Rather than telling a single story, street names preserve several layers of public memory.
Articles on Street names
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Naming storms, streets or buildings is complicated because names are not just benign words. They are powerful cultural workhorses.
Some have claimed the proposed new Indigenous names for Winnipeg streets are too difficult to pronounce. But what does it mean when we say a word is hard to pronounce?
Far more streets, buildings and public spaces in Canada are named after men than women, despite women making up a majority of the population.
The Russian embassy in Vilnius now sits on Ukrainian Heroes’ Street (Ukrainos Didvyrių g.), a direct response to the war.
US cities began naming streets in Black neighborhoods for Martin Luther King Jr. after his 1968 assassination. Researchers studying these areas 50 years later found entrenched deprivation.
In independent Kenya, road renaming happened to erase the names of the colonisers and to celebrate the new heroes: Kenya’s political leaders and freedom fighters.
Top contributors
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Senior Researcher, Technical University of Dortmund
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Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter and Professor of Visual and Material Culture Studies, Mount Allison University
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Professor of English Linguistics, University of Duisburg-Essen
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Post Doctoral Fellow in Geospatial Institute, Saint Louis University
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Lecturer, Technical University of Kenya
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Professor and Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions, University of Manitoba
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Associate Professor of Sociology, Nottingham Trent University
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Professor, Department of Cognitive Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University
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Research Project Leader, German Linguistics, University of Münster
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Professor, Geosciences Department, Mississippi State University
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Gauteng City-Region Observatory