Housing names to suit every taste: neoliberal place-making and toponymic commodification in Kyiv, Ukraine

Abstract

Through a toponymic lens, this article opens insights into Kyiv’s rampant, largely unregulated urban growth under neoliberal management, including associated forms of new-build gentrification. Practices of (re)naming are increasingly used to brand places, especially in the real estate market contexts. Theoretically, we discuss the uses of symbolic motif-repertoires, place-spoofing (through name-loans or copied architectural forms, for instance) and local heritage-based autochthonous naming as the ingredients of neoliberal place making and new-build gentrification. Empirically, we analyze 639 names for residential estates in Kyiv and its outskirts, coined in 2010–2020. We classified this corpus into autochthonous and neotoponymic estate names based on their relationship to the existing local toponymy, and then conducted a detailed interpretative analysis of both subsets. Used to attract a specific niche of home-buyers, the main types of toponymic place brands in Kyiv include select autochthonous “prestige names” recycled in the real estate landscape, overwhelmingly Western (North American and above all European) name loans, references to business owners and corporate brands, and evocations of internationally fashionable generic themes of urbanism (from urban greenness to expressions of high social status). Although the revealed toponymic novelties may express the integration of Ukrainian society to the worldwide community of free market economies, such repercussions of these neoliberal place making linguistic practices as symbolic repetitiveness and linguistic Westernization may have potentially adverse effects of enfeebled historicity and increasing placelessness, as well as phenomenological displacement in the Ukrainian capital.