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What do street names tell us? The 'city-text' as socio-cultural data
Abstract
This paper proposes the use of street names as a source of geographic-specific cultural data for quantitative analysis in social sciences. Street names reflect the cumulative commemorative decisions of municipalities and, as such, can be used as proxies for their social and cultural characteristics, which is particularly useful given the scarcity of cultural data at the local level. The utility of street names as a data source is illustrated through the study of religiosity and local economic development. The streetname indicator of religiosity is shown to be strongly correlated with the cultural factor it is supposed to capture, and appears to be negatively related to economic development at the local level. Finally, the article explores a range of other potential empirical applications to important topics in social sciences. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
... Street names are more than spatial indicators, and, since the beginning of time, rulers have used spatial engineering as a form of social engineering. As a result, street names mirror a city's social, cultural, political, and even religious values [6]. ...
... In a similar way, in the United States, studies have shown that streets named after Martin Luther King were placed on minor streets rather than major roads [14], thus reinforcing traditional racial boundaries [15], and recent street (re)naming has tried to change the country's course. Oto-Peralias [6] analyzed the religiosity expressed by street names in Spain, and found that it was correlated with cultural and economic factors. Contrary to this previous work, our study differs in two ways: i) we analyzed a large corpus of streets comprised of four cities as opposed to a single city; and ii) we explored honorees' 'meta' information such as their genders, professions, countries of origin as opposed to studying naming patterns. ...
... Yet, Paris, for example, despite being at the center of gender equality movements and public debates, still remains the most gender-biased city among the three. As one expects, street names reflect a country's culture and can be used as proxies for the country's historical and cultural characteristics (e.g., as an indicator of religiosity [6]). New York's street naming is more present-oriented than Vienna's or Paris's or London's. ...
Quantifying a society’s value system is important because it suggests what people deeply care about—it reflects who they actually are and, more importantly, who they will like to be. This cultural quantification has been typically done by studying literary production. However, a society’s value system might well be implicitly quantified based on the decisions that people took in the past and that were mediated by what they care about. It turns out that one class of these decisions is visible in ordinary settings: it is visible in street names. We studied the names of 4,932 honorific streets in the cities of Paris, Vienna, London and New York. We chose these four cities because they were important centers of cultural influence for the Western world in the 20th century. We found that street names greatly reflect the extent to which a society is gender biased, which professions are considered elite ones, and the extent to which a city is influenced by the rest of the world. This way of quantifying a society’s value system promises to inform new methodologies in Digital Humanities; makes it possible for municipalities to reflect on their past to inform their future; and informs the design of everyday’s educational tools that promote historical awareness in a playful way.
... Street names are more than spatial indicators, and, since the beginning of time, rulers have used spatial engineering as a form of social engineering. As a result, street names mirror a city's social, cultural, political, and even religious values [6]. ...
... In a similar way, in the United States, studies have shown that streets named after Martin Luther King were placed on minor streets rather than major roads [14], thus reinforcing traditional racial boundaries [15], and recent street (re)naming has tried to change the country's course. Oto-Peralias [6] analyzed the religiosity expressed by street names in Spain, and found that it was correlated with cultural and economic factors. Contrary to this previous work, our study differs in two ways: i) we analyzed a large corpus of streets comprised of four cities as opposed to a single city; and ii) we explored honorees' 'meta' information such as their genders, professions, countries of origin as opposed to studying naming patterns. ...
... As one expects, street names reflect a country's culture and can be used as proxies for the country's historical and cultural characteristics (e.g., as an indicator of religiosity [6]). New York's street naming is more present-oriented than Vienna's or Paris's or London's. ...
Quantifying a society's value system is important because it suggests what people deeply care about -- it reflects who they actually are and, more importantly, who they will like to be. This cultural quantification has been typically done by studying literary production. However, a society's value system might well be implicitly quantified based on the decisions that people took in the past and that were mediated by what they care about. It turns out that one class of these decisions is visible in ordinary settings: it is visible in street names. We studied the names of 4,932 honorific streets in the cities of Paris, Vienna, London and New York. We chose these four cities because they were important centers of cultural influence for the Western world in the 20th century. We found that street names greatly reflect the extent to which a society is gender biased, which professions are considered elite ones, and the extent to which a city is influenced by the rest of the world. This way of quantifying a society's value system promises to inform new methodologies in Digital Humanities; makes it possible for municipalities to reflect on their past to inform their future; and informs the design of everyday's educational tools that promote historical awareness in a playful way.
... Therefore, researchers often resort to unconventional datasets to develop proxies that capture complex socio-cultural characteristics. These include geo-referenced pictures [5], points of interests [6], social media photos [2], and street names [7], to name a few. ...
... Associating a city's street naming system with socio-cultural dimensions emerged in the 18 th century, when street naming practices switched from highlighting cities' geographic features to establishing commemorative spaces [7]. Street names were used to develop urban indicators of male predominance, women's societal role, religious connections [7], and biodiversity [8]. ...
... Associating a city's street naming system with socio-cultural dimensions emerged in the 18 th century, when street naming practices switched from highlighting cities' geographic features to establishing commemorative spaces [7]. Street names were used to develop urban indicators of male predominance, women's societal role, religious connections [7], and biodiversity [8]. What remains less explored, however, are comparative studies of cities. Examples in this direction are the discovery of commemorative practices of new settlements in Israel [9], socialistic Poland and Czechia [3]. ...
Throughout history, maps have been used as a tool to explore cities. They visualize a city's urban fabric through its streets, buildings, and points of interest. Besides purely navigation purposes, street names also reflect a city's culture through its commemorative practices. Therefore, cultural maps that unveil socio-cultural characteristics encoded in street names could potentially raise citizens' historical awareness. But designing effective cultural maps is challenging, not only due to data scarcity but also due to the lack of effective approaches to engage citizens with data exploration. To address these challenges, we collected a dataset of 5,000 streets across the cities of Paris, Vienna, London, and New York, and built their cultural maps grounded on cartographic storytelling techniques. Through data exploration scenarios, we demonstrated how cultural maps engage users and allow them to discover distinct patterns in the ways these cities are gender-biased, celebrate various professions, and embrace foreign cultures.
... Street-name data allow the construction of geographic-specific and time-variant indicators of many characteristics of society (Oto-Peralías, 2018). For instance, Oto-Peralías (2018) shows that the population in Spain in areas with a higher percentage of religious streets tends to have stronger religious beliefs and behaviors. ...
... Street-name data allow the construction of geographic-specific and time-variant indicators of many characteristics of society (Oto-Peralías, 2018). For instance, Oto-Peralías (2018) shows that the population in Spain in areas with a higher percentage of religious streets tends to have stronger religious beliefs and behaviors. Similarly, people in Scotland living in areas with street names commemorating Great Britain are less likely to identify themselves as Scottish only (Oto-Peralías, 2017). ...
Street names constitute a rich source of data for quantitative analysis in social sciences. We gather and process street-name data from OpenStreetMap to create an accessible and readily analyzable street names database for the US and a large part of Europe. We also develop a web app to visualize the spatial distribution of street names and download the underlying data from users’ queries. These tools will continue to expand its geographic coverage by including additional countries.
... Street-name data allow the construction of geographic-specific and time-variant indicators of many characteristics of society (Oto-Peralías, 2018). For instance, Oto-Peralías (2018) shows that the population in Spain in areas with a higher percentage of religious streets tends to have stronger religious beliefs and behaviors. ...
... Street-name data allow the construction of geographic-specific and time-variant indicators of many characteristics of society (Oto-Peralías, 2018). For instance, Oto-Peralías (2018) shows that the population in Spain in areas with a higher percentage of religious streets tends to have stronger religious beliefs and behaviors. Similarly, people in Scotland living in areas with street names commemorating Great Britain are less likely to identify themselves as Scottish only (Oto-Peralías, 2017). ...
This paper introduces a new web app to visualize the spatial distribution of street names and download the underlying data. First, we motivate the relevance of street-name data for researchers in social sciences. Second, we describe the data sources employed as well as the data cleaning process. Third, we present a web search app that allows to spatially visualize and download street-name data for the US and a large part of Europe.
... Therefore, researchers often resort to unconventional datasets to develop proxies that capture complex socio-cultural characteristics. These include geo-referenced pictures, 5 points of interest, 6 social media photos, 2 and street names, 7 to name a few. ...
... Associating a city's street naming system with socio-cultural dimensions emerged in the 18th century, when street naming practices switched from highlighting cities' geographic features to establishing commemorative spaces. 7 Street names were used to develop urban indicators of male predominance, women's societal role, religious connections, 7 and biodiversity. 8 What remains less explored, however, are comparative studies of cities. Examples in this direction are the discovery of commemorative practices of new settlements in Israel, 9 socialistic Poland, and Czechia. 3 But case-based research lacks automated workflows and is mostly done manually by mapping communities or by participants of thematic workshops. ...
Throughout history, maps have been used as a tool to explore cities. They visualize a city's urban fabric through its streets, buildings, and points of interest. Besides purely navigation purposes, street names also reflect a city's culture through its commemorative practices. Therefore, cultural maps that unveil socio-cultural characteristics encoded in street names could potentially raise citizens' historical awareness. But designing effective cultural maps is challenging, not only due to data scarcity but also due to the lack of effective approaches to engage citizens with data exploration. To address these challenges, we collected a dataset of 5,000 streets across the cities of Paris, Vienna, London, and New York, and built their cultural maps grounded on cartographic storytelling techniques. Through data exploration scenarios, we demonstrated how cultural maps engage users and allow them to discover distinct patterns in the ways these cities are gender-biased, celebrate various professions, and embrace foreign cultures.
