Re-name the Streets. Toponymic Struggles and Civic Belonging in Murcia (Spain) and Johannesburg (South Africa)

Abstract

Toponymic struggles are about forms of civic belonging that street names enable or prevent. Drawing on a moral economy perspective, this article examines similarities and differences between struggles over street names in the Spanish city of Murcia and the South African metropolis of Johannesburg. In contrasting these cases, a paradox becomes apparent: While actors in toponymic struggles have to evoke moral goods such as inclusivity, fairness and neutrality to advocate for change or in defense of the status quo, these values are rendered suspect in the very same process. Nonetheless, in the examined cases toponymic struggles lead in part to more inclusive solutions than those originally expected by actors that face each other as adversaries in the local moral economy of toponymic struggles. The article is based on intensive field research in both areas of study, including participant observation, qualitative interviews, online ethnography, and an analysis of newspaper articles and policy documents.

Introduction

Reflecting on the global increase of conflicts around street names and monuments in public spaces, a field of critical toponymic studies has emerged over the last decades (Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009; Rose-Redwood et al., 2010). This scholarship examines how state institutions and ruling elites both in the present and the past (Ruipérez and Dinas, 2021) use street names and monuments to inscribe ideological hegemonies and impose their ‘vision of the division of the world’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 240) onto urban landscapes. While street names and monuments become, over time, a barely noticed symbolic backdrop against which city dwellers go about their daily business, historical conjunctions emerge when specific names and the histories and biographies connected to them become problematic. At least since the French Revolution, situations of rapid political change often become moments in history when the re-naming of streets and the demolition of monuments has been debated and put into action (Faraco and Murphy, 1997; Rose-Redwood et al., 2017: 10-11). ‘More than anything else,’ Koselleck (2002: 288) writes, ‘permanently erected memorials bear witness to transience.’ Studies of toponymic change show that what is seen as an adequate symbolic representation of the past in the present is a matter of social struggles.

Since the 1960s, social movements and civil society actors have played an increasingly important role in challenging existing toponymic orders in urban spaces (Samayeen et al., 2022). Reflecting on the changes of power relations between political elites and civil society in democratic environments, Rose-Reedwood and his colleagues (2017: 11) emphasize the relevance of ‘cultural arena[s]’ that evolve around questions of naming streets where conflicts emerge about ‘what histories and whose identities are to be recognized or ignored.’ Within this turn towards the political practice of public space (re-)naming, Light and Young (2017: 198) stress that it is important not only to focus on change but also on the ‘politics of toponymic continuity’ so as not to overestimate the empirical relevance of contestation.

Toponymic struggles often have an emotional dimension. Alderman and Inwood (2013: 212) emphasize that this is related to the relevance of names of public spaces as ‘expressive and constitutive [elements] of the politics of citizenship, conferring a greater degree of belonging to certain groups over others.’ Understanding toponymic struggles as a means of contesting unequal modalities of civic belonging shifts the attention to, as Adebanwi (2017: 222) puts it, the larger ‘tensions inherent in the social order as represented by the power to name places.’ In this context, two questions are particularly relevant for this article. First: How can the difficult historical relationship between majorities and minorities, men and women or rulers and ruled be translated into sufficiently inclusive and democratic symbols (Alderman, 2000)? And second: To what extent can honoring certain events or persons by naming streets or squares after them be considered an affirmation of historical injustice (Azaryahu, 2017)? Especially in the context of liberal democratic societies dealing with the ‘criminal legacies of formerly authoritarian regimes and political orders,’ (Langenohl, 2008: 163) changing street names is considered a means of transitional justice aiming at ‘restoring dignity and public recognition of the victims’ (Swart, 2008: 106). Murcia and Johannesburg, the cities we are focusing on in this article, are both part of post-authoritarian political landscapes and share one of the central dilemmas of transitional justice: they have to work towards restoring a socially acceptable level of justice between victim and perpetrator groups on the one hand; and, on the other hand, they have to take efforts not to endanger the fragile bonds of social cohesion in these societies (Tucker, 1999). Debates about renaming streets and squares can be interpreted as cultural arenas where this conflict of goals must be brought to a decision. It requires an assessment of the extent to which certain street names and public symbols can still be considered acceptable forms of commemorating a collective history or as unacceptable forms of symbolic violence against victim groups who suffered under the authoritarian regimes.

Our case studies show that struggles for symbolic recognition around street names often employ confrontative scripts which polarize publics. They create antagonisms between people who are for and against renaming as well as between those who argue for symbolic recognition through street names as a relevant aspect of civic belonging and those who prioritize other moral goods. Nevertheless, the presented case studies also show that the results of these local conflicts are often more inclusive than they seem at first. This is due, as we will show, to the internal logic of the moral economies where these conflicts are played out, which requires the actors to refer to moral arguments that reach beyond the boundaries of their own group. Our analysis suggests that the developed moral economy perspective is of great analytical value for the field of toponymic studies. It allows for a better understanding of the underlying moral and political order of symbolic recognition and civic belonging to which actors refer when they want their arguments for or against specific street names to be heard.

