Less Politicised – (Not) More persistent? Longitudinal study of street name change in Kyiv, Ukraine.

GNATIUK, Oleksiy; ZAPOTOTSKA, Viktoriia; HAVRYLIUK, Oleksii

The paper investigates whether specific categories of street names (in particular, politically relevant vs. politically neutral) have more probability to be renamed in historical perspective. Focusing on the case of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, a city with a rich history of street renaming due to numerous transitions of political power, and based on a longitudinal dataset (1880-2023) of street renaming in the city, we determine the odds of a certain category of street names to be renamed in a certain historical period employing multiple binomial logistic regressions as a research method. The results generally confirmed a theoretically grounded hypothesis that politicised street names are more likely of being renamed that politically neutral ones. At the same time, in between the tumultuous phases of the power transitions, ideologically neutral names become primary targets of renaming just because of their political neutrality, since the commemoration of new heroes needs additional street names. In this way, the probability of a specific semantic category of a street name to be changed depends on the stage of political transition cycle.

STREET names; POWER (Social sciences); LOGISTIC regression analysis; LONGITUDINAL method; RESEARCH methodology

Forum Geografic, 2024, Vol 23, Issue 1, p132

1583-1523

Academic Journal

10.5775/fg.2024.1.3615