Street names carry stories with them. What they tell us about Gauteng in South Africa

As a design researcher working in urban graphic heritage, I explore how everyday graphic objects communicate in public spaces.

I have started to think of the city as a kind of living, dispersed archive.

It is not an archive that replaces formal institutions, but one that exists alongside them.

In a recent mapping project that I led for the Gauteng City-Region Observatory in South Africa, almost 44,000 street names were analysed across Gauteng, the country’s economic heartland.

The aim was to explore how street names tell stories about the region, its people, associated places and cultural heritages made visible through them.

It found that 57% streets were classified as names of people.

This means that Gauteng’s everyday street network also functions as a vast, dispersed memorial landscape.

The mapping project used data from OpenStreetMap and grouped the street names into four broad categories: people, geographical places, plants and animals, and other names.

Grouping them revealed patterns that would be difficult to notice from individual street signs.

This connects to my wider research on how ordinary graphic objects communicate heritage in the urban environment.

A street name may seem like a simple tool for navigation, but each one can connect the past to the present and influence how we understand a place.

This is important when we think about belonging.

The Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s most recent Quality of Life Survey shows that 21% of residents feel they do not belong where they live, while 31% feel that nobody cares about people like them.

This matters because street names do more than help us to find our way in our daily travels.