In ancient Rome they had no name. Nor do they carry it in the cities of Japan today. In Europe in the Middle Ages they were called for the trades that were carried out in their premises. In many places in the United States they are simply numbered. Street names are a universe in themselves. They are very different in the various places of the world and say a lot, but a lot about the people who inhabit them.
What about people who don't have an address if, for example, they need an ambulance or are waiting for an urgent package or want to vote by post? Attorney and writer Deirdre Mask asked herself that question when she visited a friend in West Virginia. His street had neither name nor number and that made him almost, almost, undocumented.
Then Mask decided to pull the plug and started researching street names. His searches have resulted in The List of Streets (Capità Swing), a book that contains a thousand and one stories about the directions from the origins of cities to the present from the length and breadth of the planet.
Ancient Rome lacked directions, but its inhabitants did not get lost, “because the city was very rich in visual and sensory signals. The Romans moved by points of reference such as shops, statues, buildings or arches, and also guided by smells, sights or tastes", explained Mask in an interview with La Vanguardia.
During the Middle Ages, the streets were given trade names to guide the artisans who worked in them: Chuchilleros, Buttoneras, Embroiderers, Plasterers, Booksellers, Hilanderas, Dyers... "With the French Revolution, a change occurred and the streets began to be named after people, because the revolutionaries wanted to adjust them to their ideals and pay honor to their heroes", adds the author, although she acknowledges that "this transformation was also taking place in other places of the world, Paris was not alone".
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There were names, but no numbers for things. This was a later idea resulting from the Enlightenment "at a crucial moment in history in which rationality and equality were committed, although the numbering of houses also had a lot to do with a moment in that governments began to take an interest in controlling citizens". The Archduchess of the Austro-Hungarian Empire María Teresa numbered the streets of Vienna and other cities in her territory in the middle of the 18th century because "she needed more soldiers and the numbering of the houses helped her find them".
The gestures of the French revolutionaries and María Teresa were a first step towards the politicization of the streets through their nomenclature. Then things went further and now "street names are definitely political weapons, because above all they have to do with power: the power to decide who names a street is to control it. We see it now in Ukraine, where Russian streets are named after them. Changing the names of the streets is a key move in any regime change."
And for that very reason "there are more streets named after men all over the world". "It is not surprising because it was the men who wrote the history books and also named the streets. Now many countries are trying to rectify this and in others there are groups that place unofficial street signs with women's names next to the regular ones that, of course, have men's names", concludes Mask.
