The politics of toponymic continuity: the limits of change and the ongoing lives of street names

There is a widespread recognition in the critical toponymies literature that radical or revolutionary political change is accompanied by the renaming of urban streets and buildings. In particular, through a process of ‘toponymic cleansing’ ideologically inappropriate names are removed from the urban arena and replaced by new names that accord with the agenda, aspirations and values of the new political order. This process is frequently assumed to be clean, decisive and definitive; a clean sweep which results in a comprehensive reconfiguring of the toponymic landscape. However, we argue that the process is far more messy and inconclusive than is often recognised. Streets with inappropriate names may be overlooked; the material signage with the old name may persist long after a street has been through the administrative process of renaming; and old (and ideologically inappropriate) names may remain in widespread daily use long after they have been formally changed. In other words, former toponymies are absent presences that haunt the city long after a period of revolutionary political change has been completed. In this chapter we examine such ‘residual’ toponymies and we illustrate our discussion with a range of examples from post-socialist and post-colonial contexts. We argue that attempts to change everyday ‘worlds of meaning’ through renaming streets are much less successful than is often argued, and we call for a recognition of the performative limits of changing urban place names

Designing a memorial place

The design and selection of a memorial stone and the site of the grave, both of which represent the deceased, can be a central issue for people bereaved by traffic accidents. This was revealed in an interview survey of recent Swedish roadside memorials and other memorial places. In this article we consider the design and selection of the memorial stone and gravesite as expressions of continuing care for the deceased and as a way to offer comfort to the bereaved. Materiality, representation and presence will be discussed as crucial parts of the link between the living and the dead. Communicative, spatial and physical values are important also in the professional's design of common public memorial places. Of specific interest for this text are two design practice-based terms, memory object and passage landscape, which may be used by landscape architects when designing memorial places, such as cemeteries and public monuments. Throughout this text, we argue that memorial places like these are capable of bridging the gap between the space of life and the space of death, as well as supporting the regeneration of present memories and the construction of future ones

Rhetorical-Performative Analysis of the Urban Symbolic Landscape : Populism in Action

This chapter introduces a rhetorical-performative analysis as a tool for exploring urban symbolic landscape and populism and hence deals with relationality and materiality from the postfoundational perspective. It connects the articulation theory of cultural theorists Stuart Hall or political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and spatial analysis of cultural geographer Doreen Massey to the study of populism. The case of Hungary shows how political frontiers have been articulated in the public space, contestable interpretations of the past are deliberately used and key symbolic urban landscapes transformed radically to articulate a political ‘us’—and ‘them.’ In the 2010s, in the Hungarian capital Budapest, the top-down process transforming urban space faced bottom-up movements which reproduce the populist logic of articulation.Peer reviewe