The streets named after political figures and events are important parts of modern culture policy; it not only provides spatial and semiotic orientation to the city, but also serves to naturalize and legitimacy a selective vision of the past. Street naming thus can become a contest about who has the power to determine how the landscape is represented and whose history will be told. Although the Royal's logo has long since been removed from all government agencies, but most of the streets names of colonial legacy still were persisted in the city after Hong Kong's reunification to China in 1997. Most of these streets of Hong Kong named during the British colonial rule, were first written in English and then translated into Chinese. Whom were the streets named after? When were they named? Where did these streets appear? What is the relationship between street names and the region? It has also become an important clue to the development of Hong Kong's city blocks.
This paper considers street names as cultural landscapes and seeks to advance the critical toponymical study through the history and spatial changes of Hong Kong's street names to explore the street naming operations of Colonial governance with different block spaces in different periods. It is expected to compare the spatial distribution pattern of all kinds of street names through the analysis of street names, focusing on the relationship between the change of geographical names and political power, the ethnic groups and regional background to understand the spatial order of nation-building. With the purpose of exploring how the spatial politics of toponymy influenced the city and how the street names can be involved in "political" discourse. Especially in showing the relationship between the power and the toponymical inscriptions on the streetscapes.
Mots clés : street names|spatial politics|Colonial governance|critical toponymy|Hong Kong
A102980wH