Urbanonymic Design: On the Naming of City Facilities

Abstract

The paper focuses on the problems of naming and renaming of municipal facilities: streets, squares, parks, public gardens, etc. The author’s reflections rest upon her personal experience as a member of the Facilities Naming Committee of the city of Ekaterinburg. The article seeks to suggest a new approach to the solution of controversial issues of naming city facilities based on territory branding and city image design and promotion concepts. Place names are thus considered as an important informational and communicational resource of creation of a city’s image which means that the naming of concrete city facilities should rely on a holistic urbanonymic conception defining basic features of the city’s identity and ordering themes to be reflected in names. The author argues that the rational long-term urbanonymic policy implies the existence of a consistent image-making strategy. In this case the process of naming and its results could be characterized in terms of ‘urbanonymic design’ considering the naming of city facilities as a part of the construction of the city’s identity. The policy of official naming of city-owned assets must then meet the following requirements: proportionality, functionality, orientation capacity, semantic transparency, harmonicity, which constitute the most significant principles of construction of an urbanonymic system.

Keywords

• Russian language
• city place names
• urbanonyms
• naming
• principles of naming
• city’s image