Mapping Diversity
Kyiv’s street names are being heavily de-russified
About 500 streets in Kyiv have been renamed since 2014 – many of them changed their name after the military agression by Russia in 2022. Ukrainian and Western history and figures have now taken the place of Soviet or Russian ones.
Who are Italy’s city streets dedicated to?
Only a handful of streets in Italy’s major cities are dedicated to women. And those women are mostly religious figures.
The most popular figures in the street names of European capitals
We have compiled a ranking of the 100 men and women that appear most frequently in the toponyms of 15 European capitals. There’s a lot of saints and white men from the 19th and 20th century, but there’s also quite a few actresses and female Nobel laureates.
What do Prague’s street names say about us?
Of the Prague streets named after famous people, less than 5 percent bear the names of women. Diversity is also lacking in terms of the nationalities represented and the periods in which the personalities lived. These days, the city’s local-history commission encourages neutral names – but neutrality is an illusion.
The gender gap in Europe’s street names is here to stay
In 30 of Europe's biggest cities, streets named after women make up only 9 per cent of the streets dedicated to individuals. The imbalance has started to narrow in some places, but progress is too slow: at this rate, it would take centuries to really close the gap.
How we used OpenStreetMap and Wikidata to map street names across Europe – Part 2
A walkthrough presenting the data sources used for the "Mapping Diversity" project and of how we extracted and combined journalistically relevant information – and of the many challenges encountered during the process.
Mapping Diversity: the gender gap in Italian toponyms
A pilot project analysing the gender ratio in street names in Italy's 21 regional capitals. The idea is to replicate similar analyses for other countries or topics related to street names in the future.
