Critical Toponymies

While place names have long been studied by a few devoted specialists, approaches to them have been traditionally empiricist and uncritical in character. This book brings together recent works that conceptualize the hegemonic and contested practices of geographical naming. The contributors guide the reader into struggles over toponymy in a multitude of national and local contexts across Europe, North America, New Zealand, Asia and Africa. In a ground-breaking and multidisciplinary fashion, this volume illuminates the key role of naming in the colonial silencing of indigenous cultures, canonization of nationalistic ideals into nomenclature of cities and topographic maps, as well as the formation of more or less fluid forms of postcolonial and urban identities.

"In Toponymy on the Periphery, Julien Charles Cooper conducts a study of the rich geographies preserved in Egyptian texts relating to the desert regions east of Egypt. These regions, filled with mines, quarries, nomadic camps, and harbours are often considered as an unimportant hinterland of the Egyptian state, but this work reveals the wide explorations and awareness Egyptians had of the Red Sea and its adjacent deserts, from the Sinai in the north to Punt in the south. The book attempts to locate many of the placenames present in Egyptian texts and analyse their etymology in light of Egyptian linguistics and the various foreign languages spoken in the adjacent deserts and distant shores of the Red Sea"--

Illustrated with numerous case studies, this book is the first comprehensive overview of the related fields of toponymy and toponomastics.

This book presents research on geographical naming on land and sea from a wide range of standpoints on: theory and concepts, case studies and education. Space and place naming or toponymy has a long tradition in the sciences and a renewed critical interest in geography and allied disciplines including the humanities. Place: location and cartographical aspects, etymology and geo-histories so salient in past studies, are now being enhanced from a range of radical perspectives, especially in a globalizing, standardizing world with Googlization and the consequent ‘normalization’ of place names, perceptions and images worldwide including those for marketing purposes. Nonetheless, there are conflicting and contesting voices. The interdisciplinary research is enhanced with authors from regional, national and international toponymy-related institutions and organizations including the UNGEGN, IGU, ICA and so forth.

In recent decades, urban policymakers have increasingly embraced the selling of naming rights as a means of generating revenue to construct and maintain urban infrastructure. The contemporary practice of toponymic commodification has its roots in the history of philanthropic gifting and the commercialization of professional sports, yet it has now become an integral part of the policy toolkit of neoliberal urbanism more generally. As a result, the naming of everything from sports arenas to public transit stations has come to be viewed as a sponsorship opportunity, yet such naming rights initiatives have not gone uncontested. This edited collection examines the political economy and cultural politics of urban place naming and considers how the commodification of naming rights is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities. Drawing upon case studies ranging from the selling of naming rights for sports arenas in European cities and metro stations in Dubai to the role of philanthropic naming in the "Facebookification" of San Francisco’s gentrifying neighborhoods, the contributions to this book draw attention to the diverse ways in which toponymic commodification is reshaping the identities of public places into time-limited, rent-generating commodities and the broader implications of these changes on the production of urban space. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.

The global web and its digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication, and spreading knowledge or as means of control, fueled by capitalism, surveillance, and geopolitics. The Digital Frontier interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned to reveal how their conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Sangeet Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation states. In analyzing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.

Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Second Edition, Fourteen Volume Set embraces diversity by design and captures the ways in which humans share places and view differences based on gender, race, nationality, location and other factors—in other words, the things that make people and places different. Questions of, for example, politics, economics, race relations and migration are introduced and discussed through a geographical lens. This updated edition will assist readers in their research by providing factual information, historical perspectives, theoretical approaches, reviews of literature, and provocative topical discussions that will stimulate creative thinking. Presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage on the topic of human geography Contains extensive scope and depth of coverage Emphasizes how geographers interact with, understand and contribute to problem-solving in the contemporary world Places an emphasis on how geography is relevant in a social and interdisciplinary context