... As Rose-Redwood observed, "[t]he metaphor of the city-as-text, or the city-text, has become one of the mainstays of works on the political geography of street naming, and the notion of 'reading' a city's politics through its street names has acquired an almost canonical status within the literature on street naming" (Rose-Redwood 2008, 882). The scope of the term varies, with some scholars focusing chiefly on the names of streets (Ferguson 1988;Azaryahu 1996;Oto-Peralías 2018), and others including all sorts of memorials erected in the city (Palonen 2008, Šakaja andStanić 2018), or even the aural aspects of naming (Kearns and Berg 2002). An important aspect of the interpretation of urban signage as text is related to the idea of city-text as a palimpsest, one which is constantly rewritten and reinterpreted (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2018b, 8). ...
The aim of the article is to analyse, in a diachronic perspective, the street names in today’s Berlin whose bases are geographical names referring to places in contemporary Poland. The analysis reveals a purposeful city-text that supports the nation-building narrative: either by mapping the state’s actual geography at the moment of the name’s bestowal, or by including the territories claimed (literally or metaphorically), beyond the current borders at the time of the naming. However, the degree to which these street names and the intention behind them are decipherable today remains questionable. Once meaningful for their original creators, today they are partly or completely semantically oblique to the general public, as evidenced by their contemporary reception.
... Literature [10] addresses early Parisian urban sexual culture, before and after the ruling leadership class, respectively secular language and means to eliminate the occurrence of behaviors such as prostitution, including teaching the population, stigmatizing prostitution, surveillance, and detention. Literature [11] attempts to study specific urban cultures through the laws of urban street naming, arguing that street naming can serve as a characterizing interpretation of urban society and culture, especially when there is insufficient information on cultural data at the local city level. Literature [12] describes the European Capitals of Culture project, points out that the tourism resources of all the cities of Basilicata are unpromoted, with highly flexible and inclusive qualities, and discusses the problems of tourist accommodation, the development of tourism infrastructure, and proposes a World Wide Web-based platform for operating and presenting the city's culture and environment, as well as consulting, to promote the positive promotion of the city's tourism and urban culture. ...
As an important cultural institution for urban cultural inheritance and construction, the complementarity, interaction, and development between university culture and urban culture are also getting more and more attention. This study analyzes the dynamic mechanism of the integration of university culture and urban culture by combining the dynamics model. Then, it constructs a dynamics model for the integration of urban culture into university culture based on the group dynamics theory and the airplane dynamics model. Then, a data-driven decision-making optimization scheme is proposed based on the BASM model, and a data-driven decision-making model oriented to the development of cultural integration is constructed with the data related to the artistic integration of universities as the driving basis. Finally, an empirical analysis of the integration development of culture between University M culture and Guangzhou city culture is carried out in Guangzhou city as an example, with a comprehensive average score of 92.70 for cultural recognition, and the correlation coefficients of the dimensions are highly correlated between 0.812 and 0.891. Meanwhile, the regression coefficients corresponding to the seven dimensions of cultural integration and development are all less than 0.05, and the VIF values are all less than 10. Moreover, the comprehensive average score of each dimension after optimization is 4.193, which is 0.79 points higher compared with that before optimization, and the satisfaction level is 1.297 points higher. In this paper, the optimization of the development strategy for the integration of university culture and urban culture can promote cultural integration and provide a specific optimization path for the integration of university culture and urban culture.
... Street names can also undergo a commodification process, because names which evoke positive associations result in an increase in real estate prices located on such streets (Light & Young, 2014). They can also be a reflection of the religiousness of local citizens (Oto-Peralías, 2017). ...
The article presents the process of changing street names in Poland
after the central government introduced a law in 2016 requiring the
elimination of all communist symbols from the public space; it also
provides a quantitative analysis of the impact of changing street
names on the electoral results of the ruling party. The study
results, based on outcomes from over 26,400 polling stations,
demonstrate that stations located near streets with
decommunised names produced lower election results for the
ruling party than in other parts of the country. This suggests
that – although the majority of the Polish society has a negative
view of the communist dictatorship – introducing an ideologically
and politically motivated policy that generates economic costs for
citizens may lead to a drop in the ruling party’s electoral results.
... We should also note the recent development of quantitative methods in critical toponymy (Eades 2017;Oto-Peralias 2018;Badariotti et al. 2021;Bancilhon et al. 2021;Fabiszak 2021). They might not self-identify as such, rather as digital humanities, but fully address the social, cultural and political importance of toponymic choices and uses. ...
Naming the world is very much the adventure societies, groups, individuals and humans engage in when they inhabit a portion of earth, a territory, a city, or they follow routes, discover them, invest in them, or map them. Toponymy appropriates places and spaces through addresses, landmarks, referents, routes, signage and cartography. In a word, it territorializes. The naming of places is fundamentally political because it participates in the institution of an order endowed with a regime of representation that hierarchizes places, resources, values and beliefs. A political semiotic approach points to the well‐demarcated field of political odonymy. This field has been enriched by works on the naming and visualization of new emerging territories, resulting from the politico‐functional recompositions of new regionalism, or of tourism territories or transport as places where the political hold of the visual and linguistic landscape extends, together with territorial marketing in a globalizing context.
... Over the last two decades, a robust body of scholarship at the interdisciplinary intersection of cultural geography, political sociology, and onomastics has convincingly argued that place-names are more than orientational devices valuable only to the extent that they assist in efficiently organizing space (Oto-Peralías 2018;David 2011;Guyot & Seethal 2007;Azaryahu 1996). It is clear that "as icons, indexes, and symbols of space phenomena, place-names have enormous referential power" (Thornton 2008, 31). ...
The gender relations of power embedded within the urban landscape and materialized in street nomenclature remain an underexplored topic in place-name studies. This paper situates the gendered spaces of street names within the broader investigation of identity politics played out in the public space. Drawing on scholarship from “critical toponymies”, this article diachronically examines the gender patterning of urban nomenclature in a city from Eastern Europe (Sibiu, formerly Hermannstadt, Romania). For this purpose, a dataset was compiled from the entire street nomenclature of the city across seven successive historical periods, from 1875 to 2020 (n = 2,766). The statistical analyses performed on this dataset revealed a “masculine default” as a structuring principle underpinning Sibiu’s urban namescape for the two centuries investigated. As this analysis demonstrates, contrary to the overall democratization of the Romanian post-socialist society, Sibiu’s streetscape continues to tell a patriarchal story informed by hegemonic masculinity.
... Text-based methods tend to be obtained and analyzed through attributes such as names of specific representations of urban style. Daniel [9] found that street names with religious beliefs are closely related to the cultural factors it captures and can be closely linked to local economic development, which can reflect its social and urban style. Livia [10] collected georeferenced and tagged metadata associated with eight million Flickr images to explore the terms used to describe urban centers, explore where urban cultural centers are concentrated, and also explore the boundaries of urban cultural center communities at the level of individual cities. ...
The coexistence of different cultures is a distinctive feature of human society, and globalization makes the construction of cities gradually tend to be the same, so how to find the unique memes of urban culture in a multicultural environment is very important for the development of a city. Most of the previous analyses of urban style have been based on simple classification tasks to obtain the visual elements of cities, lacking in considering the most essential visual elements of cities as a whole. Therefore, based on the image data of ten representative cities around the world, we extract the visual memes via the dictionary learning method, quantify the symmetric similarities and differences between cities by using the memetic similarity, and interpret the reasons for the similarities and differences between cities by using the memetic similarity and sparse representation. The experimental results show that the visual memes have certain limitations among different cities, i.e., the elements composing the urban style are very similar, and the linear combinations of visual memes vary widely as the reason for the differences in the urban style among cities.
... Reading the city as a text spelt out in its street names, a series of researchers led by Azaryahu articulated the "political semiotics" perspective in toponomastic scholarship. This perspective empowered researchers to read urban namescape as a textual discourse (Šakaja & Stanić 2011;Oto-Peralías 2018). ...
Street names (odonyms) and their academic study constitute an important part of onomastic research. This paper takes stock of the growing literature on street naming processes and provides a meta-analytical systematic review of odonymic scholarship. To this purpose, a collection of 121 peer-reviewed articles on street names published in English language academic journals in the social sciences and the humanities were identified in the Scopus database. The statistical analyses conducted on these materials indicate (1) the temporal dynamics of knowledge production and the geographical hotspots in toponomastic scholarship, (2) the geopolitical settings and historical contexts framing these studies, (3) the theoretical perspectives employed to conceptualise street naming practices, and (4) the methodological outlines characterising the research done on street names in the 270 MIHAI S. RUSU literature. The conclusions point out four main clusters of toponomastic research and indicate directions for future inquiry in street name scholarship.
Pratiques de dénomination des rues : Une revue systématique de la littérature sur la toponymie urbaine Résumé : Le nom des rues (odonymes) et leur étude scientifique constituent une partie importante de la recherche onomastique. Cette étude fait le bilan de la littérature croissante sur le processus de l'attribution de noms des rues et offre une méta-analyse systématique de la littérature existante sur les odonymes. Dans ce but, on a identifié et utilisé un nombre de 121 articles en anglais dédiés à ce sujet, publiés dans des revues à comité de lecture en sciences humaines et sociales faisant partie de la base de données Scopus. L'analyse statistique menée sur cette collection d'articles en anglais met en évidence (1) la dynamique temporelle de la production scientifique et la concentration géographique de la recherche sur la toponymie, (2) les contextes géopolitique et historique qui encadrent ces études, (3) les perspectives théoriques utilisées pour la conceptualisation des pratiques de l'attribution des noms des rues et (4) les cadres méthodologiques employés par la recherche portée sur les noms des rues dans cette littérature. Les conclusions soulignent quatre groupes principaux d'étude et indiquent les directions pour la recherche future dans le domaine toponymique. Mots-clés : Nom des rues, changement de noms de rues, toponomastique, odonyms, noms des endroits.
