Modeling Toponymic Change

A Multilevel Analysis of Street Renaming in Postsocialist Romania

Bibliographic Data

ID3175172
AuthorsMihai Stelian Rusu (0000-0001-5474-3895, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume114
Issue3
Pages591-609
Publication date2024-03-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2023.2292805
OpenAlexW4391617584
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited35

Political geographers and sociologists working in the field of critical toponymies have demonstrated that renaming the streetscape follows invariably after a regime change. Scholars have barely gone beyond documenting the extent of toponymic change at the level of particular places, however, usually the capital cities of countries from the former socialist bloc and other postdictatorial societies. This article sets out to address toponymic changes at the country level, by examining the complete national street nomenclature in postsocialist urban Romania. For this purpose, a data set comprising the entire collection of urban street names in Romania, together with all the street name changes that occurred during postsocialism, was constructed from multiple sources (N = 37,076). A series of multilevel logistic regression analyses were performed to model statistically the effects of various street- and locality-level variables on postsocialist street renaming. The results of these multilevel logistic regression analyses indicate that toponymic revision after the fall of state socialism is shaped by the intersection of street-level properties (e.g., artery class and features regarding the street name itself) and locality-level characteristics (e.g., the historicity of urban status and the ethnopolitics played out at the level of each city and town). The article is the first to analyze the shifting political geography of urban nomenclatures at a national level based on a complete data set of street names. The analytical model advanced in this article, based on postsocialist Romania, could be used to inform similar research on other geographical settings and historical contexts

Archaeology · Economic geography · Geography · Human geography · Linguistics · Locality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Toponymy · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philippine History and Culture

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