Modeling Toponymic Change: A Multilevel Analysis of Street Renaming in Postsocialist Romania

Abstract

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.