Methodology and case selection

This article is the product of a larger research project that examined ordinary urban life in neighborhoods on the periphery of four cities, looking especially at moral issues and concerns that trigger conflicts, criticism and perceptions of threat among local residents. The neighborhoods were selected by a figurative approach (cf. Dieterich, 2023; Elias and Scotson, 1994). To limit empirical variation within our otherwise more explorative and inductive ethnographic research, we selected neighborhood constellations in the four cities based on three objectified similarities: urban morphology, ethno-racial composition (majority vs minority), and patterns of social inequality. In each of the four selected sites, intensive ethnographic fieldwork of between nine and 12 months was conducted. The project had two phases. In the first phase of the project (2015-2019), we studied neighborhoods in Murcia (Spain) and Frankfurt (Germany). These cities were chosen because they were both middle-size cities (450,000 to 750,000 inhabitants), we could draw on established field contacts, and both cities differed significantly in terms of how they were affected by the 2008 financial crisis. The central finding of the first phase was that despite obvious differences between the cities, we could identify in both neighborhood constellations comparable moral issues around which local conflicts and perceptions of threat gravitated. This finding resonated with Jennifer Robinson’s argument that it is productive to ‘think about a world of ordinary cities, which are all dynamic and diverse (…) arenas for social and economic life,’ (2006: 1) rather than treating them as different from the outset based on a theoretically predefined typology – such as wealthy versus poor, developed versus developing or global versus national/regional. The similarities in terms of moral themes we found in the first phase made us more courageous and confident in the second phase, where we aimed at observing similarities even when looking at neighborhoods and cities that we could superficially expect to be even more different from our original pairing.

Drawing on the extended case method (Burawoy, 2009), we expanded our sample in the second phase (2019-2023) to neighborhoods in Johannesburg and Santiago de Chile. Again, our plan was to identify conflicts and threat discourses in neighborhood constellations that fitted in our scheme of selection. The approach worked again. Across cases, we found four shared moral goods around which conflicts, threat perceptions and criticism evolved: bodily integrity, public order, symbolic recognition and material well-being. Most interestingly, despite the contextual differences on which we will elaborate later, the conflict figurations crosscut in sometimes unexpected ways the divides between world regions and the scale of the examined cities. Our article therefore provides some evidence to support Jennifer Robinson: it is possible and analytically productive to ‘move beyond divisive categories and hierarchies’ of cities (Robinson, 2006: 1-2) and take ordinary urban life as a starting point to study conflicts and tensions in cities and neighborhoods around the globe. ¹ The examined conflict constellations derive from our larger corpus of ethnographic data. Rather than the two cities, the analytical entity of comparison are the discourses and practices on whether certain streets should be renamed or not, as they appeared in the selected neighborhoods. We do not discuss exhaustively all positions taken in toponymic struggles in the respective countries or cities but focus on those we encountered during our geographically and temporally limited field research. This results from our decision to take ordinary urban life as the starting point for analysis, rather than comparing prominent cases of toponymic conflicts. The juxtaposition of the cases from Murcia and Johannesburg is an empirical result of our research: they are the neighborhoods in our sample where toponymic conflicts took place more explicitly during our field research. There were also toponymic conflicts in Frankfurt and Santiago de Chile, but these were not so salient in the neighborhoods under study during our period of field research.

The conflict site in Murcia was Vistabella, a neighborhood developed as a garden-city in the 1940s and 1950s by the Francoist regime to accommodate politically loyal state employees and soldiers, who then dominated the area in the following decades. However, since the late 1990s, demographic changes led to an increasing number of young and generally more left-wing families from an emerging cosmopolitan professional middle-class (including artists, architects, journalists and other academics), and migrants moving to the neighborhood. A progressive middle-class lifestyle became to some extent emblematic of a new image of Vistabella, something that created tensions between newcomers and established residents. The analyzed toponymic struggles are part of this conflict figuration.

In Johannesburg the site of the conflict was Mindalore, a relatively typical formerly white middle-class suburb with mostly single-family houses with gardens and high walls or fences. There are different churches, a park, a few schools and several small businesses in the area. The architecture of the houses is designed for motorized mobility and shields the private spaces from their environment. The neighborhood was constructed during apartheid and housed mostly white Afrikaners. ² However, since the early 2000s, black middle-class families began moving to the area and represent a significant minority today. The changing racial composition of the neighborhood causes tensions. Especially the more conservative white Afrikaners understand the immigration of black middle-class families as a threat to their identity. At the same time, street names referring to historic representatives of the Afrikaner community are contested in Johannesburg as a legacy of the apartheid regime.

