ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the politics of street naming to provoke critical reflection on the political life of urban streetscapes as an opening to consider contemporary issues and future horizons of urban toponymic scholarship. Street signs are found everywhere and hence are commonplace. Since they belong to the language of urban space, they are mostly used in ordinary situations and when invested with remembrance, they perform as banal commemorations. Street signs communicate a plethora of additional political messages. The understanding that commemorative street names belong to the symbolic foundations of identity has yielded many useful insights into processes of social formation and the geopolitics of public memory. The political life of urban streetscapes extends not only to the renaming of streets but also to the very design of, and hierarchical ordering of different languages on, systems of street signs. The field of critical toponymy is currently witnessing a period of theoretical innovation and experimentation.
