The Change in Planned Nomenclature in Vuosaari, Helsinki

The change in planned nomenclature in Vuosaari, Helsinki Jani VUOLTEENAHO, Terhi AINIALA and Elina WIHURI 1. Introduction In terms of general visibility and the functioning of cities as spatial systems, the most prominent names in the urban landscape are those belonging to the planned nomenclature. The planned names differ from the traditional ones which have their origin in a spontaneous use of language. Traditionally, people have talked about places important for, e.g., working, living, and traveling by referring to them by names of their own invention. In modern urban environments, however, planned names are utilized for a variety of administrative as well as everyday purposes. At least in the bulk of cases, these names have not been originally coined by local residents. Instead, the norm is that a local authority has created and officially sanctioned the names. This article examines planned nomenclature in the urban environment. The study on which the article is based is part of a larger research project entitled “The transformation of the sociolinguisti- cally diversifying neighbourhoods of Helsinki” in which the urban onomastic landscape is studied both linguistically and geographi- cally (Ainiala & Vuolteenaho 2006). The full study covers not only official and planned names but also everyday and unofficial names used by city dwellers. The unofficial names are, nevertheless, not discussed in this article. Besides Finnish nomenclature, we consider examples from continental European and Nordic urban settings in the theoretical section of the article. The focus of this article is on town plan names and housing corporation names. The town plan names are names that have been planned specifically and authoritatively for a planned area within a town. Typically they are names of city districts, streets, squares, and parks (Viljamaa-Laakso 1999a, 45–47). Town plan names and names for roads in sparsely populated areas in today’s Finland number about 992625_ONOMA_42_12_Vuolteenaho2625_ONOMA_42_12_Vuolteenaho 221313 115-02-20105-02-2010 111:25:381:25:38 214 JANI VUOLTEENAHO, TERHI AINIALA AND ELINA WIHURI 300,000 (Paikkala 2000, 27). Furthermore, the number of such names is growing as new urban areas are being built. Previously, urban place names have been scrutinized above all from the viewpoint of language planning. Different administrative instructions and recommendations about name giving to streets and other areas have been issued. In Finland, the most comprehensive guide book is Yhteinen nimiympäristömme: nimistönsuunnittelun opas [“Our common onomastic environment: a handbook of name planning”] (Paikkala, Pitkänen & Slotte 1999). Moreover, the development and history of name planning in different cities have been studied. The street names in bigger cities and, above all, the motifs behind naming have been examined. Several publications in Finland have addressed street names: e.g. Helsingin kadunnimet [“The street names of Helsinki”] (1970/1981, 1979, 1999). Furthermore, during the 21st century, the attitudes of urban dwellers towards the official names in their own surroundings have been the focus of several studies (e.g. Aalto 2002, Ainiala 2004, Päres-Schulman 2005, Yli-Kojola 2005). In Sweden a comparative study was made by Carina Johansson (2007). In these studies conducted in the spirit of ‘folk linguistics’ (see e.g., Niedzielski & Preston 2000) it has been noted, inter alia, that the descriptiveness of a name is being regarded as an important feature by local dwellers. The names of housing corporations are neither town plan names nor primarily even toponyms in the conventional sense of the term. Instead, they are place-bound commercial names given to the units of private dwellings in Finland (typically apartment blocks and terraced houses owned by a group of shareholders). Throughout the article, it has to be borne in mind that the naming of housing corporations is controlled by totally different (governmental trade registration) author- ities than the planned toponymy of local governmental areas. Accord- ing to the Finnish act on business names, every housing corporation (henceforth abbreviated Hsg. Ltd) in Finland must have a name. Addi- tionally, a statute from 1990 determines that even a prefix expressing the locality (i.e. the home town) of the housing corporation must be included in the name. (Sjöblom 2006, 85, 187.)1 The names and name elements of housing corporations are being used in marketing and partly in everyday language use in the same way as toponyms while 1 The name of a home town (e.g. Helsinki) is not mentioned in the name examples of this article. 