Street Naming in Batman: The Efforts to Create Public Memory and to Control Urban Space.

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Today, the street naming has a different structure. Indeed, naming has arisen from desire to regulate and control urban space. In this way, local authorities have purposed of creating public memory according to their opinions. One of the best example of this is Batman city. Naming the street according to their political identity, the mayors, ruling the city in 1994-2011, had intented to keep the different ideologies alive in urban space. So, there had been a struggle on urban space during this period.Above all, coming to power of two parties ideologically different from each other such as religious-identitied The Welfare Party and ethnicidentitied The People’s Democracy Party had increased speed of this struggle. 1994, Welfare Party won local elections, had been the beginning period of the names to be determined by identity. Indeed, in 1995, many naming had been made. The share of religions-names had been 76 percent in this names. On the other side, the political change, in 1999, had affected also the street naming. As a result a differentidentitied party coming to power had started to gain different structure of street names in 2000. First, the toponymic cleaning began and half of the name of fifty-six, from the previous periods, had been changed. As a result of these changes, the share of religious-based names had declined to 16 percent. Whereas, the using of the ethnic-based names (11%) and political-based names (13%) had increased in this year. Some names that are contrary to applicable laws and controversial names had been revoked by the court.

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Place names , toponymy , street names , Batman , public memory

International Journal of Geography and Geography Education

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International Journal of Geography and Geography Education