Do street status and centrality matter for post-socialist memory policy? The experience of Ukrainian cities

Oleksiy Gnatiuk,Victoria Glybovets

doi:10.7163/gpol.0167

Abstract

Naming and renaming of urban space often is sensitive in terms of the street location and status and implies categorization of streets according to the perceived importance of a street name. Thus, different locations in the city have different symbolic significance, and the urban toponymy could be read as a spatial projection of the societal axiological system. This article represents an attempt to study the importance of location (centrality vs. peripherality) and status (significance) of the urban public spaces in the 36 largest Ukrainian cities in terms of symbolical value and memory policy. The findings indicate that both investigated factors constitute an important tool of identity shaping and historical memory policy, but their influence and manifestation may vary considerably depending on specific historical, cultural and (geo)political conditions. Therefore, although the central parts of cities and the main urban arteries have tangibly larger symbolic significance, the toponymy of less presentable urban areas may be no less eloquent in the critical toponymy studies.

Highlights

It is widely assumed that the inhabitants generally consider some places in the city to be more significant and more valuable than others
The findings indicate that both investigated factors constitute an important tool of identity shaping and historical memory policy, but their influence and manifestation may vary considerably depending on specific historical, cultural andpolitical conditions
In the conditions of difficult geopolitical context and high interregional diversity, especially in geopolitical fault-line cities, as in Southern and Eastern Ukraine (Gentile, 2017, 2019), the relationship between the axiological status of the person or event and respective commemoration place (Azaryahu & Kook, 2002; Light, 2004; Dwyer & Alderman, 2008; Azaryahu, 2009) is not so unambiguous: in terms of ideological contradictions between central government and local elites, ideological toponymy, one that is important for local identity, is displaced in less symbolically important locations, while key streets and squares usually receive ideologically neutral names

Summary

Introduction

It is widely assumed that the inhabitants generally consider some places in the city to be more significant and more valuable than others. The second fault-line divides the centre, densely settled with predominantly agricultural population already in Cossack times, from the south-east, former “Wild Field”, which started to be continuously settled only since the 19th century and undergone intense industrialization in the Soviet period, so that people there often has no other reference points for identity building than Soviet ones These circumstances resulted in strong differences in the regional mentality, including preferences of geopolitical integration and attitudes to particular contexts and episodes of the national history, which is proved, among else, by well-marked electoral divisions of the country (Birch, 2000; Clem & Craumer, 2008; Osipian & Osipian, 2012). Recent decommunizaton of Ukrainian urban toponymy reveals various strategies used by local and regional authorities in order to impose own version of national memory, albeit with an eye to central government policy (Gnatiuk, 2018)

Literature review

Methodology

Conclusions