At a very mundane level, street names provide the daily spatial framework for human activities so that cities can function. But beyond their indexical importance as spatial reference landmarks, street names are inevitably loaded with history and ideology, reflecting the present and the past of people, places and nations.

As Moszberger et al. (2002:5) point out, street names are particularly revelatory for tracing changes in representational politics. In cases of massive renamings, there is often a breach in the cultural transmission of collective memory, when younger generations treat the reworked cityscape as timeless and natural (Fabiszak & Brzezińska 2016). What for older generations is a revolutionary wiping out of old heroes and values they stood for, for the younger generation becomes a “natural order of things” (Fairclough 2003:2).

The aim of this project is to develop a new approach of researching ideological power struggles between various stakeholders over the symbolic appropriation of the semiotic fabric of the city. This will be achieved through the application of a mixed-methods approach to four European and four non-European locations. The proposed multi-disciplinary research residential will bring together a number of key scholars to investigate different ways in which urban conurbations instigate, negotiate and make sense of commemorative practices, focusing on street renaming as eight illustrative case studies.

By integrating findings from a wealth of theoretical and methodological perspectives and by transcending epistemological boundaries, our international cross-disciplinary project proposes to develop a coherent theoretical framework for understanding recent changes in the commemorative cityspace from a global heuristic perspective.

Throughout the residential, participants will work on case studies, exchange methodological and theoretical approaches and deliver daily presentations reporting on progress of the research. The writings resulting from the residential will be published as a Special Issue in a peer-reviewed journal.