Straßenbenennungspraktiken: Eine systematische Untersuchung der urbanen toponymischen Erforschung Zusammenfassung: Straßennamen (Hodonyme) und ihre akademische Untersuchung sind ein wichtiger Bestandteil der Onomastik Forschung. Die vorliegende Studie zieht eine Bestandsaufnahme der wachsenden Literatur zu Straßenbennenungprozesse und bietet einen metaanalytischen systematischen Überblick über die Forschung der Hodonyme an. Zu diesem Zweck wurde in der Scopus Datenbank eine Sammlung von 121 wissenschaftliche Artikel identifiziert, die in englischsprachigen Fachzeitschriften der Sozial-und Geisteswissenschaften veröffentlicht wurden. Die statistische Analyse des Korpus zeigt (1) die zeitliche Dynamik der Wissensproduktion und die geografischen Hotspots der bisherigen Forschung der Toponomastik, (2) die geopolitischen Rahmenbedingungen und die historischen Kontexte und deren Einfluss auf die Studien (3) die theoretischen Perspektiven, die zur Konzeptualisierung der Grundsätze und Verfahren der Straßenumbennenung angewandt wurden und (4) die methodologischen Zugänge, die die Forschung zu Straßennamen in der Literatur charakterisieren. Die Schlussfolgerungen weisen auf vier Hauptcluster der Toponomastik Forschung hin und bieten einen Ausblick auf zukünftige Forschungsrichtungen der Straßennamenkunde. Schlüsselbegriffe: Straßennamen, Umbenennung der Straßen, Toponomastik, Hodonyme, Ortsnamen.
... 59 As well as going some way to answering the question of the location of the Hortons' first factory, 60 here is an example of how a local family, with strong financial interests in an area, could influence the naming of streets as seen before in the naming of courts. 61 An old photograph shows a wide street with two-storey, brick-built dwellings of various sizes joined in terraces. Some of the doors to buildings open directly on to the road but in one place there is a pavement with a tree. ...
Darlaston, in the part of the English midlands known as the Black Country, grew from a small village prior to the Industrial Revolution to a town of over 15,000 inhabitants by the beginning of the twentieth century. It played an important role in the area’s coal and iron extraction, and manufacture of gun parts, screws and bolts. Hitherto little has been written about the social history of this significant industrial urban location but by using a range of sources including the national censuses, maps and newspaper reports, the nature of Darlaston’s changing built environment and the experiences of its residents is investigated in a close focus, microhistorical study.
... Alexandru Odobescu, Kirchhof/Churchyard-currently Piaţa Albert Huet), or otherwise made sense only to the local community in the light of its oral tradition and collective memory (e.g., Off dem Hwesruck/Dog's Back-currently Str. Centumvirilor/ Centumviri Street) [45]. ...
Recent scholarship in critical toponymy studies has refashioned the understanding of street names from innocent labels to nominal loci of historical memory and vectors of collective identity that are embroiled with power relations. Urban nomenclatures consist of more than mere linguistic signposts deployed onto space to facilitate navigation. Street names are also powerful signposts that indicate the political regime and its socio-cultural values. Drawing on these theoretical insights, this paper is focused on Sibiu (Romania) and explore the city’s shifting namescape in a longitudinal perspective spanning one century and a half of modern history (1875–2020). The analysis is based on a complete dataset of street names and street name changes registered across five political regimes (Habsburg Empire, Kingdom of Romania, Romanian People’s Republic, Socialist Republic of Romania, and post-socialist Romania). A series of multiple logistic regression models were carried out to determine the factors that influence toponymic change. The statistical results point out several significant predictors of street renaming: (1) the streets’ toponymic characteristics (politicized or neutral name); (2) artery rank (public squares and large avenues or ordinary streets and alleys); and (3) topographic features (a street’s size and centrality). Such a quantitative approach coupled with a longitudinal perspective contributes to the scholarly literature on place-naming practices in three major ways: firstly, by advancing an innovative methodological framework and analytical model for the study of street name changes; secondly, by delineating with statistical precision the factors that model toponymic change; and thirdly, by embedding these renaming practices observed especially after significant power shifts in the broader historical context of the changes brought in the city’s street nomenclature.
... Thematic toponymy, therefore, is not a study of the placenames per se, but rather uses placenames as a source of information to reveal a certain theme, whether it be in natural science, social science, or humanities. Other examples include the use of street names as indicators to local social and cultural characteristics [21], to use field names for management and planning of landscapes [22], and to use toponym databases to reveal different conceptualization of landscapes across different groups and cultures [23]. Uncertainties and ambiguities present in the placename information can be costly to rectify, as the very use of placename information is often because there is no other source, but is done through fieldwork [22,24] and cross-referencing to other available documents [5,9,10]. ...
Disaster-originated placename is a kind of disaster subculture that is used for a practical purpose of identifying a location while reminding the past disaster experience. They are expected to transmit the risks and knowledge of high-risk low-frequency natural hazards, surviving over time and generations. This paper compares the perceptions to tsunami-originated placenames in local communities having realistic and exaggerated origins in Sanriku Coast, Japan. The reality of tsunami-originated placenames is first assessed by comparing the tsunami run-ups indicated in the origins and that of the tsunami in the Great East Japan Earthquake 2011 using GIS and digital elevation model. Considerable proportions of placenames had exaggerated origins, but the group interviews to local communities revealed that origins indicating unrealistic tsunami run-ups were more believed than that of the more realistic ones. We discuss that accurate hazard information will be discredited if it contradicts to the people’s everyday life and the desire for safety, and even imprecise and ambiguous information can survive if it is embedded to a system of local knowledge that consistently explains the various facts in a local area that requires explanation.
Similar to other countries from Central and South-Eastern Europe, Romania’s cultural field developed as a literature-centric system. Throughout the process of nation-making and state-building that unfolded starting with the early nineteenth century, literary figures (writers, poets, and other men of letters) have played a critical role in shaping Romanians’ historical consciousness and national identity. This paper intersects the conceptual perspective derived from the tenets of critical place-name scholarship with historical contextualisation provided by literary studies to examine the patterns of spatial inscription of literary figures in Romania’s urban street names. Using as dataset the entire collection of street names in Romania’s cities and towns (N = 49,469), the article analyses who are the canonical writers commemorated in the country’s streetscape and how the presence of writers had changed after Romania’s regime change of 1989. It then charts the spatial distribution of writers’ names across the country’s geo-historical regions, investigates the gender disparity, as well as, the ethnic structuring of the literary namescape. The first to combine critical place-name research with literary studies in a quantitative approach to a large-N set of spatial data, the study contributes to several bodies of scholarship by mapping the memorial literaturisation of street nomenclature at the national level as well as its longitudinal dynamics, regional variation, gender disparity, and ethnic structure.
Narratives about the past do not only exist in museums, heritage sites and books. Our streets are crowded by images and words that evoke cultures, events and figures extracted directly from history, which are adapted to social, political and economic interests. As a consequence, public space constitutes a privileged scenario for studying contemporary uses of the past. The aim of this text is to talk about the role of the past in people’s daily life, through the study of its expression in the public space —street and business names, heritage sites, commemorative monuments, street art, advertisements, architecture, commemorations, etc.— and to offer some methodological statements for its analysis. The implementation of this kind of study will serve to create a better understanding of the meanings of the past in the present, and what they imply for people.
Street names reflect the commemorative decisions of a community, representing not only the historical and political causes of naming and renaming processes that a city experiences but also social and cultural values. This study aims to analyse individual perceptions of gender equality through urban toponymy in Italian municipalities in order to provide insight into the persistence of local community culture as encapsulated in street names. Specifically, different specifications of a probit model are estimated to observe how a change in the ratio of streets named after women is related to the probability of an individual having more equitable perceptions of gender. Results show that even when controlling for a complete set of geographic, economic, socio-demographic, historical and political controls, in Italian municipalities with a high percentage of streets named after females, there is more awareness of gender bias and more egalitarian attitudes towards gender. Results are confirmed by a large set of robustness checks. Moreover, several heterogeneity analyses highlight that culture has a stronger influence in smaller cities, in cities with high social capital, and among native-born and less educated people.
Given names hide crucial information about cultural attitudes and beliefs that sheds light on how parents raised their children and the importance they attached to education and other values. Relying on the 1860 Population census for the province of Zaragoza (Spain; almost 400,000 observations), this article shows that naming practices, captured by whether children bear more or less common names and/or were named after their parents, help predicting their educational outcomes, even after controlling for a host of individual-, household-and community-level confounders. Crucially, these results differ by sex, birth-order, socioeconomic status and the urban-rural divide, which allows identifying the mechanisms in place. In particular, bearing a common name is negatively associated with the likelihood of girls attending school and being literate in rural areas. By contrast, being named after parents had a positive influence on boys' education, a pattern that is especially visible for the eldest son from families who have access to land. In addition, the results reported here are stronger in more complex household arrangements. These results therefore stress the role played by inheritance customs and the continuity of the family line on both naming practices and the way that parents allocated resources between their siblings, as well as highlighting the different expectations around the role that sons and daughters played in these societies.