Our methodological strategy aimed at developing the comparison inductively from our case studies. It allowed us, especially in the case of Johannesburg, to focus on a more ambiguous, and ‘banal’ type of ethnographic case that is usually not covered by researchers and the media. The juxtaposition of the two cases follows a Grounded Theory approach where comparison is seen as a methodological strategy for empirically based theory building (Corbin and Strauss, 2014: XXIV). Engaging with differences and similarities between cases allows to stepwise generate more abstract thoughts and hypotheses, which are implied in every case study but sometimes difficult to see without contrasting cases (cf. Mitchell 2006). In this respect, the juxtaposition of the two ethnographic cases is what we call, following Eckstein (2000: 137-140), a heuristic case comparison, utilized ‘to stimulate the imagination towards discerning important general problems (…). Such studies (…) are less concerned with overall concrete configurations than with potentially generalizable relations’ (Eckstein, 2000: 137).

The question of larger relevance here is how authoritarian legacies are dealt with in post-authoritarian political constellations, such as in Murcia and Johannesburg, and what role the liberal democratic moral economy plays in it. While Spain went through a transition from dictatorship to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975, South Africa experienced a process of democratization after the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. In both countries, issues of street names and the representation of the past are far from resolved and still trigger conflicts where competing perspectives on history clash with one another. While in both cases people have to deal with the dilemmas of post-authoritarian societies, the most salient difference is that, considering South Africa’s colonial and postcolonial history, the social category of race is much more significant in Johannesburg than in Murcia. In Murcia, ideological divisions between left-wing and right-wing are more important for understanding the toponymic struggles.

The main research in Murcia took place during a total of 12 months of on-site research between September 2014 and June 2017; in Johannesburg it consisted of 9 months of fieldwork between October 2019 and September 2022. Both studies included extensive participant observation, qualitative interviews, online ethnography and the analysis of newspaper articles and policy documents (Breidenstein et al., 2020; Snodgrass, 2016). Generally, the selection of interlocutors followed the method of theoretical sampling (Corbin and Strauss, 2014: 134-152). On the one hand, we followed the threads of conflict communication and interviewed representatives of local neighborhood associations, the neighborhood watch, organizers of local help initiatives and community leaders as well as ‘ordinary residents.’ On the other hand, we ensured that important dimensions of demographic difference and inequality, like race/ethnicity, class, gender, political affiliation, and old residents versus newcomers, were covered in our sample of interlocutors. During the analysis of our data, we recognized one gap in each sample. In Murcia, the conservative neighbors who opposed the renaming were less inclined to openly discuss this question with us during fieldwork encounters. To compensate for this spot, we analyzed a heated online debate that took place on a social media platform in 2018 about the renaming of streets in Vistabella where conservative opinions were expressed more openly. In Johannesburg it was the opposite case: we did not find strong voices in favor of renaming in the neighborhood itself. To close this gap, we drew on policy documents and media articles where arguments for renaming that our interlocutors referred implicitly were spelled out. By criticizing or defending certain names and symbols, our interlocutors entered a reflexive mode regarding how symbolic remnants of the authoritarian histories in their respective places of living should be dealt with. Building on Alderman and Inwood (2013), we argue that focusing on disputes and conflicts over street names provides a pathway to explore the local moral economies of civic belonging. When we talk about moral economy, we deviate from the Durkheimian sociological tradition of seeing morality as a social means to create consensus and community in favor of a more conflictual understanding of moralization in contemporary society. For Didier Fassin (2018: 17), the term moral economy aims at capturing the cultural arena of ‘the production, circulation, appropriation, and contestation of values as well as affects, around an object, a problem, or more broadly a social fact.’ We subsequently argue that if street names are rendered problematic, their justification or critique requires argumentative reference to shared civic values and is likely to mobilize affects. Toponymic conflicts can therefore be seen as crystallization points for the making and remaking of local moral economies of civic belonging and symbolic recognition. Methodologically, we argue that moments of critique or defense of established symbolic representations are instructive for studying underlying normative understandings. This approach builds on a sociology of knowledge perspective which presumes that situations of disturbance of routine action and ‘thinking as usual,’ like crises (Schütz, 1972) or moral breakdowns (Zigon, 2007), can be seen as reflexive moments where people are forced to explicate underlying assumptions that would otherwise remain implicit.

