‘Rename the Streets’: The Challenges of Decolonizing Toponymy in Toronto Canada

DOI: 10.47632/2786-717X-2023-2-139-153 УДК 94:711.73(71-2):811.111’373.21 Як цитувати: Rob Shields, ‘Rename the Streets’: The Challenges of Decolonizing Toponymy in Toronto Canada, Ukrainian Historical Review / Український історичний огляд, IІ | 2023, 139–153. Rob Shields ‘Rename the Streets’: The Challenges of Decolonizing Toponymy in Toronto Canada This paper considers recent efforts to rename and rebrand streets to erase historical oppressors and events in Toronto, Canada. Although renaming campaigns have been common in English-speaking countries, the focus will be on the entanglement of place names and street names, toponymy and odonymy, respectively with not only material sites and infrastructure, but as elements within a broader set of place myths and spatial practices that make up a still-surviving settler colonial matrix and spatialisation. Settler-Colonial Theory argues that genocide of Indigenous occupants and their replacement with settlers, slaves and other labourers was a central feature of colonisation that underpinned rather than followed the rise of capitalism. We begin, however, with an overview of critical toponymy and an outline of Canadian naming practices and policies. These contrast with European practices and display the legacy of changing cultural and political relationships between historically oppressed and hegemonic settler-colonial socioeconomic groups that have controlled the formative development and the last 70 years of planning of Canadian cities such as Toronto. References Alderman Derek H., Rose-Redwood Reuben. The Classroom as ‘Toponymic Workspace’: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Campus Place Renaming // Journal of Geography in Higher Education 44 (1). 2019. 124–41. Berg Lawrence D., Kearnes Robin A. 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