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.
批判性地名领域的政治地理学家和社会学家已经证明, 政权更迭之后总是伴随着街景的更名。然而, 学者们仅仅记载了特定地方的地名变化, 常常包括前社会主义集团和其它后独裁社会的首都。本文旨在研究后社会主义罗马尼亚全国城市街道的命名, 来探讨国家层面的地名变化。本文构建了多源数据集, 包括罗马尼亚所有城市的街道名称、后社会主义期间的所有街道名称变化(N = 37,076)。进行了一系列多层逻辑回归分析, 对街道尺度和地方尺度变量影响后社会主义街道更名进行了统计建模。多层逻辑回归分析结果表明, 国家社会主义垮台后的地名修正, 是由街道特性(例如, 与街道名称有关的干线类别和特征)和地方特征(例如, 城市的历史性和城镇的民族政治)共同塑造的。本文首次基于完整的街道名称数据集, 分析了国家尺度城市命名政治地理的变化。本文提出的基于后社会主义罗马尼亚的分析模型, 可用于其它地理环境和历史背景的类似研究。
Los geógrafos políticos y los sociólogos que trabajan en el campo de las toponimias críticas han demostrado invariablemente después del cambio de régimen se cambian los nombres del paisaje de las calles. No obstante, los eruditos a duras penas han ido más allá de establecer la extensión del cambio toponímico al nivel de lugares particulares, usualmente las ciudades capitales de los países que hicieron parte del bloque socialista, y de otras sociedades posdictatoriales. Este artículo se orienta a abocar los cambios toponímicos a nivel de país, examinando la completa nomenclatura nacional de calles en la Rumania urbana postsocialista. Para tal fin, se elaboró un conjunto de datos derivados de múltiples fuentes (N = 37.076), que comprende la colección completa de nombres de calles en la Rumania urbana, junto con todos los cambios de nombre de las calles ocurridos durante la era postsocialista. Se realizó una serie de análisis de regresión logística multinivel para modelar estadísticamente los efectos de diversas variables, a nivel de calle y localidad, sobre el cambio postsocialista de la nomenclatura de calles. Los resultados de estos análisis de regresión logística multinivel indican que la revisión toponímica tras la caída del socialismo de estado está configurada por la intersección de las propiedades a nivel de calle (e.g., la clase de arteria vial y los rasgos propios del nombre de la calle en sí mismos) y las características a nivel de localidad (e.g., la historicidad del estatus urbano y la etnopolítica jugada a nivel de cada ciudad y poblado). El artículo es el primero en analizar la cambiante geografía política de las nomenclaturas urbanas, a un nivel nacional, con base en un conjunto de datos completo de nombres de calles. El modelo analítico que se propone en este artículo, basado en la Rumania postsocialista, podría usarse para informar investigaciones similares sobre otros escenarios geográficos y contextos históricos.
Street naming in Malta is essentially a reflection of the colonial and post-colonial influences. This is seen within a number of spatial scales: the national (country), regional (towns and villages), and local (streets). A further factor that influences the naming of streets is the language used in identifying their location with a spray of vernacular Maltese (Semitic), Italian (Romance) and English. Although the Maltese Islands were occupied by a succession of rulers who were intent on exerting their influence in the central Mediterranean, it was the Arabs (870–1090), Knights of St. John (1530–1798) and the British (1800–1964) who left their mark on the written and spoken word. This chapter presents a description and critique of the initiation, evolution, change and purposes of street naming in Malta using three main sources. The first are maps and sketches drawn by the official designate such as the Public Works Department (Malta) and the Ordnance Survey (UK); secondly, the minutes and proceedings of the street-naming committees in both Malta and Gozo; and, thirdly, a ground-truth exercise at selected sites. It is expected that the geo-political influences at local, regional and international levels, together with the transition from socio-religious to secular attitudes are reflected in street naming.KeywordsStreet namingGeo-culturalSocio-religiousTransitionGround truthMalta
This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two localities lies in the commemorative pantheon of referents—events, people, and places inscribed as traces of a hegemonic national past—that are replaced when commemorative priorities change. Other patterns are common to both study sites. Notably, in both Poznań and Leipzig, peaks of renaming occur at the threshold of regime change, after which commemorative renaming activity subsides. We report on our findings and propose methodological guidelines for analyzing street renaming from a longitudinal, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspective. (Collective memory, critical toponymy, memoryscape, linguistic landscapes, encoding of ideology, comparative analysis of Eastern Europe, longitudinal analysis, commemoration, GIS visualization)*
En este trabajo se analiza el género de los nombres de las vías públicas de la ciudad de Zaragoza (España), dada la importancia que tienen los nombres como una manera de transmitir y perpetuar determinados valores. El análisis tiene dos vertientes: por un lado, cuantitativo, contabilizando el número de calles de género femenino y clasificándolas en función de su trayectoria vital y atributos profesionales; y por otro lado, realizando un estudio con técnica de SIG (Sistemas de Información Geográfica) para analizar dónde se encuentran estas vías y sus principales características. Las conclusiones más evidentes son la escasa representación de las mujeres en el callejero, con un perfil de mujeres más tradicional, y la heterogénea distribución espacial en los distintos distritos.
El ejercicio de nombrar calles en ciudades como Cuenca, en Ecuador, continúa siendo un tema controversial tanto en su desarrollo como urbe como desde la creación de políticas públicas. Este trabajo analiza, a través de una lectura crítica, las nomenclaturas de las calles de la ciudad utilizando como herramienta la visualización de información. A través de una metodología interdisciplinaria que incluye el análisis crítico-histórico, la perspectiva de género y la visualización de información, este artículo muestra el proceso de categorización para la clasificación de las calles de la zona urbana de Cuenca. Los gráficos propuestos y los mapas interactivos, seis en total, permiten realizar una visión de las categorías por su contenido estadístico, geolocalización o longitud, entre otros parámetros. En este sentido, el papel desempeñado por la visualización de datos como herramienta de comunicación hace posible nuevas narrativas y modos de ver la ciudad.
En el artículo se aborda la igualdad de género en la toponimia urbana a través del análisis del callejero del distrito Centro de la ciudad de Málaga. El hecho de que cualquier mujer protagonice con su nombre la rotulación de una calle supone estar presente y ser reconocida por sus méritos y logros, formando parte de la memoria colectiva. El análisis se realiza mediante: gráficos de doble histograma para el número total de calles, gráficos de sectores circulares para mostrar los porcentajes, y gráficos de columnas apiladas para mostrar la categorización de los topónimos. Como resultado, esta investigación demuestra los actuales sesgos de género de la toponimia urbana y su prevalencia; es decir, la preeminencia de nombres masculinos frente a los femeninos en el distrito Centro. Esta investigación contribuye a visibilizar a las mujeres en el espacio público, en las calles y en definitiva en la ciudad que habitamos todos y todas, además de ayudar a construir una sociedad igualitaria apoyando la visibilidad de las mujeres.
Persecution, pogroms, and genocide have plagued humanity for centuries, costing millions of lives and haunting survivors. Economists and economic historians have recently made new contributions to the understanding of these phenomena. We provide a novel conceptual framework which highlights the inter-relationship between the intensity of persecution and migration patterns across dozens of historical episodes. Using this framework as a lens, we survey the growing literature on the causes and consequences of persecution, pogroms, and genocide. Finally, we discuss gaps in the literature and take several tentative steps towards explaining the differences in survival rates of European Jews in the 20th century.
The worlds we inhabit tell stories, stitched into the material and symbolic representations of the past that comes to define the features of our places. These stories are never neutral, anchored as they are in the intentional (re)presentation of a racialized white, masculine, and settler story as “our” story. Indeed, space, as an ostensibly neutral platform for storytelling, is called into service of settler-state anxieties to write itself into every (spatial) corner of our lives. This paper takes up this issue by theorizing how the street naming practices of settler communities write into everyday life a settler collective memory that, as a consequence, both shapes space into (settler) place and powerfully intervenes in individual (student) geographic consciousness. By way of vignettes woven throughout theoretical considerations as examples of everyday encounters, I unpack what it means to think of the language of invaded place with greater critical intention as an example of how walking through space can become a pedagogical method, with a focus on detailing what it might mean to support learner engagement with the names that make their communities coherent and media of normalized colonial memory.
This paper examines the street name changes brought about in Romanian cities and towns during the period of postsocialist transformations. Based on a complete dataset comprising the entire urban street nomenclature existing prior to the regime change of 1989, the paper explores the geography of postsocialist toponymic change, as well as the latter’s temporal dynamic. Statistical analyses reveal major discrepancies in the scope of street name changes between Romania’s historical regions. The paper argues that one important factor that structures these regional variations is the ethnopolitics played out at the level of each locality. The analysis concludes by pointing out the instrumentality of street names as a powerful means of politicising the urban landscape, as well as their vulnerability, especially in the aftermath of significant political changes.
This paper uses text analysis to measure gender bias in cities through the use of street names. Focusing on the case of Spain, we collect data on 15 million street names to analyze gender inequality in urban toponyms. We calculate for each Spanish municipality and each year from 2001 to 2020 a variable measuring the percentage of streets with female names over the total number of streets with male and female names. Our results reveal a strong gender imbalance in Spanish cities: the percentage of streets named after women is only 12% in 2020. We also observe substantial intra-urban differences, with female named streets being relatively scarcer in town centers. Concerning new streets, gender bias is lower but still far from parity. The second part of the paper analyzes the correlation of our indicator of gender bias in street names with variables related to gender attitudes and values, with the results suggesting that it constitutes a useful cultural measure of gender equality at the city level. This study thus helps to measure a relevant phenomenon, given the strong symbolic power attributed to street names, which has been elusive to quantify so far.
