Historical Hodonymy in Public Space: Regional, Biographical, and Memory-Cultural Research on Street, Square, and Building Names in South Tyrol

­The names of street, piazzas, and buildings are familiar to us from our daily experience. At street corners, on business cards, on letterheads, and in telephone directories, the names of streets, squares, and public buildings are omnipresent in the all around South Tyrol. At the same time, names in public space function as markers of historical memory that embody the political and social values contemporary with the moment in which they were assigned. Such names thus serve a dual purpose: as waymarkers they help us find our bearings, and as heritage markers they preserve our historical and cultural memory.

Street names and other public designations have always provoked political and social controversy. As the political actors in power come and go, or as regimes succeed one another, the relationship with the historical hodonymy changes accordingly. In recent decades—and not only in South Tyrol—a range of names often assigned in authoritarian contexts, and still etched into the landscape of region’s memory as historical relics, have drawn growing criticism. In many cases, this criticism has also been accompanied by more or less resolute calls for renaming these places.

On the one hand, the project aims to compile a compendium of brief biographies of “compromised” persons, places, or episodes. On the other hand, it will contextualise the practices of street naming and renaming as part of a politics and memory of the past .