Axel Honneth (1995) emphasized that experiences of injustice are often starting points for struggles for symbolic recognition. Stressing the connection between feelings of injustice and claims of civic belonging, we follow Axel Honneth’s argument that social conflicts about symbolic recognition are often ‘conflicts for sociality’ (Boltanski and Honneth, 2009: 90). Despite their critical and often antagonistic form, they express a foundational ‘wish to belong’ (ibid.) to a political community. Therefore, the practice of criticizing state institutions and authorities for not recognizing persons and groups adequately can be seen as a way of adopting a ‘relational modality’ (Thelen et al., 2014: 10-11) to the institutions of society that are considered responsible for keeping and protecting the promises of justice, equality, and solidarity. To emphasize the moral dimension that is implied in the claim of being symbolically recognized as a member in a political community, we speak of civic belonging rather than citizenship. ‘Civic belonging’ accentuates the moral principles of ‘mutuality and (…) responsiveness’ (Gammeltoft, 2018: 92) associated with membership status and adds a communitarian dimension (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017) to more juridically-oriented and individualistic understandings of citizenship (Glenn, 2011: 2). In this sense, civic belonging is more than a passive subjective side of membership in a polity. It rather refers to ordinary people’s capacity to aspire to and claim that the ‘promise (…) of belonging to a polity’ (Das, 2011: 320) should be kept by authorities and other members of a political community; and includes the ability to position oneself and others in relation to identities, histories and famous personalities which are symbolically recognized by street names and monuments. Symbolic recognition is understood in our context as a modality of civic belonging. It appeals to the moral imaginary that state actors and other members of a political community should represent different groups and persons in society as being of equal value. Although many people in democratic societies would probably agree with the moral imperative of symbolic recognition on a general level, conflicts occur about what it means in practice.

Struggling with the Francoist legacy in Murcia

In contrast to other post-authoritarian countries, the end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain did not lead to any serious exercise in reconciliation. As a result, in contemporary Spain no cross-party consensus exists on the evaluation of the Franco era. An important political step towards coming to terms with the historically burdened past was the Law 52/2007, also known as the ‘Law of Historical Memory,’ which was passed by the socialist government in 2007 and required from public administrations ‘the removal of signs, insignia, plaques and other objects or commemorating mentions or exalting persons or collectives of the military uprising, the Civil War and the repression of the dictatorship’ (BOE, 2007: 10). In the Region of Murcia, as of 2019, only nine out of 45 municipalities had complied with this article of the law, with 80% of those municipalities still having public spaces whose names commemorated the Francoist legacy (Peñalver, 2019). The law is an attempt to resolve the post-authoritarian dilemma by setting a new standard for neutrality and inclusivity committed to the symbolic recognition of pluralism while excluding the public presence of Francoist symbols from it. From the point of view of the large conservative political and civic sector in Spanish society, the ‘Law of Historical Memory’ did not contribute to national reconciliation but rather to ‘reopening the wounds’ of the Civil War (El País, 2008). According to the conservatives’ political imaginary, a neutral and inclusive civic sphere is one that leaves the quarrels and atrocities of the past behind. This imaginary is rooted in the 1977 Amnesty Law, which the political right considers the founding document of the so-called ‘pact of oblivion,’ that is, ‘a tacit agreement among the political elite not to legislate, litigate, or publicly discuss their recent history’ (Rubin, 2020: 352; quoting Encarnación, 2014). Although it is politically contested whether such a ‘pact of oblivion’ ever existed or whether it was, rather, an authoritarian imposition by the heirs of the Francoist regime (Mateo Leivas and Kerangat, 2020), actions directed against the Francoist legacy are often represented by right-wing politicians as a breach of the social contract of post-authoritarian Spanish democracy. Altogether, the 2007 ‘Law of Historical Memory’ and the 1977 ‘pact of oblivion’ stand symbolically for two competing political imaginaries whose antagonism is still relevant for understanding the moral economy of civic belonging in contemporary Spain. While according to one imaginary, names and symbols associated with the Franco regime must be erased to create an inclusive public sphere, according to the other, the same actions symbolize a breach of the social contract and endanger peaceful coexistence.

In the city of Murcia, social movements and the political left demanded the implementation of the Law of Historical Memory, while the ruling Partido Popular (PP) slowed down the process (IURM, 2020). As a result of its history as a neighborhood developed for employees of the Francoist state, Vistabella has one the highest number of streets and squares in the region that reference Francoist nomenclature. In 2016, when Damián did fieldwork, members of a local neighborhood association started a mobilization plan against street names that referred to the Francoist elite. Most of the activists belonged to the left-leaning cosmopolitan groups that had more recently arrived in the neighborhood. For them, the symbolic recognition of high-ranking representatives of the dictatorship in public spaces was offensive to the dignity of the victims and negatively affected their own feeling of civic belonging to the neighborhood. Therefore, members of the association demanded that the municipal government put an end to their unlawful ‘politics of toponymic continuity’ (Light and Young, 2017:198) and change the street names. In response to their engagement, these activists were criticized by older and/or more established neighbors, who understood the proposal to change street names as a leftist attempt to gain symbolic hegemony over the neighborhood and degrade the civic status of those residents whose families had lived in the area for decades.

