The stories in Gauteng’s street names: Street naming as a form of urban storytelling

Introduction

Cities are often understood through what we can see, such as buildings, streets, parks, or monuments. Every day, people encounter place names on street signs, maps, and addresses. These names help us navigate, but they also tell stories about who and what is remembered in the urban landscape. Street names may seem ordinary, but they are not neutral. They reflect history, identity, and the values of the societies that produce them (Azaryahu, 1996). Some names honour people, others refer to natural features, and some draw on languages, ideas or places from elsewhere. Over time, these naming practices leave traces across the city, forming patterns that reveal how places have been imagined and shaped (Oto‐Peralías, 2018).

GCRO has previously explored the need to take streets seriously (Parker and Joseph, 2018), and analysed street renaming in Pretoria/Tshwane and Johannesburg (Mkhize and Naidoo, 2023; Mkhize et al., 2025). This Map of the Month follows these earlier analyses, but shifts the focus from selected renaming initiatives to the broader semantic structure of Gauteng’s full street-name archive. Analysing almost 44 000 street names, the article reflects on naming as a form of everyday urban communication that encodes layers of meaning into the built environment (Jordan, 2023; Zuvalinyenga and Bigon, 2020).

This perspective builds on work that interprets naming as part of broader systems of memory and identity in urban space in the Named After Nelson project ​​(Burger et al., 2024), and provides a methodological framework for the ‘heritage mapping’ initiative at the Loughborough TOWN Observatory in the United Kingdom, who partly funded the project.

Street names in Gauteng

The maps below plot the spatial concentration of almost 44 000 named streets across Gauteng. The centre point of each street is aggregated into 2km² spatial units using a grid across the province. The successive maps differentiate between four semantic categories: People, Geographical locations, Fauna and Flora, and Other. In doing so, the maps reveal where different aspects of Gauteng’s symbolic archive of naming are most densely embedded in the landscape.

To some extent, of course, the overall pattern reflects the relative density of the street grid, which is often more tightly knit in areas with small stands. So naturally the strongest concentrations occur in the south-west of the City of Tshwane, Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni municipalities, while peripheral parts of the province remain less dense. However, within this overall pattern, there are clearly distinct pockets of naming activity. High concentrations (darker colours) of names per semantic category indicate areas where that naming pattern is more strongly represented, whereas lower concentrations (lighter colours) suggest a smaller spatial presence.

The People category is the most dominant semantic layer in the dataset, and its highest clusters (n = 90+ streets per 2km² grid cell) occur in areas such as Mamelodi, Soweto, Kagiso, Thembisa, Atteridgeville, Daveyton, Vosloorus, and Tsakani, all historically black townships. The commemorative naming in these clusters is most likely shaped by apartheid-era planning. A closer reading of the commemorative names shows that Gauteng’s street-name archive is anchored around a relatively small group of highly recurrent political and historical figures. When variants are combined, Nelson Mandela appears most frequently, followed by Albert Luthuli, Jan Smuts, Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Oliver Tambo, Robert Sobukwe, A.B. Xuma, Walter Sisulu, and Solomon Mahlangu. The predominance of male figures within this recurrent canon further suggests that commemorative street naming continues to reflect historically gendered patterns of public recognition, in which men have been more readily memorialised in urban space than women (Mkhize et al., 2025). Frequently recurring names such as Green, Augusta, Dube, Amanda, and Kruger – which occur across multiple municipalities – further show how dense naming clusters are reinforced through repeated surname and personal-name forms.

A more localised example appears in Pierre van Ryneveld, adjacent to the Waterkloof Air Force Base, where the suburb and its street names preserve a specific period of South African air force history through references to military leaders and aircraft. This shows another layer of public memory and how localised naming systems can preserve institutional histories.

Figure 1: Spatial concentration of streets named after people across Gauteng. Street-name locations are aggregated into 2 km² spatial units to show where the province’s naming archive is most densely concentrated (Data Source: Open Street Maps, September 2025).

The Geographical category reveals a different naming logic from the commemorative dominance of the People category. These names symbolically connect Gauteng to rivers, mountains, towns, regions, and countries, positioning the province within wider local, national, and international spatial frames. Many of the most frequently recurring examples point strongly to the broader South African landscape, including rivers such as Tugela, Caledon, Kei, Letaba, and Limpopo, and mountain ranges such as the Drakensberg, Lebombo, Soutpansberg, and Magaliesberg. Other names, such as Majuba or Ulundi – sites of 19^th-century battles – and Graskop and Sabie, connect streets to places with strong historical or regional associations. International references such as Kent, Derby, Oxford, Amsterdam, Harare, and Accra extend the symbolic geography beyond South Africa. The strongest cluster of geographical naming (n = 90+) occurs in Cosmo City, where a highly planned naming system organises streets around the names of countries and cities in Africa, including South Africa. In Etwatwa (north east of Daveyton), by contrast, the second strongest cluster is also shaped by a broader pan-African and international pattern of city and town names such as Arusha, Amboseli, Entebbe, Victoria Falls, South Luangwa, Namibia, Paris, and London City.

Figure 2: Spatial concentration of streets named after geographical locations across Gauteng. Street-name locations are aggregated into 2 km² spatial units to show where the province’s naming archive is most densely concentrated (Data Source: Open Street Maps, September 2025).

