Toponymy as Commodity: Exploring the Economic Dimensions of Urban Place Names

In recent years the study of urban toponymy (place names) has been revitalized by the emergence of a ‘critical toponymies' approach. This focuses on the cultural politics of place naming and the decisions involved in attributing names to the urban landscape. However, in contemporary cities place names have an economic role in addition to their political role. In particular, there have been recent calls for more attention to the commodification of place‐naming rights and practices. This article seeks to respond to these calls by addressing the issue of urban place names as commodities. It begins by examining the naming of sports stadia by corporate sponsors. It then considers a range of ways in which private‐sector interests are increasingly influencing the naming of the urban landscape, from buildings and neighbourhoods to individual streets. Even the material signage that identifies street names can be appropriated within branding and promotional strategies. Moreover, urban place names are increasingly incorporated into a range of commercially produced spatial datasets collated by private companies. The article ends by proposing a number of directions for future research into the economic role of urban place names and the commodification of toponymy more broadly.     

In deep water: diving site names on Norfolk Island

A linguistic and cultural analysis of diving site names and their role as toponyms is absent in Pacific research and studies into scuba diving tourism. This article analyzes a corpus of 38 diving site names collected during interview-based fieldwork on Norfolk Island. The analyses demonstrate that the naming of Norfolk Island diving sites can be perceived as a type of tourism management – through the names, diving sites are ascribed varying degrees of linguistic, cultural, and historical significance. Previous studies in tourism research have argued that tourism can be perceived as a modern form of pilgrimage, and that the naming of tourism sites is a way of sacralizing sites in order to emphasize their importance within processes of pilgrimage. The results of this article reveal empirically that Norfolk diving sites are part of a sacralization process, where transference of the cultural, historical, and environmental significance from names as language to locations as place occurs. The article puts forward diving site names not only as a toponymic taxon of interest to toponymy and linguistics but also for island and coastal studies in the Pacific and elsewhere.