The naming of cityscapes has never been a disinterested or straightforward affair. This article, which introduces the special issue on multifunctional urban toponymy in the Romanov Empire, opens by providing an overview of recent developments in critical place-name studies and bringing this field into dialogue with the historiography of the empire. It then delineates the main waves of toponymic changes in the empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and proposes a typology of the main categories of imperial toponyms used for (re)naming. Our main argument is that place names performed a wider array of functions, beyond just orientational and ideological, and were also used to gain socio-economic capital and enhance the social desirability and economic value of urban areas. Having introduced the contributions to the special issue, the article then outlines several avenues for future research.

In recent years, the emergence of both the spatial and spectral turns has meant a more intense focus on the importance of space in supernatural narratives, especially within modern, industrialized cities. Less has been said, however, about the importance of understanding the affective resonances of space in early modern tales. This article examines tales of ghost sightings in London and Southwark that appeared in print. It argues that these hauntings created affective topographies that had both individual and communal resonances. In turn, the article explores how these emotional responses contributed to conceptions of space, community and neighbourhood in early modern London. As such, it demonstrates how paying attention to supernatural narratives can reveal a hidden geography of the city, one that is shaped by supernatural storytelling, emotions and close conceptions of community.

In this article, I explore the history of Bokaro Steel City – a planned industrial settlement conceived in the 1960s in the Indian state of Jharkhand as part of India’s post-Independence modernization programme. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials, I demonstrate the unique socially inclusive approach of tackling social inequalities, focusing specifically on how planners approached social reproduction. By foregrounding the distinctiveness of Bokaro’s urban design, I argue for a re-evaluation of modernist urbanities, delinking them from the exclusively Eastern European monotowns or Western superblocks and demonstrating how Indian planners adapted modernist ideas to meet their local objectives.

This article considers a curious document – Baker’s Australian County Atlas – which contains carefully illustrated maps of each of the 19 counties in the colony of New South Wales in the mid-1840s. The analysis seeks to bridge the gap between high-level geographical studies of the British invasion of New South Wales and historical analysis of settler colonial property formation. We argue that the Atlas reveals the mechanics of territorial accumulation and Aboriginal dispossession in nineteenth-century New South Wales in their historical and material specificity, locating instances of ‘improvement’ – clearing, fencing and the construction of temporary and permanent buildings – at the centre of settler colonial land administration and sovereignty. The article demonstrates that the legal obligation to improve ultimately regulated colonial urbanization, enacting a process in which buildings and other structures functioned less as ends in themselves than as discrete operations within a more pervasive and abiding process of dispossession.

Orenburg, a Russian border fortress on the Kazakh steppe founded in 1743, was the first city of the Tsarist Empire that was provided with a full set of official street names. While toponymic designations in empires have often been investigated in the context of the struggle of competing national groups for visibility, the case of Orenburg provides an example of how toponymic designations served to claim a newly conquered region as an integral part of the empire. As Orenburg’s street names were rarely in use in everyday life, this article argues moreover that both their orientation and representation functions were of little importance, and that their main purpose was to demonstrate the progressive governing techniques the administration had at its disposal.

The 1893 Dorpat-to-Iur′ev (present-day Tartu) renaming law marks a key moment in the Romanov imperial government’s efforts to de-Germanize and Russify the Baltic provinces. This article brings legal perspectives to critical place-name studies by examining how the Romanov Empire used law to regulate and exert control over naming practices, and how local inhabitants leveraged their legal knowledge to spot ambiguities, exploit loopholes and defend naming rights in court, thereby engaging in various forms of toponymic resistance. By situating the 1893 renaming law within the broader imperial legal system, this article argues that even ideologically motivated changes to urban toponymy could be subject to legal checks and balances.

In 1872, Hong Kong’s colonial government passed an ordinance prohibiting hawkers from crying wares in the parts of town where Europeans lived and worked. This was precipitated by a local discourse on ostensibly Chinese noise that took shape in the English-language newspapers that constructed Chinese people as intrinsically noisy and Europeans as noise averse. These ideas drew upon existing rhetoric produced in response to noise nuisance in London and a broader transatlantic discourse on the relationship between noise and civilization. The transformation of these ideas in Hong Kong established a model whereby Chinese people were producers of noise, unaffected by hearing it, while intrinsically quiet Europeans suffered from hearing noise. This process justified the differential treatment of space, enabling the creation of a privileged ‘European’ zone legally protected from ‘Chinese’ noise.