This paper researches the role that hodonyms (street names) play in forming cultural and collective identity and awareness. Street names are thereby treated as the elements that get transformed from everyday communication and interaction to symbols constructed by political elites to direct the collective history perception and memory. The paper explores the principles of forming a new onomastic space of the capital city of the Republic of Moldova, Chisinau. Current work identifies some peculiarities of street renaming, grouping them into several categories. The main principles of renaming policies are also revealed. The analyses of renaming practices help understand the national identities that Moldovans are going to build, and the ideology that local and national authorities will impose.
This article deals with the dramatic transformations and changes occurring in the thought structure of Geomorphology and the relationship between geomorphology in practice of quantum mechanics, which is a postmodern metaphor. Structural changes and developments in science, physics in particular, have affected the epistemology and ontology of natural sciences. Earth sciences and more specifcally Geomorphology have a mindset that is almost as old as human history. This mindset has been influenced by various paradigmatic shifts from a general perspective. The emergence of geomorphology as an intellectual discipline dates back to the 19th century. However, at this point, it should not be forgotten that geomorphology has passed through important
stages in human history. The way geomorphology deals with the subjects, its scientifc quantitative claims, approaches and methodology have been under the influence of the substanceoriented philosophy of natural sciences and natural sciences that dominated this period. At the beginning of the 20th century, material and energy-oriented entropies, behavioral algorithms, which occurred in physics, caused quantum mechanics to
come to the fore and criticized modern science, and its various constitutionalism was shaped under the focus of shakes. These tremors paved the way for chaotic model developments in earth dynamics. Chaotic systems also caused dependent or
independent spatial, temporal, linear, and non-linear conflicts. According to the evaluations made, quantum mechanics did not only shake the claim of “scientifc” of modern science, but also closely influenced the philosophy of geomorphology with
a post-modern metaphorical perception with empiricist, logical positivism and critical rationalism approaches.
Keywords: Geomorphological Thought, Quantum mechanics,
Postmodernism, Decoherense.
La monografia è di carattere scientifico ed è certamente destinata ai ricercatori che si occupano della lingua italiana, ma anche agli studenti che cercano nuovi argomenti per le loro tesi di laurea triennale o magistrale. Si tratta di un importante contributo allo sviluppo degli studi italianistici polacchi e internazionali, mostrando le tendenze contemporanee nella ricerca strettamente linguistica e didattica. Viviamo la speranza che il volume s’iscriva in una prospettiva attuale ed aggiornata degli studi sull’italianità, costituendo una delle fonti tematiche per ulteriori discussioni e osservazioni scientifiche interdisciplinari in Italia e nel mondo, in cui nella fattispecie si “sperimenta ed esprime” questo concetto e realtà in tutte le sue varie forme.
La monografia è di carattere scientifico ed è certamente destinata ai ricercatori che si occupano della lingua italiana, ma anche agli studenti che cercano nuovi argomenti per le loro tesi di laurea triennale o magistrale. Si tratta di un importante contributo allo sviluppo degli studi italianistici polacchi e internazionali, mostrando le tendenze contemporanee nella ricerca strettamente linguistica e didattica. Viviamo la speranza che il volume s’iscriva in una prospettiva attuale ed aggiornata degli studi sull’italianità, costituendo una delle fonti tematiche per ulteriori discussioni e osservazioni scientifiche interdisciplinari in Italia e nel mondo, in cui nella fattispecie si “sperimenta ed esprime” questo concetto e realtà in tutte le sue varie forme.
Based on the obvious anisotropy of Xisha Islands waters topography, the uneven fractal characteristics of Xisha Islands waters topography are studied by using multivariate linear expression. Using multiple linear regression analysis method to extract the projection of heterogeneous characteristic factors, the geometric heterogeneous characteristics of Xisha Islands waters are obtained. The fractal feature of landform is studied based on projection coverage method, and the non-isotropic body irregularity in Xisha Islands waters is measured. Experimental results show that this method can effectively analyze the non-uniform fractal characteristics of the Xisha Islands waters. The fractal dimension of different types of landforms in Xisha Islands in the corresponding region is high mountain area > medium and low mountain area > basin area, which reflects the difference of surface roughness or complexity of different types of landforms. The calculated fractal dimension is helpful to reveal the heterogeneity of general geomorphological features in different development stages.
The articles in this special section focus on data physicalization. The practice of representing data in physical form has existed for thousands of years, yet it has only become an area of investigation and exploration for scientists, designers, and artists much more recently.3 Advances in areas such as digital fabrication, actuated tangible interfaces, and shape-changing displays have spurred an emerging area of research now called Data Physicalization.1 This Special Issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications presents four articles spanning a wide breadth of current data physicalization research, from theory to practice.
Peter Bernholz has described how ideologies and religions with supreme values have used violence to accomplish their goals. We describe the transformation of supreme values through civic engagement and pro-social behavior (dedication to common good, charity, participation in social life) that rejects as unacceptable all forms of violence. Our focus is on Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council, which emphasized the lay faithful’s role in the Church’s mission of salvation in the world and affirmed categorically that the duty of layperson is to serve other people and society. Using data on Poland, we find that the lay faithful try to fulfil those duties. Religious observance measured by participation in Holy Communion and church attendance correlates positively with civic engagement measured by the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The present paper explores a historical case of a location where a group of merchant families established powerful positions over many generations, involving both the international trade of fine wine and human beings sold as slaves. These families lived in Bordeaux, one of the largest trading centers for trade of enslaved humans in the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These trading families were concentrated in a few quarters of the city, and most of the leading merchants were active in both lines of trade. More importantly, this paper shows that three of the key trading institutions, namely practices defining ‘product quality’, product classes and how prices were set, were remarkably similar in both fields of trade. This, in turn, facilitated a smooth and successful substitution of trade from enslaved humans into fine wine when abolition was imposed in the early 1800s. Overall, a story of the darker side of agglomerations is revealed. This study facilitates a new theoretical understanding of how wealth and prosperity can be secured over long time periods, through transposition of institutions between fields, and driven by forces of proximity.
Street names in city maps may be interpreted as traces of memory practices and politics, and can clearly be identified as the products of hegemonic norms and values of a given time and place. In the following article we describe a project-oriented teaching unit for secondary school students. In the course of the project, students are instructed to research either their school or residential neighborhoods, looking at the persons and events commemorated and written into the city. These toponymic inscriptions can be analyzed by studying the naming practice of streets and squares. Which people and events are remembered and which are forgotten? Do these events and people indicate processes of social inclusion, exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination? Investigating naming practices will be the starting point for the students to develop their own naming suggestions, as well as encouraging their active engagement in further negotiation processes regarding naming practices in their towns and villages. The teaching proposal is based on the idea of a geography teaching that educates politically, and meets the requirements of a critical topography approach (VIELHABER 2012). Students will also gain experience in aspects of a critical map reading competence (GRYL 2009) and the work can also be situated within the context of critical place-name studies (ROSE-REDWOOD 2009).
We study whether a positive historical shock can generate long-term persistence in development. We show that Italian cities that achieved self-government in the Middle Ages have a higher level of civic capital today than similar cities in the same area that did not. The size of this effect increases with the length of the period of independence and its intensity. This effect persists even after accounting for the fact that cities did not become independent randomly. We conjecture that the Middle-Age experience of self-government fostered self-efficacy beliefs—beliefs in one's own ability to complete tasks and reach goals—and this positive attitude, transmitted across generations, enhances civic capital today. Consistently, we find that fifth-graders in former free city-states exhibit stronger self-efficacy beliefs and that these beliefs are correlated with a higher level of civic capital. (JEL: O43, P16, O10)
Economic geographers have struggled over how to address the role of culture in economic processes without resorting to either structural determinism or agent-centric rationality. While culture is commonly seen as an institution affecting economic processes, there has been little consideration regarding the mechanisms connecting cultural outlooks within individual practices and actions. This article links the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu with relational economic geography and practice perspectives to examine how cultural outlooks influence the practices of entrepreneurial actors. Through a qualitative analysis of 73 interviews, this framework is used to examine the patterns of entrepreneurial mentorship in Waterloo and Ottawa, Canada. The article finds that the significant differences in both the rates and the dynamics of mentorship between the two cities are the result of different cultural outlooks toward mentorship that have developed within each region, which in turn have fostered distinct beliefs about the value of mentoring and entrepreneurship.
This paper shows that a historical process that ended more than five centuries ago, the Reconquest, is very important to explain Spanish regional economic development down to the present day. An indicator measuring the rate of Reconquest reveals a heavily negative effect on current income differences across the Spanish provinces. A main intervening factor in the impact the Reconquest has had is the concentration of economic and political power in a few hands, excluding large segments of the population from access to economic opportunities when Spain entered the industrialization phase. The timing of the effect is consistent with this argument. A general implication of our analysis is that large frontier expansions may favor a political equilibrium among the colonizing agents that is biased toward the elite, creating the conditions for an inegalitarian society, with negative consequences for long-term economic development.
in Geopolitics, 2016, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2015.1134493
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2015.1134493
Recent critical toponymies have convincingly demonstrated that studying place names also reveals much about geopolitics and power relations. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for interpreting these toponymies, in order to better decipher, theorise, and compare the many very rich case studies in the field. Our first argument is that the focus of enquiry should be place naming processes rather than place names themselves. We then show that place naming is a dispositif in the Foucauldian sense. This allows us to build a framework that distinguishes between (a) four types of geopolitical contexts, from which place naming processes tend to stem; (b) four types of technologies that are commonly used; and (c) three types of actors. Lastly, we identify the preferential combinations and nexuses between these building blocks of place naming contexts, technologies, and actors.
