ABSTRACT
Urban place names have a capacity for bringing hegemonic ideologies into mundane existence. Most dramatically, the power-embeddedness of toponymic city-texts is unveiled after changes in regimes of governance. As Gill (2005, 480) has put it, “the reworking of language (through the injection of new words, the changing of the meaning of existing terms, and the elimination of some words) in order to invest it with a new ethos [is] important to the creation of a new regime’s symbolic culture.” Of course, under more steady urban conditions the ideological transformation of toponymies typically takes place more incrementally. As essentially palimpsest-like constructions, urban namescapes develop as “sums of additions and erasures” along with the protracted processes of societal development (Azaryahu, this volume). Until now, the critical conceptualizations of urban place naming have focused on nationalist, socialist and post-socialist street name revisions (e.g. Azaryahu 1997; Faraco and Murphy 1997; Pinchevski and Torgovrik 2002; Light 2004; Gill 2005), or the role that spatial addressing systems have played in the rationalization of urban space (e.g. Rose-Redwood, this volume). In European urban settings, in particular, much less attention has been paid to the ways the present-day marketers, developers, and indeed city-authorities increasingly brand places by bestowing them with nomenclatures that are attractive and marketable.
