Political colonization quantified: urbanonymy landscape seen as a network of street-sign posts
Political colonization quantified: urbanonymy landscape seen as a network of street-sign posts

Summary/Abstract: The goal of the article is to present two quantitative methods of assessing the degreeof political colonization of municipal space by official urbanonymy. This is done inorder to provide a tool which will enable the researchers to test hypotheses and measurethe property with needed exactitude. To this end, four municipal units from theMoravian-Silesian region, the Czech Republic, have been selected – namely, the formervillage of Ostrava-Hošťálkovice, the intra-estate city quarter of Ostrava-Pustkovec,the village of Dolní Lhota, and the medium-sized city of Studénka. The methodspresented are street-sign distances (SSD), which map the density of the street sign-carryingobjects, and street-sign irradiation (SSI), which measures the number of streetsigns placed on individual objects. It has been proved that both metrics may furnishsome information about the way the public space is colonized in the chosen settlementunits, and some interpretations were provided on their bases. In order to drawa general picture of political colonization, two things need to be carried out – moreindexes should be brought into the game, and more municipalities investigated.

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