One of the first public actions of the activists in 2012 was to demand the changing of the name of the public school, which was named after the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. ³ In an interview with Damián, Petra, a member of the school’s parents’ association, and Martín, a leading figure in the neighborhood association, recalled the moment when they publicly demanded changing the name of the school as ‘a very conflictive moment:’

Petra: ‘Maybe 500 comments [on the neighborhood association’s social media pages], I swear, hey, that’s crazy! (…) They told us “We’re going to burn down the premises [of the neighborhood association] (...) You fucking shitty commies”’

Martín: ‘Yes, (…) I mean, everything, “fucking shitty commies,” Julian [another member of the school’s parents’ association] was called “shitty Catalan,” and what not’ ⁴

Based on the argument that representing the neighborhood requires a longer period of residency and a commitment to the local moral values, the activists were denounced as outsiders who were intentionally undermining the local social contract. The critics applied a long-established strategy, used by those leaning ideologically towards the right, of demonizing their political opponents as enemies of the nation-state (‘communists,’ ‘Catalan separatists’). After simmering for some time, the toponymic conflict further escalated in 2016 when the neighborhood association demanded the change of 27 street names, including the name of the central square in the neighborhood. ⁵ When these changes were not implemented by the end of 2018, a leading member of the neighborhood association shared a newspaper article on a social media platform where the municipal government was criticized for not changing Francoist street names in the neighborhood and added the message: ‘A reminder that there are a few streets in Vistabella that do not comply with the Law of Historical Memory, and therefore the City Council of Murcia is not complying with the law.’ One person responded with the exclamation: ‘Leave my neighborhood alone! (…) Which name do you want the streets in our neighborhood to have?’ Eduardo, a member of the neighborhood association, replied: ‘Certainly not the name of fascist murderers.’ Another person added cynically, ‘I would put the name of killer communists.’ Eduardo defended himself: ‘who said anything about names like that? As far as I know, nobody. Besides, I am not a communist. For the extreme right, all those who do not support their ideology are communists.’

These and many other social media comments demonstrated that the claim to change the toponymic order of the neighborhood activated a well-established script of political confrontation engrained in the local moral economy of civic belonging. The civic status of those who follow the script of a clear-cut break with the legacy of the Franco regime and of creating a new standard of neutrality is morally devalued by the reproach that they are enemies of the local community who pose a threat to ordinary people’s way of life. Once this confrontational script is initiated, it tends towards a polarization and leaves little space for mediatory positions and compromises. Eduardo’s argumentative counterstrategy was, first, to neutralize the criticism by distancing himself from the accusation of being a communist and, second, to turn the moral reproach around: those who call decent residents of the neighborhood communists are right-wing radicals who thus forfeit their right to participate in the debate.

Alongside this confrontational script, there were also ‘materialist’ voices suggesting a reframing of the debate, stressing that efforts to rename the streets would divert attention from more serious problems, such as poverty. Víctor wrote: ‘Enough with Franco. So many people in need and always the same story.’ He argued that it is not the names, but the insistence of the importance of symbolic representations, what causes the conflict and distracts from more relevant problems. In response, Eduardo defended the change of street names using a legalistic argument:

‘Keeping the names of Francoists on the streets is ILLEGAL, in case you didn’t know. By the way, Vistabella’s neighborhood association is open to the whole neighborhood, if you care so much about [the neighborhood] problems (…) You can get information on how to become a member of the association, for only 10 Euros a year. Greetings.’

By cynically inviting Víctor to the neighborhood association meetings, Eduardo turned the accusation around and implied that the reference to more pressing material problems in the neighborhood is only a red herring meant to distract attention from the issue of illegal street names.

Based on previous experiences of how easily the confrontational script could be used to undermine their agenda, the activists pursued the strategy of suggesting new names that were sufficiently neutral so that they could not easily be accused of pursuing a left-wing political agenda. Elena suggested to select women with diverse political backgrounds who were pioneers in different fields of society like science, architecture or the arts. She argued it would make the toponymic space of the ‘neighborhood symbolically fairer and more inclusive.’ ⁶ While the choice of women as name-givers, even if they were not clearly politically left-wing, could still be interpreted as a feminist agenda, also other names were proposed, such as ‘Music Street’ or ‘Dance Street,’ that would not be seen as having any ideological or political insinuation.

