Critical Toponymy

On 13-October, Derek Alderman (University of Tennessee Department of Geography, I-NAME Initiative) and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Writer and Geographer), moderated by Brent D. Ryan, shared their work on critical toponymic studies as part of the 2021 Fall Urbanism Lecture Series, co-hosted by the City Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program, and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT.

The panel discussion focused on the acknowledgment of racialized and gendered place names, and on the emerging movement toward an inclusive and equitable landscape of commemoration in our cities, towns, and spaces. Derek Alderman of the University of Tennessee’s Department of Geography discussed the collaborative I-NAME Initiative that is working to both reflect on histories and to recast place naming as a participatory process. And writer and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro spoke to New York City’s rich ethnic mosaic of cultures and their relationship to place names, a relationship insightfully and incisively explored in his new book Names of New York (Pantheon, 2021).

By Joris Komen, Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Fellow, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.