992625_ONOMA_42_12_Vuolteenaho2625_ONOMA_42_12_Vuolteenaho 221414 115-02-20105-02-2010 111:25:381:25:38 THE CHANGE IN PLANNED NOMENCLATURE IN VUOSAARI, HELSINKI 215 referring to objects in the urban environment (Sjöblom 2000, 378; Sjöblom 2006, 20). Thus, they can be regarded as part of the official nomenclature in cities (Ainiala 2003, 209). The authoritatively planned and housing corporation nomenclatures, together with their relation to the urban development and city planning, have been hitherto studied only infrequently. This provides a general rationale for focusing on them in the present article. More specifically, we aim to describe how the name planning and naming practices related to the two urban name-types have changed in the course of four recent decades. As a research area we have chosen Vuosaari, a relatively new, fitfully grown seaside suburb in eastern- most Helsinki. Settled nowadays by 35,000 inhabitants, the district’s urbanization started more or less co-incidentally with its annexation to the Finnish capital in 1966. By a qualitative analysis of nearly 650 local names coined over the course of last decades, we are tracking underlying naming practices and motifs behind the development of its authoritatively planned and housing corporation nomenclatures. As a theoretical backup to the approach of this article, we will first elucidate certain important tendencies in the administrative naming practices. After that, the town plan names and the housing corporation names are analyzed as a part of urban development and city planning. Our analysis follows the chronological order from the 1960s to the present day. Finally, conclusions about the changes in the onomastic landscape are made and reasons for them considered. 2. Tendencies in administrative naming practices In medieval and early modern Europe, the founders of towns “did not worry about naming the streets” (Langenfelt 1954, 331). “Naming streets was everybody’s business in those days: no communal authority cared” (ibid.). In Swedish and Finnish towns, street names could change “almost as often as the owner of the major house at the begin- ning of a lane changed” (Harling-Kranck 2006, 219). Unstable place name usage based on local topographic features and prominent build- ings dotted local townscapes (Langenfelt 1954, 331–332). Since the second half of the eighteenth century, however, systematic nominatory reforms started to spread in Europe. In particular, the related practices of affixing of street signs and the alternate numbering of houses were adopted all across the continent, as is evinced by London and other 992625_ONOMA_42_12_Vuolteenaho2625_ONOMA_42_12_Vuolteenaho 221515 115-02-20105-02-2010 111:25:381:25:38 216 JANI VUOLTEENAHO, TERHI AINIALA AND ELINA WIHURI English cities (1765), France outside Paris (1768), Copenhagen (1771), Geneva (1782), Paris (1805), Florence (1808), and Stockholm (only in 1832; in earlier decades the houses in the city had been numbered based on quarters) (Garrioch 1994, 37–38; Azaryahu 1996, 313; Har- ling-Kranck 2006, 230). In essence, the technocratic advantages of systematic naming became evident with an array of administrative functions: from postal delivery to property records management, the controlling of illegal housing construction, the recruitment of military troops, tax-collection, fire protection, policing, and so on. In subse- quent centuries, in many respects a similar development has taken place in cities throughout the world (Farvacque-Vitkovic et al. 2005). Subsequently, the rise of a number of European nation-states in the tumultuous nineteenth century gave rise to an ideological aspect of toponymic modernization: the use of street, square and other urban place names to introduce nationalistic political messages into popular consciousness. In particular, honorific (re-)naming was no longer “limited to celebrating dynastic glory but … increasingly associated with nation-building measures” (Azaryahu 1996, 314), becoming a prominent symbolic socialization strategy. Commemorative place names were found useful tools in legitimating and naturalizing “exist- ing power structures by linking the regime’s view of itself, its past and the world, with the seemingly mundane settings of everyday life” (Gill 2005, 481). Alongside single nominatory commemorations, a new model of thematic clustering—initiated in Paris in the early nineteenth century (Langenfelt 1954, 337; Harling-Kranck 2006, 217)— was also exploited. A major revision of Stockholm’s street nomenclature between 1885 and 1900, inter alia, was based on blatantly nationalistic, spatially clustered name-motifs of “patriotic and histor- ical names”, “Nordic mythology”, “famous places near the city”, “the southern provinces”, “the northern provinces”, “famous Swed- ish authors” and “prominent men within technology and engineering” (Pred 1990, 126–129; see also Stahre

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