The greatest success of the association, however, was the renaming of the central square of the neighborhood in 2017. The name was changed from Plaza Federico Servet, who was a prominent member of the Falange, to Plaza de los Patos (Ducks’ Square). This was the popular name of the square, referring to the fact that originally there had been a fountain with ducks in the middle of it. During the interview, Martín reflected on the political strategies of the neighborhood association and explained that he had learnt to step out of the confrontational script because it produced too much resistance. Instead, he argued, it is important for a neighborhood association to consistently follow a more inclusive script of civic belonging that can mobilize support across divides: ‘I think that one of our successes (…) is that our politics (…) is work and smile; and (…) not to return the insult. Then there is another thing, that we do not position ourselves politically. We do not allow political party meetings here, that is totally forbidden.’ ⁷ However, during the renaming celebration of the central square it also became clear how easy it was to fall back into the confrontational scheme deeply rooted in the left-wing’s post-Francoist understanding of civic belonging. In his speech, Martín exclaimed, megaphone in hand, how great it was that the square had finally been renamed: ‘It doesn’t make any sense that it was named after Federico Servet (…) He was the head of Falange, and a fascist. And we don’t want fascists in this neighborhood.’ ⁸ When Damián conveyed his impression that Martín’s behavior appeared more confrontative than what he had said before, Elena, who had joined the conversation, made the ironic remark: ‘That was the excitement!’ And Martín added laughingly: ‘Yes! And because I like to provoke sometimes. I should really give up doing that, but I like it, (…) it was fun.’ ⁹ Obviously, in this moment of victory, the confrontational script conveyed Martín a sentiment of pleasure that ‘flavored his courage with the sweetest emotions of battle’ (Mailer, 2016: 149). Nevertheless, Martín’s brief exuberance also reveals the post-authoritarian logic of the local debate. Although he obviously took satisfaction in defeating his political opponents, he and his friends had to look for inclusive names – like Plaza de los Patos – that did not express their own political convictions but facilitated a viable compromise for the neighborhood. The activists took care that their suggestions could not be discredited by the accusation of being a political imposition.

However, Martín’s speech on the day of the renaming shows that the moral economy of civic belonging is multi-layered. Within the blink of an eye, it was possible to switch from a more inclusive political script of civic belonging to a more confrontative one. Nevertheless, Martín expressed his conviction that it is necessary to leave behind the confrontational scripts of the post-Franco era:

‘I think that (...) every organization that wants people to participate needs new methods of action, new discourses, because the old ones of the left (…) are a little bit stagnant.’

The new methods to which Martín refers are, in his view, better suited to moving things forward, because they stimulate changes in the local moral economy of civic belonging and promise to overcome the stagnant confrontational scripts of the past.

Contested street names in Johannesburg

In South Africa, questions of renaming streets and squares are a way of coming to terms with the legacy of the colonial past and the apartheid regime. The revision of the South African toponymic landscape does not follow a legal top-down approach like in Spain but is regulated by a bottom-up procedure. In a first step, citizens or government agencies can submit proposals to the responsible Provincial Geographical Names Committee where the street or square is located. After reviewing the proposals and initiating a local participation procedure, the committees make suggestions to the South African Geographical Names Council. The Council evaluates the suggestions again and recommends the promising ones to the Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, who takes the final decision.

The relevance of street names for the post-authoritarian politics of symbolic recognition and inclusion is reflected by the fact that the Johannesburg City Administration has published an official guideline with the telling name ‘Policy on the Naming of Streets and Public Places.’ In this document it is noted that names play an important ‘cultural role’ and therefore ‘should reflect the rich histories, diverse heritage, cultural identities and natural resources of the area’ (Johannesburg Municipality, 2017: 3). The guideline acknowledges the importance of place-naming as a symbolic means of creating an inclusive social space and circumscribes the responsibility of the city administration to work towards a fair representation of the demographically and culturally diverse groups that live in the city. This includes, according to the city administration, the rededication of streets whose names are considered ‘offensive or hurtful’ (Johannesburg Municipality, 2017: 12). From the perspective of many black Johannesburgers, this is especially true of names, events and persons connected to apartheid and colonialism. In this context severe toponymic struggles have emerged in the past, as in the well-known example of the #Rhodesmustfall movement, which started in 2015 at the University of Cape Town with the demand to remove the Cecil Rhodes statue from campus. As a result, a nationwide discussion developed, and the removal of statues was discussed or practiced in various cities, also in Johannesburg. ¹⁰

Symbolic recognition through monuments and names was also considered important by those who perceived transformations of the toponymic space as a challenge to the established mode of civic belonging. This included South Africans who either did not distance themselves from the history of apartheid or suspected that the toponymic conflicts might too easily turn into the ostracizing of the ethnic and racial groups that they represent. Fear of the latter was widespread among conservative white Afrikaners in Mindalore. In the period between 2019 and 2020, when Manuel did fieldwork, rumors abounded that the municipal government wanted to change street names in the neighborhood. Giniel, a conservative Afrikaner in his late 50s who lived in Hendrik Potgieter Street, defended the name of his street. He argued that Potgieter was one of the Voortrekkers ¹¹ and had died long before apartheid was established. Therefore, he could not be blamed for it. Since in the view of Giniel and his friends there were no historical reasons for renaming the street, they suspected the government of secretly pursuing another agenda. Giniel argued: ‘So part of how they [the current ANC government] got into the whites’ minds – it doesn’t matter whether you are German, Afrikaans, Italian or whatever – is that they took away Afrikaner cultural heritage by changing street names to start off with, okay?’ ¹² His friend Edwin explained further: ‘When you start losing your culture you start losing who you are as a person.’

