Street toponymy and the decolonisation of the urban landscape in post-colonial Nairobi

Abstract

International audienc

“We shall know a place by its names”: Co-existing place names in Bindura, Zimbabwe

“…11 Critical toponymic enquiry is a developing field deserving further research (Azaryahu, 2011;Berg et Vuolteenaho, 2009;Bigon, 2008;Bigon, 2016;Górny et Górna, 2019a, 2019bNjoh, 2007;Njoh, 2009;Puzey et Kostanski, 2016;Rose-Redwood et al, 2009, 2017Sihlongonyane, 2015;Wanjiru et Matsubara, 2017). Critical name studies, according to Puzey and Kostanski, 2016) react to sentiments expressed by many scholars' citation of the utterances: "A rose by another name would still smell as sweet" from Shakespeare's seminal Romeo and Juliet.…”

Naming rights, place branding, and the tumultuous cultural landscapes of neoliberal urbanism

“…During the 1990s, a number of seminal works highlighted how the naming of places, streets, and urban landmarks was implicated in political projects such as nation-building, state formation, and the spatialization of collective memory (Cohen & Kliot, 1992;Azaryahu, 1996;Berg & Kearns, 1996;Myers, 1996;Yeoh, 1996). Building on these classic studies, a new wave of critical toponymic scholarship extended this work by analyzing a range of case studies related to the politics of (re)naming places in a variety of geographical contexts, with a particular focus on colonial/postcolonial, post-Apartheid, and socialist/postsocialist settings (Light, 2004;Bigon, 2009;Duminy, 2014;Light & Young, 2014;Wanjiru & Matsubara, 2017). A parallel body of research has also linked naming and renaming to the politics of race, gender, class, and the geographies of social justice (Alderman, 2002;Rose-Redwood, 2008; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, & Azaryahu, 2010Alderman & Inwood, 2013).…”

Vocabularies of Spatiality in French Colonial Urbanism: Some Covert Rationales of Street Names in Colonial Dakar, West Africa and Saigon, Indochina

“…Toponymy can be defined as the art of attributing names to places and objects in built and natural space (see Wanjiru and Matsubara, 2017). As an area of research, it has attracted increasingly intense attention during the last decade (see for example Alderman and Inwood, 2013;Azaryahu, 2012;Bigon and Njoh, 2013;D'Almeida-Topor, 2016;Kearns and Berg, 2002;Medway and Warnaby, 2014;Njoh, 2017;Vuolteenaho, 2017).…”