Signifying passages: the signs of change in Israeli street names

Abstract

Street names are mundane media through which the past is commemorated and introduced into the public sphere. Viewed from a semiotic perspective, street names constitute a spatial-text produced over time, capturing the political, social and cultural climates in which it is formed. In this article we propose an analysis of street names in four Israeli towns of different social, political and demographic backgrounds. The study is based on a two-stage analysis: an analysis of the local narratives and a hermeneutic reading of the street maps as spatial-texts. This is followed by a quantitative summary of street names according to categories. By studying practices of naming and renaming, and deciphering key elements in these spatial-texts, we conclude that street names reflect the changing character of the Israeli political, social and cultural orders. As such, they are indicative of shifts occurring in the social production of the Israeli collective memory.

Street‐naming, tourism development and cultural conflict: the case of the Old City of Acre/Akko/Akka

“…This method is still in use by the Israeli Postal Authority, as will be described later in this article. Records from other Arab cities suggest that the British rulers faced difficulties in convincing the local Arab population of the need for naming the streets; in order to create administrative efficiency and as a measure of governmentality (Rose‐Redwood ), they chose to number the streets instead (Pinchevski and Torgovnik ). In the Old City of Nazareth, similarly, the British gave the streets and alleys numbers rather than names, and this system still functions with no change nearly 60 years after the last British administrator left the country.…”

“…The case of Israel has been investigated by a relatively large number of researchers; this is a result of frequent geopolitical changes in the region, which led to different phases of street‐naming under various political and cultural regimes. The main periods that have been investigated are the British Mandate period (Azaryahu ; Bar‐Gal ; Katz ), the formative years of the State of Israel (Azaryahu and Golan ) and modern‐day Israel (Azaryahu ; Azaryahu and Kook ; Pinchevski and Torgovnik ).…”

‘A sense of where you belong in the world’: national belonging, ontological security and the status of the ethnic majority in England

“…In the contemporary era, social relations, representations and organisations continue to be defined in national terms, governed and institutionalised in accordance with national temporalities and located within the spaces of the nation, thereby contributing to a relatively consistent view of ''reality'' (Condor 2000;Dhoest 2005;Edensor 2002;Palmer 1998;Pinchevski and Torgovnik 2002;Pointon 1998). Furthermore, in realising an ongoing and fairly stable sense of (national) self, other and place, these everyday processes and symbolic systems secure disparate individuals to the wider community and also provide them with 'a positive understanding of who and what they are' (Reicher and Hopkins 2001: 33).…”

Street Renaming, Symbolic Capital, and Resistance in Durban, South Africa

“…Many have considered the ways in which governing elites use naming procedures to incorporate authorized representations of the past into the city-text and its "mundane spheres of human experience", as alternative histories and ideologies are erased (Rose-Redwood et al, 2010, page 460; see also Azaryahu, 1996;. Place naming has been seen as an important medium for the ideological construction of nationalisms, particularly during periods of political change (Azaryahu, 1997;Light et al, 2002;Nash, 1999;Palonen, 2008;Pinchevski and Torgovnik, 2002). It is also seen as a key practice of imperial and colonial power (Bigon, 2008;Myers, 1996), symbolic of the "imperial project of permanent possession through dispossession" (Carter, 1987, page xxiv).…”