ABSTRACT
This chapter expands on an international photography exhibition that the co-authors co-curated in summer 2018, both at HIT-Holon Institute of Technology and the Architect House’s Gallery (of the Israeli Association of Architects and Town Planners) in Jaffa Port, Israel. The exhibition assembled a rich collection of street signs from a variety of cities in Africa and Israel, with thematic and analytical threads that passed through the images. Dialectic processes of spatial production are, therefore, exposed, including semiotics of cultures, emotive values, political traditions and mundane conceptions of space users. Relevant colonial and postcolonial heritages in both regions in question are also highlighted. Rendering a synoptic view of the up-to-date toponymic landscapes and urban imageries, the exhibition enhanced the understanding of official (top-down) and informal (bottom-up) rationales of toponymic inscriptions. This understanding operates at both the macro-theoretical level through the several enframing thematic panels and on the micro-level through the visual documentation of particular localities. This chapter, therefore, points out the infinite possible ways of thinking of and analysing the namescapes in the selected regions, striving to highlight the divergence in focus, scales, inherent ideological or technocratic limitations, creativity and contextual interplays. Especially rich in visual evidence, the chapter is structured around the eight thematic panels of the exhibition, presented together with a group of images as examples, each with its own analysis (for a map showing Africa and Israel featuring the represented cities, inter alia, see Figure 1.1). The chapter ends with the list of participants and their short bios; these are associated with four continents, a variety of professions and with an almost-ethnographic acquaintance with their respective urban sites.
