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The Taipei city map in 1897. (Source: Zeng 1958, 213)
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Taiwan has been ruled by a variety of political regimes and the different ruling elites have used Taiwan’s place names to shape their symbolic landscape. The end of World War Two witnessed the most tremendous change of place names in Taiwan when the Chinese Nationalist government or Kuomintang (KMT) established itself on the island. The traditional...
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... street names have transited from the Qing dynasty, through Japanese era to the present day. Based on Taipei's street names on the map of the late Qing dynasty (Figure 1), we can fit all the street names of Qing Taipei into the following five naming rules: ...
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Citations
... Moreover, in the bulk of publications, the preoccupation with political power's control over both landscape and history is concerned almost exclusively with the northern hemisphere. That is, it is centered on the West (North America and Western Europe) (ibid) and Eastern Europe [16,17], with relatively few geographic exceptions such as southern America, Africa and Asia [18][19][20][21][22]. Some of the relevant publications, such as encyclopedic entries and other book-length studies, also have a considerable Eurocentric bias [23,24]. ...
This commentary points to the problems inherent in critical place names studies in terms of classic research topics, methodologies and geographies. It expounds the limits of the official “index”, that is, the variety of traditional urban inscriptions on which critical toponymy scholars rely in interpreting modern urban spatialities—e.g., lists of street names, official street signage, gazetteers, archival materials, etc. The argument is that in Southern urban contexts, where informality in planning can reach up to about 80 percent of the city, researching official naming and signage renders a distorted image of the city and its namescape production. A comment is thus made on the need to embrace more innovative and almost ethnographic research methodologies for understanding place referencing, place attachment and everyday navigational channels in Southern cities. These will generate a more substantial contribution towards the creation of global urban toponymy and a further de-colonization of Eurocentric presumptions regarding governmentality, urban management, and the accompanying role of street naming systems.
This article examines the street name signs of Taipei City in their ideological, linguistic, and semiotic dimensions. These different levels of analysis correlate with different processes of sign development. Combining critical toponymy and linguistic landscape research, it is claimed that in ideological and linguistic terms the post-war period has been one of the fundamental changes that has been arguably unparalleled elsewhere. By contrast, the ideological about-turn after the 1980s has had relatively little influence on the contents of street name signs. Alluding to Western-style modernity, semiotic features like the colour of the signs and the direction of writing are later innovations. It is also argued that in the broader context of their multilingual environment, there is an enormous discrepancy between visible normativity and audible multilingualism.
The act of remembering is an integral part of sustaining the memory of places through their palimpsests. The regenerative transformations of cities (Cheshmehzangi and Munday, 2021) may sometimes change the physicality of places. However, our memories could still be attached to the histories of places that we indefinitely remember. Regardless of their historical significance, there is the rhetoric of time, memory, and origins (De Groote, 2014) in the way places are distinguished and remembered (Huyssen, 2003). The act of remembering itself is widely recognised as a phenomenological study of the relationship between memory and place (Donhoe, 2014), through which we recognise the palimpsests of various types (e.g., memory, tradition, and place). This fact is more visible in the cases of urban memorial landscapes and political situations (Pirker et al., 2019), monumental environments (Mitchell, 2003), as well as cases of displacement (Erll, 2011), contextualisation of collective memory (Farahani et al., 2015), etc. Some of these examples refer to the matters of historical importance (Bigsby, 2006) or the significant past, which are the essence of how places of memory are developed and remembered.
This paper investigates the relationship between the state ideology and street-naming in Vietnam by examining street-names related to geographical names and their spatial layouts designed by successive regimes in Hải Phòng City since the 20th century. By treating different versions of the street names as city-texts for multi-interpretations, the study reveals that the case of Hải Phòng demonstrates that geographical names could be utilized for various themes going beyond those purely related to the contemporary geopolitics of colonial empires, military achievements, or the golden ages of the past, and further included the national identity of colonial power, national independence, regime legitimacy, and even anticipation of future reunification, as well. The foreign geographical names, which were less desirable to the post-colonial regimes, were nevertheless appropriated into a symbol of international support for the regime’s legitimacy by the spatial layout, in the case of Hải Phòng. The design of spatial layouts ranges from an expression of the contemporary national identity as stated in terms of regional geography under French Indochina (1887 - 1945), to a self-proclaimed worldwide endorsement for the legitimacy of a regime, namely the State of Vietnam (1949 - 1954), via the radiating pattern composed of a roundabout and its six intersecting streets. The subsequent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1955 - 1975), in contrast, created a linear pattern conveying the idea of the evolutionary process of Vietnamese history, from the birth of a nation to its future reunification, by its naming of the thoroughfare cutting through the aforementioned spatial configuration centering on the roundabout. It is the spatial configuration of street-naming which transforms the ahistoric toponyms into vehicles of commemoration, imbued with the implications of nationalism, state legitimacy, or evolutionary and prophetic history.
After the Chinese Civil War, the Republic of China (ROC) government, led by Kuomintang (KMT) withdrew to Taiwan, and made Taipei as the temporary capital in 1949, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing. Since then, the cross-Strait relations are alienated from each other. However, the street names of Taipei and Shanghai present a high degree of correlation in these two cities. Both are filled with the geographical places of mainland China. This chapter will make use of critical theories to argue street names as the illustration of state power on its spatial politics by examining the scale and location of the street names related to geographical places in Taipei and Shanghai. This argument will be based on their political difference on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait to compare and analyze the difference responses between the CCP and KMT governments.
