As a design researcher working in urban graphic heritage, I explore how everyday graphic objects communicate in public spaces. I have started to think of the city as a kind of living, dispersed archive. It is not an archive that replaces formal institutions, but one that exists alongside them.
In a recent mapping project that I led for the Gauteng City-Region Observatory in South Africa, almost 44,000 street names were analysed across Gauteng, the country’s economic heartland.
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% 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 my wider 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 to find our way in our daily travels. They make histories and identities visible in the places we share. Through paying attention to these 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.
Patterns
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 South Africa’s racial segregation and apartheid policies.
Across the province of 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.
These names reflect different periods of South Africa’s history. Rather than telling a single story, the street network preserves several layers of public memory.
What also stood out was that many of the frequently 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 build 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 residental 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.
These 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 immediate surroundings.
The stories our streets tell
In South Africa, street naming and renaming generally fall under the authority of municipal councils, although individuals and communities can propose names or changes through local processes that often include public consultation.
What interests me about these patterns is how histories and identities become visible in the places people share. The names we encounter everyday 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 particular 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.
I encourage people to look differently at the streets around them. The next time you read a street sign or give someone directions, ask who or what the street is named after. Think about why that name is there, whether it has changed and what other stories might be less visible.
Our streets are already telling us stories. Sometimes we simply need to stop and read them.
Yolandi Burger
theconversation.com