A growing body of empirical work measuring different types of cultural traits has shown that culture matters for a variety of economic outcomes. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of the relevance of culture: its relationship to institutions. We review work with a theoretical, empirical, and historical bent to assess the presence of a two-way causal effect between culture and institutions. The first part of the paper provides the main definitions and discusses the difficulties associated with the quantitative analysis of this effect. It also features a map of cultural traits used in economics and of their correlations. © 2016, Russian Presidental Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. All rights reserved.
The installation of each of the three socially transformative regimes of twentieth-century Spain (the Second Republic, the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and the restoration of democracy following his death) has been marked by sweeping changes in the street names of the Andalusian town of Almonte. This paper considers how the content of these toponymic changes reflects the goals, tactics, ideology, and ethos of each successive regime as it stipulated a new relationship between the inhabitants and those who govern them; the Second Republic used street names to advance its educational agenda, the dictatorship deployed toponyms to threaten the townspeople, and the socialist democracy fashioned a crafty symbolic compromise aimed at ending the onomastic cycle of victors and vanquished.
This article provides a history of efforts to map vernacular regions as context for offering readers a way of using business directories in order to construct a GIS-based map of vernacular regions. With Michigan as a case study, the article discusses regional-naming conventions, boundaries, and inclusions and omissions of areas from regional labels in order to offer educators ideas that can enhance classroom content on regions. This article concludes by providing suggestions for classroom activities collecting, analyzing, and discussing vernacular region patterns and processes in accordance with National Geography Standard Five at the eighth-grade level.
A growing body of research is making links between diversity and the economic performance of cities and regions. Most of the underlying mechanisms take place within firms, but only a handful of organization-level studies have been conducted. We contribute to this underexplored literature by using a unique sample of 7,600 firms to investigate links among cultural diversity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and sales strategies in London businesses between 2005 and 2007. London is one of the world's major cities, with a rich cultural diversity that is widely seen as a social and economic asset. Our data allowed us to distinguish owner/partner and wider workforce characteristics, identify migrant/minority-headed firms, and differentiate firms along multiple dimensions. The results, which are robust to most challenges, suggest a small but significant “diversity bonus” for all types of London firms. First, companies with diverse management are more likely to introduce new product innovations than are those with homogeneous “top teams.” Second, diversity is particularly important for reaching international markets and serving London's cosmopolitan population. Third, migrant status has positive links to entrepreneurship. Overall, the results provide some support for claims that diversity is an economic asset, as well as a social benefit.
Much has been said about the institutional determinants of transitional justice (TJ), yet scholars still know little about the determinants of citizens’ attitudes toward restorative policies aimed at addressing human rights violations of the past. This article draws on an original survey of a representative sample of Spanish citizens conducted in 2008. One year earlier, the Spanish socialist government had approved the so-called Law of Historical Memory, aimed at providing restitution for victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). We analyze individual-level attitudes toward a set of TJ policies (i.e., truth commissions, trials, and symbolic reparations) in a comprehensive overview of the field. We study the effects of different sets of variables: individual sociodemographic and ideological factors, family and socialization variables, and context-related factors. Individual ideology, family victimization during the dictatorship, and regional context appear highly relevant in explaining individual attitudes toward TJ policies.
The study of place naming, or toponymy, has recently undergone a critical reformulation as scholars have moved beyond the traditional focus on etymology and taxonomy by examining the politics of place-naming practices. In this article, we provide a selective genealogy of the ‘critical turn’ in place-name studies and consider three complementary approaches to analyzing spatial inscription as a toponymic practice: political semiotics, governmentality studies, and normative theories of social justice and symbolic resistance. We conclude by proposing that future scholarship should explore the political economy of toponymic practices as a step toward expanding the conceptual horizon of critical place-name studies.
Street names are ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious. This might be the reason why social scientists have hardly addressed the issue of street names in their studies of the structures of authority and the legitimation of power. In this paper the author explores the semiotic and political operation of commemorative street names. He sheds light on the procedures of the naming and the renaming of streets and the utilization of street names for commemorative purposes as a fundamental feature of modern political culture. Further, he elaborates on how street names, in addition to their fundamental role in the spatial organization and semiotic construction of the city, are also participants in the cultural production of shared past. In addition, the author uncovers commemorative street names as a powerful mechanism for the legitimation of the sociopolitical order. Commemorative street names provide for the intersection of hegemonic ideological structures with the spatial practices of everyday life. Therefore they are instrumental in rendering natural the official version of history which they incorporate into the urban setting. The author concludes that the power of (commemorative) street names stems from their ability to implicate the national narrative of the past, though in a fragmented manner, in numerous narratives of the city.
In the recent literature on the cultural politics of naming, toponyms and street names are increasingly read within the wider social–historical context upon which naming is contingent. In this perspective, naming is often seen as an act of power and a way to inscribe an ideological discourse into the landscape. In this article, we analyze the street names currently inscribed in the historical center of the Italian city of Milan, Italy as a reflection of its long and contested social and political history. Fragments of all the different toponymic regimes and hegemonic discourses that took over one after the other over time have remained inscribed in Milan’s street network, originating a complex tapestry in which different pasts revive and conflicting ideologies co-exist. In this context, we examine the role Geographical Information Science (GIScience) methods and technologies play in quantifying, revealing, and visualizing the spatial patterns of downtown Milan’s toponymic texture at the urban scale and at the scale of the six historical neighborhoods.
Researchers disagree over the definition, measurement, and expected political consequences of American patriotism, a situation that is fueled by the absence of a strong theoretical research foundation. We develop and evaluate a new measure of national attachment that is grounded in social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979), drawing on data from three distinct sources: two studies of undergraduate students and the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS). Confirmatory factor analyses provide clear evidence that national identity is distinct from other measures of national attachment including symbolic, constructive, and uncritical patriotism, and nationalism. National identity has a number of other good measurement properties when compared to existing measures: it receives equal endorsement from conservatives and liberals (unlike most other measures which exhibit an ideological bias), develops with time spent in the United States among immigrants, and most importantly is the only measure of national attachment to predict political interest and voter turnout in both student and adult samples, consistent with the predictions of social identity theory. In that sense, the national identity measure outperforms all other measures of national attachment and provides unambiguous evidence that a strong American identity promotes civic involvement.
Apart from the possible, but unproven presence of some Irish hermits, the Norse colonizers of the Faroe Islands arrived in
an unsettled landscape around A.D. 800. The archipelago was essentially unwooded and rich in bird and marine life. The area of land suitable for settlement
and farming was relatively meagre and concentrated in coastal areas; inland areas were suitable for shielings (summer pasture)
and subsequently more extensive grazing (outfield) activities. Reconstruction of the settlement distribution has not been
a well-developed aspect of Faroese historical study. Using archaeological and documentary evidence, we are able to present
the first comprehensive distribution map of Norse settlement, which emphasizes an overwhelmingly coastal focus of considerable
density. Using historical (including place-names), archaeological, and environmental evidence, we examine the nature and organization
of the Viking (early Norse) and medieval (later Norse) settlement. Colonization and economic activity in the islands were
strongly influenced by topographic and ecological factors. This, along with social organization, was subject to influences
which may have derived, at least in part, from experiences in a Norwegian homeland.
As in most parts of Central and Eastern Europe, there is a tradition in Hungary of changing street names and memorials in
the wake of major political transitions. This article focuses on the change of street names and memorials, i.e. the city-text,
in Hungary’s political capital, Budapest, between 1985 and 2001. The city-text in Budapest became a locus of dispute between
different political authorities, including the nation state, the metropolitan municipality, and the district, each bearing
different political ideals during and after the fall of communism. Discursive changes in the post-communist city-text emerged
expressing specific conceptions of national sovereignty, but the direction of the changes were debated. Different levels of
administration in Budapest and Hungary had divergent visions of what the new discourse on national sovereignty should be.
The changes, therefore, did not express a simple transition to an agreed-upon post-communist value system, but were the result
of a symbolic struggle between different levels of administration over what should be commemorated in the city-text.
Toponyms are frequently the outcome of a creative process, a subjective interpretation by the local inhabitants at the time of naming. They often survive changes in the local landscape, thus becoming historical documents of landscape dynamics or changes in land use. In this contribution we provide a systematic synchronic analysis of the toponym brüsáda (burn) in Canton Ticino. In total, 182 instances of place names containing brüsáda were recorded, of which 102 cases (56.0%) were localised. Based on oral information provided by the local people or on archival documents, it was possible to group the selected toponyms into different meaning classes such as burnt building, exposed sites, pasture-land and others without any indication (classified here as generic). On the basis of etymological, topographic, documentary, bibliographic, and historic evidence, as well as proxy-archives (such as charcoal in lake sediments), we hypothesise that most of the toponyms associated with pasture-land – and probably also a large portion of the generic toponyms – are directly or indirectly related to the habit of using fire to clear brushwood to improve pasture-land or to eliminate trees. In the study area, the practice of pasture-fires appears to have been a very well controlled and targeted activity in medieval times. In contrast, pasture-fires became very frequent and uncontrolled in the second half of the nineteenth century up until the Second World War. Our study confirms the usefulness and suitability of toponymy, in combination with other disciplines, for ecohistorical reconstructions of past environmental and land-use changes.
