Political patterning of urban namescapes and post-socialist toponymic change: A quantitative analysis of three Romanian cities

Abstract

Critical scholars of place-name studies have compellingly demonstrated that significant transformations in a society's namescape follow suit major power shifts and regime changes. However, despite the wealth of particular case studies existing in the literature, scarce efforts have been made to examine street name changes in a comparative framework using statistical modeling techniques of multivariate analysis. This paper aims to overcome these shortcomings by developing a comparative approach to analyzing post-socialist street-naming transformations in three Romanian cities from Transylvania (Brașov, Cluj-Napoca, and Sibiu). Based on comprehensive data collected from multiple sources, the study builds a logistic regression model that allows identifying the contribution of each factor to post-socialist toponymic change. The findings pinpoint two classes of factors that influence streets renaming after the fall of state-socialism in Romania: street name characteristics (politicized designations directly associated with the socialist regime) and topographic features (geographical centrality and size). The paper concludes by highlighting the street names' intrinsic vulnerability as political devices of commemoration and makes the case that toponymic change is structured by topographic importance.