This article combines approaches from critical place-name studies and the ‘imperial turn’ to examine the perception of Vilnius and the so-called Northwestern Region as Russian ‘national territory’ rather than merely an imperial possession. In the second half of the nineteenth century, to counter the significant Polish influence, the tsarist elite intensified the ‘imperialization’ of Vilnius’ cityscape more than in other borderland towns. Meanwhile, the local public, lacking any real influence over place-naming, lived in an alternative reality and continued using old names. The case of Vilnius illustrates the empire’s systematic but largely failed efforts to intervene into subjects’ lives.

Direklerarası Street was a popular promenade and entertainment hub in late Ottoman Istanbul. It was constructed in the arasta form along the historical Divanyolu in the 1720s and largely retained its spatial configuration until the 1880s. This article examines the spatial transformation of Direklerarası Street from the 1880s to the 1910s, situating it within the broader dynamics of late Ottoman urban reform. It investigates urban interventions such as the demolition and reconstruction of arcade columns, street lighting, pavement reconfigurations and square design, not merely as outcomes of modern urban regulations but also as processes intricately linked to the various dynamics shaped by the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of the late Ottoman capital.

This article examines how Black business directories from the Jim Crow era provide insight into Black communal life and urban citizenship. These directories offered guidance and legibility to inhabitants of the USA’s new ‘Negro main streets’, while also inscribing Black urban identities into the spatial syntax of modernizing American cities. An analysis of over 200 directories across four eras shows how these publications created a space for Black urban citizenship to develop by including practical information; by highlighting community leaders, property ownership and contributions to local taxes; and by urging voter registration and government lobbying. This research suggests that Black business directories are a rich resource for understanding Black urban history.

Eighteenth-century Stockholm saw a rise in illegitimate births. Yet, premarital sex was illegal, and the early modern household offered few private spaces. Where did unmarried people meet for courtship, intimacy and sex in the early modern city? In this article, we explore the spaces used for illicit sex through a database containing baptismal records of illegitimate children in eighteenth-century Stockholm. We use these records to map the locations where and approximate times when mothers stated their children were conceived. We find that shared households and workplaces were the most common meeting places for couples, that sexual activity took place towards the city centre and not on its outskirts and that urban households in the eighteenth century appear to have been characterized by a porousness and openness that allowed for the creation of pockets of privacy. Lastly, we find little evidence for any organized sex trade in the sources.

From the 1890s to the 1920s across the American Midwest, newspapers reported arrests and altercations in ‘Cocaine Alleys’. Not all of these arrests involved people under the influence of drugs, but the term nevertheless became a non-geographic cultural construct highlighting readers’ fears about racialized drug use. By describing low-income Black women as ‘queens’ central to these spaces, newspapers mingled gender, race, criminality and drug use. The ‘Cocaine Alley Queen’ stereotype applied to Black women obscured the reality of White women’s greater propensity to recreational and medical narcotic addiction. As Black migrants moved from Southern states to Northern Midwestern industrialized cities, this reporting trend appeared in cities with higher Black populations than the state average. Newspapers created an intersectional, geographic identity that collected fears and stereotypes about drug use and Black communities when narcotics were accessible, and reformers sought to discipline Black, urban, female working-class bodies and impose middle-class behaviours on them.

This article takes up the notion of ‘difficult heritage’ to explore the management of industrial legacies in eastern Ukraine, with a focus on developments between 2014 and 2022. While acknowledging that industrial heritage is not ‘difficult’ in the same way as inherited sites of genocide or internment, I contend that it too was ‘contested and awkward’, unsettling attempts to rebrand and reimagine the region in line with shifts in national memory politics. As the environmentally damaging infrastructural inheritance of empire, which nevertheless also played a community-shaping role in the local context, industrial legacies were present in the landscape in ‘disruptive ways’, opening up social divisions and exposing cultural fractures. In this article, I explore how local artists and activists responded to the condition of state abandonment of this heritage, developing the analytical category of ‘critical care’ to describe processes of community-led preservation and creative repurposing at this time.

