Contenu du sommaire : Néotoponymie

This paper analyzes the relationships between toponymy and new regionalism: new territories, e.g. municipalities, regions or project-centered territories created by cooperation between previously existing territories, are being named. This naming process points, within neotoponymy – the invention of new place names -, to place names creation that are not designed to replace existing place names, but to brand new spaces generated by processes such as demarcation or devolution. We insist that the name production and selection process reflects local territorial conflicts even better than the final, adopted name. Case studies from both the North and the South allow us to identify general trends, chiefly the search for ‘traditional' references from pre-colonial or pre-modern times on the one hand, and the tendency of small towns to assert their dominance on their hinterlands on the other hand.

In Mali, municipalities were created in the context of decentralization. Their creation reveals an original process of toponymic renewal at the local level. Between 1994 and 1996, the main characteristics of the new municipalities (size, boundaries, centre and name) have been debated and negotiated. The Malian government associated local populations with the process of demarcating new municipal boundaries, thus allowing for social and spatial representations to be taken into account. The respective balance between the internal logic of territorial demarcation and social representations differ according to place. In the Kayes region for example, the mobility and social networks that structure space have been integrated in the making of new, local toponyms. The names of the new municipalities vary from adhesion to the centre and adoption of the name of the chef-lieu to “neutral” toponyms. The nature of toponyms thus sheds light on the contrasted results of the national territorial restructuring.

Place names in Quebec stem from three main origins: the native, French and English languages. Along history, these three sources have been diversely combined, according to the geopolitical context in which were established the relations between the cultures which they represented, particularly after these relations were embodied by the Geographical Commission (1912) and the Commission de toponymie (1977). Following the course of history, place names were changed or deleted, expressing political and territorial dynamics through the successive moves of neotoponymical frontiers. Contemporary neotoponymy is variegated and fraught with self-asserting cultural choices. The Commission de toponymie du Québec, which was created nine months after the Parti Québécois acceded to power, greatly contributed to these changes, e.g. by replacing French and English place names with native ones in Northern Quebec, launching a program for adopting new names commemorating the past, creating names as custodians of tradition and cultural heritage, etc. For their part, the highest governmental authorities have created a neotoponymical context by implementing a project of municipal and territorial mergers (2001). For instance, the merger of Métabetchouan and Lac-à-la-Croix initiated a reflection about the links between names, places and politics.

This paper is an attempt at providing helpful references to understand the evolution of territorial restructuring in Morocco in relation to the type of toponymy in use. To do so, we will se an interactive approach with the aim of bringing under scrutiny territorial policy and and toponymic data. This paper also deals with the study of mechanism and complex processes by examining the forms and meanings transmitted; and this in order to decipher the aims, the logics, the stakes, competition, compromise that take place in the context of territorial toponymic production in Morocco.

This reflection presents a diatopic approach which conceptualizes place as the result of contradictory forces identifiable at different geographic levels of analysis, from the global to the local scope. Contemporary immigration in the U.S. has profoundly transformed the social and cultural environment of metropolitan areas. In a society where organizational patterns of immigrants and minorities are identifiable in the urban structure, interactions between the immigrant communities and the receiving society translate themselves into an institutionalization of the ethnic neighborhood. In this process of ethnic qualification of urban places, recent toponymic strategies play a major symbolic role. For example, in Miami where 60 % of the population is of Caribbean descent, the renaming of immigrant settlement areas reflects the cultural change of the city and its internationalization as well as its sociospatial segmentation. In parallel, neotoponymy also has a functional dimension in the U.S. society. By the early 1980s, the decision to rename an inner city section of Metropolitan Miami ‘Little Haiti' came up to the impelling acknowledgement of the Haitian illegal presence by the local and federal authorities. What was at stake was the access to federal resources in order to respond to the tremendous social needs of this marginalized immigrant population. Thus, toponymy appears as an essential tool as well as the result of a power struggle between local power structures (municipalities, county government) and the federal government. At the same time, the stakes are also high at the neighborhood level, where place renaming reveals the changing relations between ethnic communities. One needs to carefully understand the relative significance of toponymy which is indeed often out of step with the more and more complex multiethnicity of U.S. international metropoles.

The launch at the end of 2005 of the call for project “Pôle d'Excellence Rurale” by the Interministerial Delegation for the Territorial Planning and Competitiveness (DIACT) supplies a remarkable state of the “projectivity” of the French rural territories in 2006. The generated corpus indeed counts 342 files deposited during the first wave. Within the frame of the research work presented here, these were the object of a first toponymic and typological analysis. So implemented, this study investigates the matters of the mobilized territorial resources and the strategies of territorial autonomy. It allows to present at the end a first proposition of the present perceptible forms of development in the French rural territories by categorizing them according to their relation with the patrimonial resource.

During the last 20 years, the number of associations of local governments has considerably increased in France. These new territories of co-operation are now essential because they have become some significant decisional levels in both urban and rural areas. Indeed, in a climate of increased territorial competition, the various forms of human and financial sharing between municipal governments try to manage economic effectiveness and social justice. Nevertheless, these new common territories are also carrying the political projects supported by the local elected people. Obviously, the name given to each of these new spaces of municipal co-operations is often revealing about these political stakes and territorial anchors at the local scale. Thus the aim of this article will be, through an original toponymic topology, to evaluate the possible trend effects and in particular, to measure if the place names reflect the political intentions as well as the local identities. 

In French urban redevelopment the common process is territorial adjustment. It is the result of public policy (urban, housing and social integration programs) and of cultural or socio-economic changes. The question is how these kinds of changes can be seen ? Current happenings in districts of some French towns, known as “difficult areas”, explain the lack of public intervention. They make us  think that socio-spatial segregations are increasing. What about the precursors of these situations? Graphing, writing, tracing, and marking are useful tools of territorial representation. In this paper, we will be interested as a geographer and sociolinguist, in tracks and visible marks in urban space. In observing two districts (one a suburb close to a new centre in Montpellier, the second, a enclosed city close to downtown Avignon), we want to find a answer to two questions : how to describe the markers which characterize the places, practices and people of the district ? Why is it interesting to consider the shop signs, graffiti, public notices and posters, … as neotoponymics markers of change?

During years, democracy in Chile has been criticized for its lack of democratic representativeness. Then in two points of the country, the extreme north on one side (First Region called Tarapacá Region) and the south on the other side (Tenth Region of The Lakes), regionalism has taken a separatist trend: previous provinces, which importance had long been undermined by their surrounding regions, have claimed their independence. They have won the latter in 2007, after a very quick political arbitration, allowing in a few years what had long seemed impossible: the modification of the administrative map of the country established during the dictatorship years. When it comes to first balances, the impact of this change appears more profound than had been foreseen, and because of a toponymy issue. The two new regions interfere strongly with the numbering that what used to refer to the Chilean administrative units: since 2007, it is no longer possible to go on using the Roman numbers as before, since the new numbers do not fit the old north / south progression. Despite the very ordinary quality of the chosen names for the new territories, the introduction of a toponymy debate appears as the sign of a certain progress on the front of local democracy.