A recent mapping project for the Gauteng City-Region Observatory analysed almost 44 000 street names across the province. The aim was to explore how street names tell stories about the region, its people, associated places and cultural heritages made visible through them.
It found that 57% of streets were classified as names of people. This means that Gauteng’s everyday street network also functions as a vast, dispersed memorial landscape.
The mapping project used data from OpenStreetMap and grouped the street names into four broad categories: people, geographical places, plants and animals and other names.
Grouping them revealed patterns that would be difficult to notice from individual street signs. This connects to wider previous research on how ordinary graphic objects communicate heritage in the urban environment. A street name may seem like a simple tool for navigation but each one can connect the past to the present and influence how we understand a place.
This is important when we think about belonging. The Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s most recent Quality of Life Survey shows that 21% of residents feel they do not belong where they live, while 31% feel that nobody cares about people like them.
This matters because street names do more than help us find our way in our daily travels. They make histories and identities visible in the places we share. Through paying attention to the names, we can start to ask ourselves whether our own histories and those of our communities are reflected in the places we call home and how that may contribute to our sense of belonging.
A golden thread
One of the clearest patterns in the map is the concentration of streets named after people in places such as Soweto, Mamelodi, Kagiso and Atteridgeville. These are historically black townships whose development was shaped by racial segregation and apartheid policies.
Across Gauteng, names associated with figures who were at the forefront of the fight against apartheid, such as Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo, appear alongside names associated with figures who were part of the country’s colonial and apartheid history, such as Jan Smuts, Paul Kruger and Hendrik Verwoerd. The names reflect different periods. Rather than telling a single story, the street network preserves several layers of public memory.
What also stood out was that many of the repeated commemorative names refer to men. This raises questions about whose contributions become familiar through street naming and whose are less visible.
Other neighbourhoods tell quite different stories. In Cosmo City, which is a mixed-income housing development built in the early 2000s in north-west Johannesburg, street names are organised around countries and cities in Africa.
In Etwatwa, a township that emerged during the final years of apartheid, names such as Arusha (a city in Tanzania), Entebbe (a city in Uganda) and Victoria Falls (a large gorge on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia) connect an everyday neighbourhood to places elsewhere on the continent.
In the south-western parts of Centurion, a residential and commercial area between Johannesburg and Pretoria, streets have names associated with plants and trees, including Begonia, Baobab and Fever Tree. Ivory Park, which is a township in Midrand that emerged in the early 1990s, offers another interesting example, with streets named after fish, such as Snoek, Galjoen and Tilapia.
The examples show that street naming is not only about commemorating people. It can also give a neighbourhood a particular identity or connect it to places, landscapes and ideas beyond its surroundings.
Street naming and renaming generally fall under the authority of municipal councils, although individuals and communities can propose names or changes.
The names we encounter every day can tell us whose histories are commemorated, which places are considered meaningful and how neighbourhood identities are expressed. They also encourage us to think about what is less visible.
A map cannot tell us how a resident feels about a street name or whether that name creates a sense of belonging. But it can reveal which stories appear repeatedly in public space and which receive less recognition.
These are important questions when we think about how communities see themselves reflected in the places they call home. Gauteng’s street names show us that heritage is not only found in monuments or museums. It is also written into the ordinary routes travelled every day. – This article first appeared in The Conversation.
- A recent mapping project for the Gauteng City-Region Observatory analysed almost 44 000 street names across the province.
- The aim was to explore how street names tell stories about the region, its people, associated places and cultural heritages made visible through them.
- It found that 57% of streets were classified as names of people.
- This means that Gauteng’s everyday street network also functions as a vast, dispersed memorial landscape.
- The mapping project used data from OpenStreetMap and grouped the street names into four broad categories: people, geographical places, plants and animals and other names.
