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Urban Science
Special Issues
Urban Place Names: Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions
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Urban Place Names: Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions

A special issue of Urban Science (ISSN 2413-8851).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 October 2020) | Viewed by 33576

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Sergei Basik

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Liberal Studies, Conestoga College, 299 Doon Valley Drive, Kitchener, ON N2G 4M4, Canada
Interests: cultural landscapes; space, power, and symbolic landscapes; place names studies; critical toponymy; geography and onomastics; the innovative methods of teaching in geography

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The proposed Special Issue of Urban Science aims to contribute to the vigorous field of urban studies by exploring modern city landscapes through the prism of the interdisciplinary field of toponymy. The main goal is to bring together contemporary urban toponymic studies scholarship, both from the traditional onomastic perspective and the recently emerged critical toponymy perspective, to examine new areas of spatial relationships between people, language, culture, urban landscapes, development, and political power in different regions of the world. The original research papers and systematic critical reviews that reflect the theoretical development, contemporary condition, and future challenges of urban place names studies from various disciplinary perspectives will be welcomed.

In particular, the topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following themes:

  • globalization and transformation of urban toponymic systems;
  • urban place naming as a political tool;
  • place names and urban culture;
  • vernacular urban place names and community everyday life;
  • new trends in urban place naming and contemporary toponymic practices;
  • typology of modern urban place names;
  • tourism and commodification of urban toponymic landscape;
  • urban place names as markers of gentrification;
  • toponymic systems of suburbs;
  • place names and place making;
  • GIS and urban toponymic studies

Dr. Sergei Basik
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Urban Science is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • urban place names
  • political toponymy
  • critical place names studies
  • socio-onomastics
  • globalization
  • tourism
  • gentrification
  • toponymic commodification
  • urban cultural landscapes
  • place making
  • vernacular urban place names

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Editorial

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3 pages, 154 KiB  
Editorial
Urban Place Names: Introduction
by Sergei Basik
Urban Sci. 2020, 4(4), 80; https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci4040080 - 21 Dec 2020
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3099
Abstract
Urban place names are multidimensional phenomena [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Place Names: Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions)

