Naming the places of the world is an essential human act of territorialization. As the subject of conflict or dispute, naming plays out in numerous ways that involve collective and individual relationships to space, whether functional or imaginary, as well as the identities related to them. Name traces also differ together with their inscription within landscapes and history. Names constitute a heritage, they bear witness, they mark places and thus contribute to the foundation of territories. Beyond place names, place naming reveals the functions and uses of names, but also the contradictory meanings that society bestows on them. With this framework in mind, that of critical toponymy, The Politics of Place Naming considers different points of view when studying place naming. These vary from linguistics to political and cultural geography, via history, anthropology, cartography, urban planning, digital humanities, subaltern studies and many other disciplines. This book honors this transversality by taking such studies into account in its examination of place naming.

Naming the places of the world is an essential human act of territorialization. As the subject of conflict or dispute, naming plays out in numerous ways that involve collective and individual relationships to space, whether functional or imaginary, as well as the identities related to them. Name traces also differ together with their inscription within landscapes and history. Names constitute a heritage, they bear witness, they mark places and thus contribute to the foundation of territories. Beyond place names, place naming reveals the functions and uses of names, but also the contradictory meanings that society bestows on them. With this framework in mind, that of critical toponymy, The Politics of Place Naming considers different points of view when studying place naming. These vary from linguistics to political and cultural geography, via history, anthropology, cartography, urban planning, digital humanities, subaltern studies and many other disciplines. This book honors this transversality by taking such studies into account in its examination of place naming.

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.

This volume examines the discursive relations between indigenous, colonial and post-colonial legacies of place-naming in Africa in terms of the production of urban space and place. It is conducted by tracing and analysing place-naming processes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa during colonial times (British, French, Belgian, Portuguese), with a considerable attention to both the pre-colonial and post-colonial situations. By combining in-depth area studies research – some of the contributions are of ethnographic quality – with colonial history, planning history and geography, the authors intend to show that culture matters in research on place names. This volume goes beyond the recent understanding obtained in critical studies of nomenclature, normally based on lists of official names, that place naming reflects the power of political regimes, nationalism, and ideology.

This book brings together recent works that conceptualize the hegemonic and contested practices of geographical naming. Illustrated with a global range of local and national studies, this ground-breaking 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.

As a continuation of ‘Identity of Cities and City of Identities’, this book covers the arguments around the memory-experience-cognition nexus concerning palimpsests and urban places. As cities experience transitional phases of growth, development, decline, and decay, the author urges considering the notion of urban memory in place-making strategies and design decision-making processes. These explorations would add value to primary fields of architecture, architectural history, cognitive science, human geography, and urbanism. Divided into eight chapters, this book puts together a comprehensive knowledge of urban memory in city transitions. By studying urban memory, the author delves into conceptions of mental mapping, knowledge of environments, cognition of places, and the perceptual dimension of urbanism. Undoubtedly, urban memory plays a significant part in the future movements of humanistic urbanism. Given the significances of scale, pace, and mode of city transitions globally, we should remember who are the ultimate users of those living environments. Therefore, in this book, the author debates two contradictions of ‘memory of place vs. place of memory’, and ‘significance of place vs. place of significance’. Each of these is believed to be a paradox of its own, indicating places are significant through the systematic networks of cities, memories are meaningful through the neural information processing, and place memories are the essence of urban identities. The book's ultimate goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the space-time frame of place in making memorable places. Through the comprehensive explorations of many global examples, we can evaluate the significance of place in mind more carefully. This is narrated based on the recognition of nostalgia in cities, socio-temporal qualities in places, and the network of processes in our minds. In return, the aim is to provide new knowledge to make memorable cities, enhance social experiences, and capture and value the significance of place in mind.

This book provides cutting-edge insights on contemporary geopolitical toponymic policy and practice in post-Soviet countries. It examines the political features of place naming as a reflection of contemporary political discourse. With multidisciplinary insights from leading scholars, chapters explore a range of topics drawing on critical political toponymy and traditional methods. Contributions examine how the toponymic system can act as a symbol of national identity, the regional geopolitics of toponymy, and geopolitical patterns in contemporary renaming. The historical roots of toponymic decolonization are analyzed, as well as indigenous toponymy and politics, and toponymic aspects of people's daily lives. The book explores a wide range of processes in the post-Soviet realm, including power, identity, economy, social order, and how political power is changing/transforming. It considers how these processes are distributed through various geopolitical and political-economic technologies. Offering empirically rich research from a variety of regions to give insights beyond "Western" perspectives, this book is the first to provide an in-depth exploration of post-Soviet place naming. It will appeal to students and researchers in human geography, politics, sociology, Eastern European studies, onomastics and cultural studies.

This book explores the role of place names in the formation and maintenance of individual and group identities in multilingual and multi-ethnic situations. Using examples from Austria and Czechia as case studies, the authors examine the power of place names through an interdisciplinary and multi-methods approach that draws from the fields of anthropology, geography, sociolinguistics and toponomastics. The book contextualises both places within their social and political histories, and probes recent debates in the social sciences relating to place names, identity and power. It will be of interest to scholars and students focusing on place names and naming practices, minority communities and languages, and linguistic landscapes.

International in scope and varied in its theoretical approaches, this collection of ten new critical essays examines the prevailing trends in recent crime fiction. Of particular interest are shifting, and increasingly globalized, conceptions of crime, as well as the genre's response to technological, legal, and social changes at the end of the 20th century. Employing critical tools new to crime-fiction studies, the essays also gesture toward a future for genre scholarship.

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