We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are taken from a unique linguistic survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in 45,000 schools. Matching this information to 439 current German regions, we construct a dialect similarity matrix. Using a gravity analysis, we show that current cross-regional migration is positively affected by historical dialect similarity. This suggests that cultural identities formed in the past still influence economic exchange today.
Empirical research on the determinants of economic growth typically neglects the influence of religion. To fill this gap, this study uses international survey data on religiosity for a broad panel of countries to investigate the effects of church attendance and religious beliefs on economic growth. To isolate the direction of causation from religiosity to economic performance, the estimation relies on instrumental variables suggested by an analysis in which church attendance and religious beliefs are the dependent variables. The instruments are variables for the presence of state religion and for regulation of the religion market, the composition of religious adherence, and an indicator of religious pluralism. Results show that economic growth responds positively to religious beliefs, notably beliefs in hell and heaven, but negatively to church attendance. That is, growth depends on the extent of believing relative to belonging. These results accord with a model in which religious beliefs influence individual traits that enhance economic performance. The beliefs are an output of the religion sector, and church attendance is an input to this sector. Hence, for given beliefs, higher church attendance signifies more resources used up by the religion sector. Economics
The paper opens with a statement on the social embeddedness of knowledge. The disciplinary situation and practices of economic geographers are reviewed in the light of this statement. The rise of a new geographical economics is noted, and its main thrust is summarized in terms of a description of the core model as formulated by Krugman. The geographers' reception of the new geographical economics is described, and some key aspects of this reception are assessed. I then subject the core model itself to critical evaluation. Its claims about pecuniary externalities in the context of Chamberlinian competition provide a number of useful insights. However, I argue that the model is deficient overall in the manner in which it tackles the central problem of agglomeration. The discussion then moves on to consideration of the recent interest shown by many economic geographers in issues of culture. After a brief exposition of what this means for economic geography, I offer the verdict that this shift of emphasis has much to recommend it, but that in some of its more extreme versions it is strongly susceptible to the temptations of philosophical idealism and political voluntarism. In the final part of the paper, I attempt to pinpoint some of the major tasks ahead for economic geography in the phase of post-'late capitalism'. I suggest, in particular, that a new cognitive map of capitalist society as a whole is urgently needed, and I offer some brief remarks about how its basic specifications might be identified. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
This letter advances the hypothesis that persistent inequality affects cultural traits and undermines social capital. We use blood donation data at the local level in Southern Spain to document that, indeed, persistent inequality–as measured by land inequality–negatively affects blood donation, which indicates that it harms social capital. This evidence sheds new light into the debates on the consequences of inequality and the determinants of culture.
The unique geographical environment and the historical waves of immigration of the northern Han Chinese to the Lingnan region have contributed to the development of a complex and unique culture in Guangdong Province. Four ancient ethnic groups, the Zhuang, Cantonese, Hoklo and Hakka, have resided in this area for centuries. As an important part of local culture, toponyms often survive changes in history and can reveal the temporal differences between the past and present in landforms and the spatial differences in the distribution of different ethnic group populations. In this study, two goals were sought: (1) the adoption of spatial smoothing and interpolation methods to reveal the spatial patterns of the Zhuang, Cantonese, Hoklo and Hakka toponyms based on comparisons among the proportions of those who speak various languages and (2) the investigation of the differences among toponymic layers under regional environmental conditions and the influences of geographic factors using an independent samples t-test and a binary logistic regression.
1. The term geographic name is now preferred in most instances over the form geographical name.
2. Three forms of the word —placename, place-name, and place name —are used. The current preferred form is one word—placename. I will use the one-word form, except in quotes.
3. One can but wonder what revelations will come from Far Eastern scholarship. As we have only recently learned of advanced cartography in early China, will we soon learn of advanced study of geographical names centuries ago in that ancient society?
4. I learned of this incongruity from the Higher Placenames Officer for the Ordnance Survey when I taught in Dublin in 1980 and when I asked him to tape record the pronunciations of both Irish and English placenames. Personal communication, Brendán O'Cíobhain.
5. The earliest version of Gannett's Origins appeared as Bulletin 197 in 1902. The 1905 edition was reprinted in 1947 as American Names: A Guide to the Origin of Place Names in the United States. Washington: Public Affairs Press.
Surveys suggest an erosion of trust in government, among individuals, and between groups. Although these trends are often thought to be bad for democracy, the relationship between democracy and trust is paradoxical. Trust can develop where interests converge, but in politics interests conflict. Democracy recognizes that politics does not provide a natural terrain for robust trust relations, and so includes a healthy distrust of the interests of others, especially the powerful. Democratic systems institutionalize distrust by providing many opportunities for citizens to oversee those empowered with the public trust. At the same time, trust is a generic social building block of collective action, and for this reason alone democracy cannot do without trust. At a minimum, democratic institutions depend on a trust among citizens sufficient for representation, resistance, and alternative forms of governance. Bringing together social science and political theory, this book provides a valuable exploration of these central issues.
This article uses data on two vernacular traces, toponyms and business names, to explore and analyze cultural geographies of the U.S. Appalachian region. First, cluster detection is applied to a set of generic place names (toponyms) that are found to be components of a relatively unique Appalachian geographic vernacular. The results from this exercise are then mapped onto common spatial representations of the Appalachian region, where they are combined with a selected marker of perceived regional identity—businesses that have the character string “Appalachia” in their name—to construct a study area for subsequent analysis. Finally, data are collected for places inside of the derived study area to examine determinants of Appalachian identity in a zero-inflated count regression model. The findings convey important insights about specific heritage and environmental variables that correlate with, and likely contribute to the production of, patterns of Appalachian identity in the United States. In addition, the conceptual model and methodology of the article are claimed to be transferrable to other studies of cultural regions, heritage, and identity, both inside and outside of Appalachia. 2016
This article introduces cultural gravity as a concept that serves to better disentangle the direction and magnitude of the effects from migration, which is controversial in recent literature. The aim is to test for cultural gravity effects on both the geographic concentration and human capital productivity of immigrants in the EU15 countries. Operationally, we proceed to construct an empirical cultural gravity measure and test it with the use of a composite cross-sectional database, comprising, inter alia, the World Value Survey and Eurostat Census data. After an initial exploration of relevant cultural data by means of multivariate statistical analysis, we present an extended formulation of a gravity model approached through logistic regression methods and a three-stage least-squares estimation. Our results clearly demonstrate the existence of a cultural gravity effect among immigrants. Finally, an interesting finding is that cultural gravity also plays a significant role in the context of the Culture-Based Development (CBD) growth model.
We document the spatial diffusion of Friedrich Froebel’s radical invention of kindergartens in 19th-century Germany. The first
kindergarten was founded at Froebel’s birthplace. Early spatial diffusion can be explained by cultural proximity, measured
by historical dialect similarity, to Froebel’s birthplace. This result is robust to the inclusion of higher order polynomials
in geographic distance and similarity measures with respect to industry, geography or religion. Our findings suggest that
a common cultural basis facilitates the spill-over of ideas. We further show that the contemporaneous spatial pattern of child
care coverage is still correlated with cultural similarity to Froebel’s place of birth.
Place names represent an established topic in sociocultural and critical scholarship on human space and place. Based on a comprehensive data set of Germanic names in the American Midwest, this article explores the value of a novel approach integrating advanced spatio-statistical measures with critical interpretation to revitalize the field of toponomy on a concerted methodological and theoretical level. Processed in a geographic information system (GIS) environment, the regional toponymic pattern provides a broad and reliable framework that evokes interpretative discussion of underlying structures and processes. This characterizes Germanic toponyms as versatile sociodemographic, political, and ethnocultural indicators.
Following Max Weber, many theories have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With its religious heterogeneity, the Holy Roman Empire presents an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures of 272 cities in the years 1300–1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is precisely estimated, robust to the inclusion of various controls, and does not depend on data selection or small sample size. Denominational differences in fertility behavior and literacy are unlikely to be major confounding factors. Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development. Instrumental variables estimates, considering the potential endogeneity of religious choice, are similar to the OLS results.
Los mapas del Sur y Dixie en los 70s y 80s de John Shelton Reed indicaron una reducción en los límites de esas dos regiones autóctonas. Este análisis estudia al Sur y Dixie. Usando directorios telefónicos electrónicos, este estudio recopila los nombres de negocios con "Southern" y "Dixie" en todas las ciudades de Los Estados Unidos. Un análisis univariable LISA (Indicador Local de Asociación Espacial) fue usado para identificar los conglomerados de valores altos y bajos de los valores normalizados de los términos. Este análisis ayudó a identificar hoy las regiones de Dixie Land y el Sur. Los resultados indican que la erosión de los límites del "Sur" y "Dixie" es notable. El estudio identificó en Utah una "Isla de Dixie" que no había sido notada anteriormente. Las identidades de Southern y Dixie son más fuertes en los condados no-metropolitanos que en los condados metropolitanos y micropolitanos. Las identidades de Southern y Dixie se están deteriorando gradualmente; mientras que el deterioro de las identidades del sur es bastante lento, el deterioro de Dixie parece ser más rápido. En general, sería mas apropiado referirse hoy a "Dixieland" como "Islas Dixie", pero el Sur todavía es el Sur.
