vienna, it’s artists, whereas in London it is the British Royal Family, military professionals and politicians. In New York streets celebrate honorific names, peaking shortly after 9/11.
Here is a visualization summing up these trends:
shameless plug moment 😊 I also did a similar two-part blog post on this topic visualizing Tirana’s (the Albanian capital) street names by gender, occupation and historical era with some interesting (and largely in line with the above) findings. If interested, here is part 1 of my blog. But some major findings were: only 3.3% of streets are named after women, who tend to be figures in the arts. Furthermore, the historical period for the people featured in the names tended to be 1850-1930s which is attributable to the Albanian National Awakening Movement, and the most common occupations were: Politicians, Writers and Fighters.
Urban Cultural Capital
The idea of quantifying the culture of a city falls within a larger attempt of measuring culture to understand urban change and how cities develop asymmetrically. The term “cultural capital” comes from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who coined it to describe “the accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that a person can tap into to demonstrate one's cultural competence and social status”. Bourdieu believed that this embodied knowledge shaped how people interact with others, and those with more cultural capital have the greatest chance of being more successful in their lives.
One notable project working on quantifying culture has been the C3 (Cultural and Creative Cities Index), designed to compare various European cities in the role of culture and creativity in the well-being of citizens. This index contains 29 indicators, ranging from museums and galleries to jobs in the creative sciences and various metrics of trust and tolerance. In a paper discussing this approach, Montalto et al. outline many of their findings, some of which are unsurprising, such as the fact capitals largely emerge as cultural and innovation hubs. Some others are more interesting: smaller cities sometimes outperform capitals in “Cultural Vibrancy” (Florence, and its museums or Ghent on number of theaters and music halls), and some smaller cities also score better on “Enabling Environment”, often due to having a high quality university. These observations are interesting in thinking about which cities end up being the home of art movements, or intellectual thought or major innovations.
Final Thoughts
Overall, street names are more than just names: they are part of our shared culture and have a role in shaping our memory and how we understand the past. They are also interesting to think about in how they reflect values and biases and in general as a way to understand a city’s and its people, and to provide a view into how urban areas develop over time.
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!
Fascinating post! I'm curious as to what descriptive names are. Also, it is funny how religion-based street names everywhere have fallen out of favour in the last 50 years.