People like Giniel and Edwin were critical of renaming streets because they depicted it as one step within a larger political project of eradicating or at least substantially weakening the symbolic presence of Afrikaner culture in public spaces, which endangers, as Edwin highlighted, their personal identity and their civic belonging in South African society. From this perspective, it is not the legacy of Afrikaner history in South African society that stands in the way of creating a sufficiently inclusive civic space in Mindalore, but rather the government’s effort to break the post-apartheid social contract that promised to protect cultural minority rights. ¹³ While on other occasions the symbolic recognition of Afrikaner heritage was seen as problematic because black citizens felt offended in terms of their civic status through the exposure to names and symbols that stand for white supremacist ideologies, Giniel, Edwin and other conservative Afrikaners around them claimed to be offended by the loss of the right to be represented as a cultural group in the public space, especially in an area they considered their neighborhood.

Despite the obvious difference between these positions, it is noteworthy that both sides referred to the post-authoritarian ethos of an inclusive and diverse public space free of symbols of oppression and inequality. References to this moral imaginary can be found across the political spectrum – including conservative Afrikaners in Mindalore, ANC-politicians, the activists of the #Rhodesmustfall movement or even radical secessionist minority organizations. This demonstrates that these groups operate in a shared moral economy and position themselves in relation to one another. The groups, nevertheless, differ significantly in terms of what they understand concretely as equal and just representation. Several black policymakers and activists support efforts for a more encompassing transformation of toponymic spaces to eradicate symbols of inequality referring to apartheid, colonialism, political oppression and white supremacy. For them, these changes are a pathway to a more inclusive and more just society. In this context, especially the criticism of racism plays an important role as a means of intervening in the moral economy of civic belonging. Since the end of apartheid, it has become a powerful script that aims at the ‘regulation of public identifications (…) by the threat of having to live in a radically uninhabitable and unacceptable identification’ (Butler, 2006: XXVII).

In contrast to the racism frame, the Afrikaners in Mindalore used a frame of cultural minority rights which was prominently developed in the context of multiculturalism (Kymlicka, 2003). Given the unequal power relations between minority and majority, the model of multiculturalism presumes that equality requires laws and policies that protect cultural minority rights in order not to set ‘incentive[s] to destroy the societal culture of national minorities’ (Kymlicka, 2003: 100).

Although groups with sometimes antagonistic political worldviews might generally agree on the importance of symbolic recognition as a means of establishing equality among different groups of citizens, there is disagreement about whether the predominant framework for discussing politics of toponymic continuity and change should be that of racism and white supremacy or rather of multiculturalism and the protection of cultural minority rights. Each of these frames allows for different speech acts and forms of criticism. If whites in general or Afrikaners in particular are primarily seen as supporters and profiteers of the apartheid state, toponymic continuity can easily be understood as symbolic reproduction of racist ideologies and a violation of the dignity of the victims of the apartheid regime. According to a cultural minority frame, Afrikaners can depict themselves as a group that is politically and culturally threatened by the domination of the black majority in post-apartheid Johannesburg and can therefore claim the protection of existing symbolic representations of what they conceive as their culture.

Besides these two antagonistic frames for understanding the politics of recognition there are voices that take an alternative stance on the issue of renaming altogether. Eve, a black resident of an adjacent informal settlement who has worked since 1996 as a janitor in a church in Mindalore, was critical of the weight that was given to the politics of symbolic representation. She argued that changing street names was a waste of resources if at the same time larger parts of the black population in the area were living in poverty. Different from the positions we discussed above, Eve prioritized the alleviation of poverty as a modality of civic belonging over symbolic recognition: ‘Renaming costs money, the money we don’t have, the money can build work, people’s houses and other stuff.’ ¹⁴ This does not mean that Eve was per se against the rededication of streets and places but just saw it as problem of lower relevance that diverted attention and resources from more pressing problems of the black population of Johannesburg, like poverty, lack of job opportunities, housing and infrastructure.

Clifford, a black middle-class resident of Mindalore who worked for a government agency, took an ironic stance on issues of re-naming. On a joint drive through Soweto with Manuel and his old friend Tabo, Clifford referred to one of the streets they were driving along by its old name of ‘Old Potchefstroom Road.’ ¹⁵ When his friend Tabo corrected him that the street was called ‘Chris Hani Road’ ¹⁶ , Clifford laughed and said to Manuel: ‘Oh, don’t tell anyone that I used the old wrong colonial name.’ ¹⁷ His remark can be interpreted as a relativization of the debates about symbolic representation in South Africa. He indicated that he, as black South African, who was guiding Manuel, a white German, through the neighborhood where he had grown up should have used the new name referring to an assassinated ANC leader rather than the old Afrikaans name. At the same time, his laughter showed that he distanced himself from those who take street names overly seriously. By ironically making Manuel his confidant (‘don’t tell anyone’), he drew a line between ‘people like us,’ who can relativize the question of symbolic representations like street names with a wink, and those who fight serious political struggles about them.