In the Polish city of Kraków, successive regimes have (re)named the streetscape to advance their influence and ideologies. This paper examines changes in street names under three different governmental powers – Nazi, Soviet and Polish – on five maps of the city centre (from 1934, 1943, 1964, 1985 and 1996). The work extends the current literature on toponymy by providing a temporal analysis of the street name changes to one bounded area over time, which demonstrates how a politics of memory is inculcated into streetscapes to reaffirm political control. By reference to one space, I show how the name changes proffer an intriguing insight into how two foreign regimes viewed their occupations and, in addition, how all three sought to strengthen their influence by using names that reinforced past examples of their power and alleged cultural superiority in the landscape.
abstract The nation-state has long been under attack from liberal economists and cosmopolitan ethicists alike. But it has proved remarkably resilient and remains the principal locus of governance as well as the primary determinant of personal attachments and identity. The global financial crisis has further underscored its centrality. Against the background of the globalization revolution, the tendency is to view the nation-state as a hindrance to the achievement of desirable economic and social outcomes. Yet it remains indispensable to the achievement of those goals.
Do cultural attitudes affect institutions and economic performance? This paper suggests they do. To measure the impact of cultural attitudes we use prevalence rates of the common parasite Toxoplasma gondii which is known to affect individual attitudes and societal values in predictable ways. By using prevalence rates of Toxoplasma as instrument for cultural variation, we are able to isolate the effects of cultural attitudes on institutions, distinguishing them from effects of institutions and economic outcomes on culture. We find that our indicators of cultural attitudes are significant determinants of institutional quality, and strong predictors of long-run economic performance.
abstractThis article examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd's classification of medieval European family systems, we identify potential links between family types and regional disparities in household size, educational attainment, social capital, labor participation, sectoral structure, wealth, and inequality. The results indicate that medieval family structures seem to have influenced European regional disparities in virtually every indicator that we considered. That these links remain, despite the influence of the modern state and population migration, suggests that such structures are either extremely resilient or in the past were internalized within other social and economic institutions as they developed.
The renaming of streets is a significant, if often overlooked, aspect of post-socialist change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Such renamings are one manifestation of the ‘reconfiguring’ of both space and history which is a central component of post-socialist transformations. Street name changes are part of the process of creating new public iconographic landscapes which accord with the values of post-socialist regimes and the study of such changes can offer significant insights into ways in which post-socialist states are redefining national identities and national pasts. This paper focuses on the renaming of streets in Bucharest, Romania over the 1990–1997 period as one component of the ‘modern historical geographies’ of post-socialist change. A central theme in street name changes has been the evocation of the pre-socialist period, which has been increasingly constructed in terms of Romania's ‘Golden Age’.
Current methods of studying the distribution of Anglo-Saxon place-names are discussed and it is suggested that a more careful analysis of the data is required if one is to make valuable generalizations. The methods used to explain the distribution of place-names involves linking etymology with archaeological data to deduce phases of settlement without examining closely the factors involved in site location. An attempt is made to indicate how a closer study can reveal underlying trends in the distribution of such features and it is felt that by isolating these factors the distribution will be more clearly understood.
We replicate and extend John Shelton Reed's classic work on regional identification by examining and modeling the prevalence
of the words “Dixie” and “Southern” in business names across 100 cities and four decades. We find that the instances of “Dixie”
have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word “Southern” has remained more constant, providing evidence
of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative number of blacks in the population provides the most
consistent explanation of regional identity. Population density has also emerged as a significant predictor of regional identification
in more recent time periods. These findings contribute to the literature on regional identification, the politics of naming
and the sociology of the South.
Definitions of the Appalachian region vary considerably. In this paper we develop a theoretically grounded and empirically based understanding of Appalachia by focusing on the social process of regional identity. Our measure of Appalachian identity is based on the relative number of businesses in a city that include the word "Appalachian" in their name. From this analysis, we find that the core area of Appalachian identity lies in Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, Southern West Virginia, and Southwestern Virginia. We also explore the predictors of Appalachian identity and determine that poverty level, percent Black, elevation, and population density predict Appalachian identity. This work should be of interest to social scientists concerned with the study of regional identity—both inside and outside of Appalachia.
Las definiciones sobre la región de los Apalaches varían considerablemente. En este trabajo desarrollamos un entendimiento teóricamente fundado y con bases empíricas de los Apalaches, centrándonos en el proceso social de la identidad regional. Nuestra medida de la identidad de los Apalaches se basa en el número relativo de empresas en una ciudad que incluyen la palabra "Apalaches" en su nombre. A partir de este análisis, encontramos que la zona central de la identidad de los Apalaches se encuentra en el este de Tennessee, el oeste de Carolina del Norte, el este de Kentucky, el sur de West Virginia y el suroeste de Virginia. También exploramos los factores predictivos de la identidad de los Apalaches y determinamos que el nivel de pobreza, porcentaje de Negros, elevación, y la densidad de población predicen la identidad de los Apalaches. Este trabajo debe ser de interés para los científicos sociales interesados en el estudio de la identidad regional, tanto dentro como fuera de los Apalaches.
Naming is always dedicating, that is to say offering to the ancestors, inserting the person or the named object in a lineage of some sort. Only street names will be considered here because they have two characteristics of sociological relevance: they are chosen and they pertain to a social group in relation to which they are supposed to express some deep and ancient value. They can be studied from two different perspectives: the kind of action that is the naming of a street and the fact that street names express something of the social reality. Or, in other words, if naming is dedicating, when and how is it possible to shift from one tradition (to which the name refers) to another? A further question could be if street names express something of the social reality, does it imply that different types of social stratification are linked to different types of street names? Both questions will be examined here in reference to two different situations--Paris, France and Évora, Portugal.
The study of local politics has been relegated to the periphery of political science and many explanations have been offered for the marginalization of the subfield. I offer three related arguments for why scholars should revisit the study of sub-state politics. First, the local level is the source of numerous political outcomes that matter because they represent a large proportion of political events in the United States. Secondly, there are methodological advantages to studying local politics. Finally, analyzing politics at the sub-state level can generate thoroughly different kinds of questions than a purely national-level focus and can offer different answers to questions that apply more generally. Research on local politics can and should contribute to broader debates in political science and ensure that we understand both how and why cities are unique.
Women’s empowerment and economic development are closely related: in one direction, development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women; in the other direction, empowering women may benefit development. Does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion? This paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment-development nexus, and argues that the inter-relationships are probably too weak to be self-sustaining, and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative
theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic
prosperity. We test the theory using county-level data from late-nineteenth-century Prussia, exploiting the initial concentric
dispersion of the Reformation to use distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism. We find that Protestantism
indeed led to higher economic prosperity, but also to better education. Our results are consistent with Protestants' higher
literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity.
Previous research has shown that the faith in which a young woman is brought up has important effects on the subjective costs and/or benefits of many decisions that she makes over the life cycle, including schooling, employment, and fertility. Based on this evidence, the present paper develops hypotheses regarding patterns of entry into marriage and cohabitation for the main religious groups in the United States: mainline Protestants, conservative Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and the unaffiliated. The empirical results, based on young women from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, are generally supportive of the hypotheses.
Commemorative street names conflate the political discourse of history and the political geography of a modern city. Renaming streets features prominently in revolutionary changes of political regime. As a ritual of revolution, the renaming of the past is also an effective demonstration of the reshaping of political power structures. This article examines the process of renaming East Berlin's communist past in the years 1990–1994 and the subsequent reshaping of the city's postcommunist political geography as an aspect of the reunification of Germany, and of Berlin in particular. The article investigates the ideological dispositions and political configurations that controlled and directed the renaming process, elaborating on the renaming process as a discourse of German national identity that is articulated in terms of the canonization of a democratic historical heritage. It discusses the renamings accomplished in 1990–1992 at the level of district assemblies and analyzes the attempt made in 1993–1994 by the ‘Independent Commission’ nominated by the Berlin Senate to rename thoroughfares in the center of Berlin, designated to become the seat of the national government of a reunited and democratic Germany.
Differences in culture, proxied by differences in religion and language, cannot be ignored when examining why investor protection differs across countries. We show that a country's principal religion predicts the cross-sectional variation in creditor rights better than a country's natural openness to international trade, its language, its income per capita, or the origin of its legal system. Catholic countries protect the rights of creditors less well than Protestant countries. A country's natural openness to international trade mitigates the influence of religion on creditor rights. Culture proxies are also helpful in understanding how investor rights are enforced across countries.
This paper explores the potential for using place names for the identification of historical landscape features characteristic of the agras field system in Northwest Spain. We first evaluated statistically the significance of a set of targeted place names as predictors of agras presence. We then analysed the spatio-temporal distribution of agras using place names from historical records and rural cadastre cartography. Results indicated that there was a significant correspondence between selected terms and agras spatial distribution. Field names showed a strong inertia in time, remaining despite recent land use changes but also in a long-term context, as they indicate the former presence of agras in a coastal sector that disappeared around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our findings suggest that identification of historical landscape features by means of place names could be of interest for further landscape research, with application in landscape inventory, monitoring and landscape restoration.
Several authors suggest that trust is an important determinant of cooperation between strangers in a society, and therefore of performance of social institutions. We argue that trust should be particularly important for the performance of large organizations. In a cross-section of countries, evidence on government performance, participation in civic and professional societies, importance of large firms, and the performance of social institutions more generally supports this hypothesis. Moreover, trust is lower in countries with dominant hierarchical religions, which may have deterred networks of cooperation trust hold up remarkably well on a cross-section of countries.
Protestants and Catholics: similar work ethic, different social ethic
- Arruñada