Popular responses to city‐text changes: street naming and the politics of practicality in a post‐socialist martyr city

Abstract

The cultural politics of attributing names and the popular responses to the naming process of the urban landscape are core issues in ‘critical toponymies’. In many Romanian cities there are place names that articulate a collective memory agenda with respect to the 1989 Revolution, and Timişoara stands at the forefront of streets bearing martyr names. However, there have been recent calls for more attention to the popular responses to place‐naming practices. This paper explores these calls by addressing the issue of users of urban street place names. It also highlights the need to introduce the theory of ‘the politics of practicality’ in place‐ and street‐name studies. We seek to explain if Timişoarians are (un)happy with the new ‘martyr city‐text’ and how social justice and the contextualisation of the conflict as a case of the practical and the ideological are interrelated. By analysing the concerns of local service workers and by surveying local people's opinion on the use of the martyrs' names, we look to determine to what extent they accept or reject the new names and their use. In particular, pride and recognition versus everyday difficulties in martyr name uses produce major tensions at a local level. Therefore social justice (restitution) issues created local conflict over the uses of new names, and the politics of practicality in the martyrs' case shaped how political and symbolic changes are received by the people. This paper is developing and challenging previous work on place and street naming in geography by considering, beyond the understanding that conflicts over naming are symbolic or ideological, that ordinary citizens use, connect with, and depend upon street names in practical terms: they internalise and react differently to the costs of rewriting the city‐text.