Eve and Clifford’s relativizing view of street names suggests that the intensity of toponymic struggles depends on how closely the connection between symbolic representations and power structures of society is understood. If people perceive them as tightly linked, like the conservative Afrikaners in Mindalore or the activists in Murcia, symbols are highly important because they are means to transform society. If symbolic representations are considered subjects of lesser relevance, as in the case of Eve and Clifford in Johannesburg or Víctor in Murcia, toponymic questions lose their urgency. Therefore, we can learn especially from our interlocutors in Johannesburg that struggles over symbolic representations as a mode of civic belonging divide the political landscape not only into supporters and opponents of names or monuments, but also into those who attach great political weight to symbolic representation and those who do not. While what could be called a symbolist position assumes that symbolic representations are important because they reveal the truth about deeper political realities, in the materialist view they appear as merely symbolic, that is, secondary in relation to poverty. Moreover, Clifford has drawn our attention to irony as a means of modulating political framings, which can easily be applied in private conversations and when toponymic conflicts lose momentum.

The moral economy of civic belonging in post-authoritarian societies

We have shown in this article that tensions arose in Murcia and Johannesburg when it came to finding ways to deal with the authoritarian historical legacies of Spain and South Africa. While in the neighborhood in Johannesburg these tensions were rooted in the racial divide emerging out of colonialism and the apartheid regime, in the neighborhood in Murcia the political left-right divide and the Franco dictatorship were at the center of the debate. Both cases show that when toponymic debates gain momentum they tend towards a polarization of the local moral economy of civic belonging. As we demonstrated, this is related to the mobilization of established confrontational scripts of civic belonging. For the advocates of renaming streets and squares, the status quo was a reminder of humiliations of the past and the unresolved conflicts about justice, racism and the dignity of victims of political violence. For those who defended the status quo, the demands to change names threatened the fragile social contracts of the respective post-authoritarian societies. In South Africa the social contract to which the conservative white Afrikaners referred was the imaginary of a rainbow nation that protects cultural minority rights; in Spain it was the post-Francoist imaginary of the pact of oblivion.

To our surprise, however, many of our interlocutors across political divides both in Murcia and Johannesburg agreed in their opinion that authorities and civil society should care about creating an inclusive symbolic space of civic belonging. We also found materialist voices arguing that too much money and attention was being paid to the politics of symbolic recognition at the cost of more pressing problems of material well-being. ¹⁸ However, in the sketched toponymic struggles it was easy to claim of the opposite side that their pleasant-sounding words were only a façade to hide authoritarian impulses to assert their hegemony in the urban space. Even in a case like Murcia, where changes were not initiated by a political elite but by activists, they were suspected by their political opponents of secretly pursuing a radical left-wing agenda and aspiring to gain power over the neighborhood.

With all that said, we can argue that in post-authoritarian societies, struggles for symbolic recognition in the public sphere require references to common moral goods such as inclusivity, dignity, multiculturalism, neutrality or justice. At the same time, and somehow paradoxically, these common goods and the groups that invoke them are rendered suspect in the same process. This paradox of symbolic recognition could be pessimistically understood in terms of ideology: conceiving the reference to common moral goods as a legitimizing façade that disguises underlying particularist group interests. However, the two case studies also allow for a more optimistic reading. There is a widely shared consensus even among political opponents in both cities that public spaces should be symbolically inclusive. Moreover, as the Murcia case demonstrated, the reference to common moral goods had to be credible to some extent to gain support and decrease resistance. The need to find acceptance beyond the narrow political and racial boundaries of one’s in-group distinguishes the post-authoritarian moral economies studied from their authoritarian predecessors. In fact, the necessity to find common moral ground created more inclusive social effects than were initially aspired to or feared by the respective parties. The greatest achievement of the leftist activists of Vistabella was that the central square was given the politically neutral and inclusive name Plaza de los Patos. Although the white Afrikaners feared that references to representatives of their group and culture would be eradicated from the local map of a traditional Afrikaner neighborhood, the ANC government did not take serious efforts to do so. As the case of Martín in Murcia indicates, this ‘inclusivity beyond intention’ seems to be the result not so much of the ambitions of the groups struggling for toponymic change or continuity respectively but of the internal logic of post-authoritarian moral economies on how to negotiate these processes. This requires actors to show an effort to dispel the moral suspicion that references to common goods are being instrumentalized to disguise particularist group interests.