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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este artículo se desarrolló un análisis sobre las principales calles del núcleo urbano del municipio de Teresópolis y sus nombres geográficos, siendo parte de una tesis de maestría. Los aportes de la investigación están en las áreas de geografía histórica, cultural y cartografía histórica. Diferentes mapas y documentos, entre los años 1896 y 1995, fueron de suma importancia, ya que permitieron identificar los topónimos en el espacio y sus cambios. En el análisis de los topónimos se procuró comprender los recuerdos y los significados de los nombres asignados, y cómo la dinámica toponímica cambió poco a poco el paisaje textual de la ciudad. A través de estos cambios fue posible analizar la relación entre los nombres geográficos y su posición espacial, que alteran los significados, recuerdos y aspectos culturales. Los resultados muestran un claro mensaje del nombramiento y preservación de nombres de figuras importantes en las áreas de mayor circulación y poder económico, contraponiéndose a otras zonas de la ciudad.

The street names of a city weave an interesting tapestry of memory. Urban place-names shape a particular macrotext that expresses and contains several identitarian and mnemonic discourses. In this article, the author deals with the symbolic of street names. The political and commemorative tone of Spanish urban place names is explained as a logical fruit of European traditional historicism and as a consequence of modern political contexts. Street names are considered as a relevant part of the European historical culture, that is to say, as one of the sources, by means of which Europeans interpret, objectify and use history. The article has primarily a theoretical pretension. It proposes a methodological scaffolding in order to study street names and other elements of public memory. However, the street names of Barcelona and Madrid are also explored (specially modern names) in order to identify their main ideological narratives.

The street names of a city weave an interesting tapestry of memory. Urban place-names shape a particular macrotext that expresses and contains several identitarian and mnemonic discourses. In this article, the author deals with the symbolic of street names. The political and commemorative tone of Spanish urban place names is explained as a logical fruit of European traditional historicism and as a consequence of modern political contexts. Street names are considered as a relevant part of the European historical culture, that is to say, as one of the sources, by means of which Europeans interpret, objectify and use history. The article has primarily a theoretical pretension. It proposes a methodological scaffolding in order to study street names and other elements of public memory. However, the street names of Barcelona and Madrid are also explored (specially modern names) in order to identify their main ideological narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]