The Named, Lived and Contested Environment

Problematizing urban microtoponyms

“…Ian Clark (2009, p. 208) defines micrtoponym as “the name of a feature that is itself part of a larger named entity,” focusing on physical geographical features. The term's primarily environmental, ecological, or rural dimension is also applied in other studies (see, among others, Boillat, 2023; Kladnik et al., 2020). However, there are geographical works where the term microtoponym is applied to urban objects, which is a theme of this paper (e.g., Basik, 2023a, 2023b).…”

“…Congruently, using predominantly the African empirics, Bigon and Ben Arrous (2022, p. 16) noticed, “‘Other’ toponymies are indeed designated in priority by a character of deviation: non‐official, informal, non‐compliant. Their ‘unruly’ character overrides other possible categorizations and blurs the differences between ‘vernacular’ toponymies (which transform to adapt to their rejection in informality), ‘popular’ (in the sense of being more widely used than the formal system), ‘alternatives’ (to the formal system) and more.” Spatial onomastic communities (Győrffy, 2018) or microtoponymic communities (Boillat, 2023, p. 57) that share the knowledge of these place names play the roles of the onomaturgs (the creators of names, see Vuolteenaho & Basik, 2022) and users of these dynamic place names systems.…”