Research

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20 pages, 749 KiB  
Article
Then and Now: A Comparative Historical Toponomastics Analysis of Station Names in 2 of Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Lines
by Shaun Tyan Gin Lim and Francesco Perono Cacciafoco
Urban Sci. 2020, 4(3), 37; https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci4030037 - 17 Aug 2020
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 7579
Abstract
Public transport is integral to the development of cities. It promotes economic development, mitigates environmental degradation, and fosters a sense of social cohesion. Notwithstanding, one can understand a place’s culture, geography, history, languages, and sociopolitical structures by studying the naming practices in public [...] Read more.
Public transport is integral to the development of cities. It promotes economic development, mitigates environmental degradation, and fosters a sense of social cohesion. Notwithstanding, one can understand a place’s culture, geography, history, languages, and sociopolitical structures by studying the naming practices in public transport, such as bus routes and train stations, among others. This article studies the naming conventions in Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system, which serves millions of commuters daily, and alludes to the importance of public transport in urban spaces. The paper analyses MRT station names, which can be regarded as toponyms, of the North South and Downtown lines according to two aspects: firstly, by conducting a linguistic analysis of the languages used in naming these MRT stations and, secondly, by applying toponymic classifications from current research in grouping the MRT stations themselves. Ultimately, the study compares the naming practices of Singapore’s oldest and second newest MRT lines using a sociolinguistic and historical toponomastics mixed methods approach, studying the MRT station names based on social categories as well as using historical sources to account for the linguistic and historical meaning of these toponyms. This work is aimed at providing scholars and a general audience with a better understanding of Singapore’s language, culture, and society through the analysis of the naming practices of the MRT station names, unique toponyms in the urban transport of the Lion City. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Place Names: Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions)
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14 pages, 3784 KiB  
Article
Toponymy, Pioneership, and the Politics of Ethnic Hierarchies in the Spatial Organization of British Colonial Nairobi
by Melissa Wanjiru-Mwita and Frédéric Giraut
Urban Sci. 2020, 4(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci4010006 - 23 Jan 2020
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 6772
Abstract
Toponyms, along with other urban symbols, were used as a tool of control over space in many African countries during the colonial period. This strategy was epitomized by the British, who applied it in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya from the late [...] Read more.
Toponyms, along with other urban symbols, were used as a tool of control over space in many African countries during the colonial period. This strategy was epitomized by the British, who applied it in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya from the late 1800s. This paper shows that toponymy in colonial Nairobi was an imposition of British political references, urban nomenclature, as well as the replication of a British spatial idyll on the urban landscape of Nairobi. In early colonial Nairobi, the population was mainly composed of three main groups: British, Asians, and Africans. Although the Africans formed the bulk of the population, they were the least represented, socially, economically and politically. Ironically, he British, who were the least in population held the political and economic power, and they applied it vigorously in shaping the identity of the city. The Asians were neither as powerful as the British, nor were they considered to be at the low level of the native Africans. This was the deliberate hierarchical structure that was instituted by the colonial government, where the level of urban citizenship depended on ethnic affiliation. Consequently, this structure was reflected in the toponymy and spatial organization of the newly founded city with little consideration to its pre-colonial status. Streets, buildings and other spaces such as parks were predominantly named after the British monarchy, colonial administrators, settler farmers, and businessmen, as well as prominent Asian personalities. In this paper, historical references such as maps, letter correspondences, monographs, and newspaper archives have been used as evidence to prove that toponyms in colonial Nairobi were the spatial signifiers that reflected the political, ideological and ethnic hierarchies and inequalities of the time. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Place Names: Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions)
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18 pages, 454 KiB  
Article
Sequent Occupance and Toponymy in Singapore: The Diachronic and Synchronic Development of Urban Place Names
by Francesco Cavallaro, Francesco Perono Cacciafoco and Zhi Xuan Tan
Urban Sci. 2019, 3(3), 98; https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci3030098 - 3 Sep 2019
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 11084
Abstract
This paper is aimed at investigating the applicability of the notion of Sequent Occupance to the Singapore context. Sequent Occupance as a phenomenon in Human Geography was first theorized by Derwent Whittlesey in 1929 in order to describe the current cultural landscape of [...] Read more.
This paper is aimed at investigating the applicability of the notion of Sequent Occupance to the Singapore context. Sequent Occupance as a phenomenon in Human Geography was first theorized by Derwent Whittlesey in 1929 in order to describe the current cultural landscape of a region as a combination of all the people which have ‘sequentially’ occupied that region from the past to the present. According to the Sequence Occupance Theory, the cultural imprint of each civilization is never completely lost and its traces can be seen to the present day. This is a historical phenomenon that occurs in the same region or space, but at different times. Sequent Occupance regards each region as a pattern of many cultural layers laid upon each other, where each layer can be attributed to a particular civilization or culture, which overlaps the ones before it. Singapore, with its multilingual and multicultural context and with its colonial past, is a very important test-bed for Sequence Occupance approaches both in the fields of Historical Toponomastics and Human Geography. This paper aims to apply the notion of Sequence Occupance to the study of Singapore Toponomastics with a focus on Odonymy and Micro-Toponyms. The study discusses the notion of Sequent Occupance in Singapore in the light of several local Toponyms, trying to ascertain if this concept can be applied to the diachronic and synchronic development of the Urban Toponymy of the Lion City. The article also highlights historical processes in the “making” of the multi-layered Singapore society. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Place Names: Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions)

Other

Jump to: Editorial, Research

9 pages, 1840 KiB  
Commentary
Towards Creating a Global Urban Toponymy—A Comment
by Liora Bigon
Urban Sci. 2020, 4(4), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci4040075 - 12 Dec 2020
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3552
Abstract
This commentary points to the problems inherent in critical place names studies in terms of classic research topics, methodologies and geographies. It expounds the limits of the official “index”, that is, the variety of traditional urban inscriptions on which critical toponymy scholars rely [...] Read more.
This commentary points to the problems inherent in critical place names studies in terms of classic research topics, methodologies and geographies. It expounds the limits of the official “index”, that is, the variety of traditional urban inscriptions on which critical toponymy scholars rely in interpreting modern urban spatialities—e.g., lists of street names, official street signage, gazetteers, archival materials, etc. The argument is that in Southern urban contexts, where informality in planning can reach up to about 80 percent of the city, researching official naming and signage renders a distorted image of the city and its namescape production. A comment is thus made on the need to embrace more innovative and almost ethnographic research methodologies for understanding place referencing, place attachment and everyday navigational channels in Southern cities. These will generate a more substantial contribution towards the creation of global urban toponymy and a further de-colonization of Eurocentric presumptions regarding governmentality, urban management, and the accompanying role of street naming systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Place Names: Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions)
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