This article examines the heritagization of nuclear urbanity as a distinctive form of Soviet industrial urbanism. The research focuses on the satellite settlement of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, which exemplifies the ‘presentism’ characteristic of Soviet heritage – an entanglement of multiple temporalities alongside goals of propaganda and preservation. We argue that local engagements with nuclear cultural heritage are rooted in the fact that commemorative practices were embedded from the inception of the atomic town’s development. This early transformation of nuclear urbanity into heritage ensured that the former Soviet atomic town preserved not only material traces but also a lasting infrastructure of social memory and urban imagery, mobilized by various actors for identity building and future negotiations.

Baku, Azerbaijan, is one of the most significant historical sites of industrial oil production in the world. Yet, the oil industry is largely ignored in the official heritage and tourism strategies. Drawing on ethnographic research in Baku, this article examines the place of the industrial past in the top-down and bottom-up heritage practices. It identifies three different heritage discourses pursued by different actors: the government, state-linked corporate actors and city tour guides. It argues that industrial heritage has significant touristic potential which, in the context of a strongly centralized state, can only be unlocked if the official heritage actors incorporate the industrial past into its heritage discourse.

This article explores nuclear cultural heritage-making as a spatial activity in the context of nuclear secrecy and restricted access. It focuses on the closed city Sarov, formerly Arzamas-16, the birthplace of Soviet nuclear weapons. Since the end of the Cold War, Sarov has cultivated its image as a heritage site, opening a Museum of Nuclear Weapons, pioneering nuclear scientists and local history, as well as reconstructing religious sites. Based on interviews and fieldwork in Russia, this article maps the hitherto unstudied development of cultural heritage infrastructure in a closed city and its diverse and conflicting political uses and assesses the ambivalence of nuclear material culture as it is selectively preserved and deployed to achieve these conflicting goals.

Although industrial modernization in Eurasia both preceded and outlived the Soviet project, in popular and scholarly imaginations, manufacturing cities located in the continent’s eastern regions are often understood as quintessentially ‘Soviet’. Yet, this perception tends to ignore the ways in which earlier urban developments were integrated with socialist innovations. This special issue seeks to decentre the concept of ‘Soviet urbanism’ by placing socialist forms into a longue durée perspective on industrial modernity and destabilizing popular equations of ‘post-socialism’ with ‘post-industrialism’. The collection’s contributions explore how modernist urbanism has intersected a variety of political and economic regimes over the past century and how evolving industrial processes continue to shape and reconfigure Eurasia’s urban landscapes.

Focusing on the case of Mongolia during the Cold War, this article analyses how the goals of resource extraction and socialist development shaped urban and regional planning in the country. The article examines the negotiations for development assistance between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, East Germany and Czechoslovakia since 1962, with a particular focus on the foundation of the mining city of Erdenet in 1973 as a key outcome of these negotiations. It demonstrates that mineral extraction was the central aspect of socialist assistance. The requirements and scale of mining infrastructure provided a distinct logic to urban and regional planning in the country. The article argues that in the socialist development vision, extraction was integral to urban thinking. The socialist approach to resource development in Mongolia employed a heavy-handed approach of extensive urbanization, contrasting sharply with post-socialist urban patterns shaped by investments from private extractive industries.

This article re-examines the geography of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Havana through the gendered lens of Black freedom and enslavement. The author uses fragmentary evidence surrounding the disappearance of Margarita, a young, enslaved girl in 1820s Havana, to suggest how the city’s African and African-descended residents navigated urban space in opposition to colonial design and function. In the process, the author suggests the ways in which the interventions of Black residents, influenced by the ecologies internal to the port, were pivotal to the production of urban space and the geographies of slavery.

This article explores urban memory politics in Komsomolsk-na-Amure – a military-industrial stronghold erected in Russia’s Far East in the 1930s with the participation of Komsomol volunteers from across the USSR. Known as pervostroiteli or ‘first-builders’, Komsomolsk’s founders became the city’s first chroniclers, who played an enduring role in shaping the city’s heroic popular image. I argue that the Soviet government’s active efforts to glorify Komsomol builders endowed the figures of pervostroiteli with unparalleled moral authority, which participants in the city’s early development used to curate their own memorialization and local historical politics.