The Fauna and Flora category shows some of the clearest examples of clusters of street names shaped by neighbourhood planning, and imbuing of clear residential identity. The strongest clusters, with more than 60 plant- and animal-related names in a 2 km² cell, occur in the south-west of Centurion, where areas such as Thatchfield, Amberfield, and Heuweloord draw heavily on the common names of trees, flowers, and indigenous plants. These include names such as Anemoon, Begonia, Baobab, Boekenhout, Buffalo Thorn, Cluster Fig, Coraltree, Fever Tree, and Flamboyant, creating a distinctly botanical namescape. Another striking pattern appears in Ivory Park in east Midrand and Garthdale in the south-west of Ekurhuleni, where streets are named after fish, including Archerfish, Clingfish, Cowfish, Galjoen, Goldfish, Sea Bass, Shark, Snoek, Tilapia, and Trout. Other notable themed areas include the dog-named streets of Pretorius Park, the bird-named streets of Monument Park Extension, and a wildlife cluster across the R21 in Monument Park.

Figure 3: Spatial concentration of streets named after fauna and flora across Gauteng. Street-name locations are aggregated into 2 km² spatial units to show where the province’s naming archive is most densely concentrated (Data Source: Open Street Maps, September 2025).

The Other category captures the most mixed and open-ended part of Gauteng’s namescape. It includes numerical names such as First Street and 3rd Avenue alongside material and geology names such as Emerald, Platinum, and Granite; object and technical names such as Anchor, Crown, Jet, and Rocket; abstract names such as Unity, Freedom, and Heritage; and natural or celestial references such as Sunset, Orion, and Galaxy. It also includes social and institutional names such as Station, Monument, and Parliament, together with a smaller residual group of miscellaneous forms that do not fit the other main categories. While less visually concentrated than the People or Geographical layers, this category is important because it captures the most functionally diverse naming practices in the dataset, showing how streets can also be organised through sequence, symbolism, material reference, and abstract meaning.

Figure 4: Spatial concentration of streets named after “other” across Gauteng. Street-name locations are aggregated into 2 km² spatial units to show where the province’s naming archive is most densely concentrated (Data Source: Open Street Maps, September 2025).

What street names symbolise

Street naming in Gauteng is not random or purely functional. Rather, it forms part of a broader symbolic system through which memory, geography, environment, and identity are written into everyday space. The maps show that this naming archive is uneven both in where it is concentrated and in what kinds of names dominate it.

As illustrated in Figure 1 (above) and Figure 5 (below), within this uneven spatial pattern, the strongest organising logic is commemoration. Names linked to people make up 57% of the dataset, showing that Gauteng’s street network functions not only as infrastructure, but also as a distributed memorial landscape. In this sense, public memory is not confined to monuments or formal heritage sites, but is woven into the ordinary routes of movement, navigation and destination that structure everyday life (Azaryahu, 1996).

Figure 5: Distribution of street names by semantic category (n = 43 973)

This commemorative landscape of streets named after people is not neutral. The repeated appearance of a relatively small group of political and historical figures indicates that it draws on a concentrated symbolic canon rather than an even spread of remembered individuals. Figures such as Mandela, Biko, Hani, and Tambo recur strongly across the province, but older figures such as Smuts and Kruger also remain visible. The result is not a single post-apartheid memory landscape, but instead a layered and sometimes competing archive in which liberation memory coexists with older state and settler traditions.

One of the clearest contrasts in the dataset is between areas where streets are named for political or historical reasons and those where streets are named in thematically co-ordinated ways. While townships and central business districts are dominated by commemorative street names, many suburban neighbourhoods and street names are organised around plant and animal themes. In these areas, naming shifts away from public memory toward neighbourhood identity, environmental imagery, and estate branding. This contrast shows that Gauteng’s streets are shaped by different symbolic priorities across urban contexts: in some places, the street name primarily serves as a carrier of collective memory; in others, it is part of a curated local identity.

A similar shift in naming logic appears in the Geographical category. Here, the emphasis moves from people to place, connecting Gauteng’s streets to rivers, mountains, towns, regions, and countries. These names position the province within wider local, national, and international spatial frames, showing that street naming is not only commemorative but also connective. The geographical layer brings together local references, broader South African landscapes, and explicitly international or pan-African place names, suggesting that the street network also works as a symbolic geography through which people encounter a wider world. Even within this category, however, different places are imagined differently. Cosmo City reflects a highly planned naming convention structured around national and international place references, while Etwatwa presents a more outward-looking pan-African and global pattern. Both show that place-based naming does more than orient movement: it situates local urban life within broader territorial imaginaries.

A linguistic-origin category in the dataset added another question to the analysis, leading us to ask not only what is being named, but whose cultural and historical worlds are most visible through the names themselves. The linguistic origins show that the naming landscape is shaped by multiple traditions rather than a single uniform heritage. African-language names are strongly present across the province, especially within the commemorative layer, while English, Afrikaans, and other European-derived naming traditions also remain firmly embedded in the street network. The namescape that emerges is therefore both diverse and uneven. It reflects changing histories of power, belonging, and representation, but it also shows that older naming traditions continue to coexist with newer forms of public memory.

Conclusion

This Map of the Month offers a different way of seeing Gauteng. Rather than focusing only on physical infrastructure, it reveals the meanings embedded in the street names that people encounter every day. By mapping and analysing street names, the article uncovers a province shaped by multiple layers of naming practice, many of which are not immediately visible but become clearer when viewed together. The strong presence of person-based names shows how commemoration is built into ordinary space, while other naming patterns point to environmental themes, place-based identities, and wider historical and cultural influences. These patterns suggest that Gauteng can be understood not only as a physical landscape, but also as a set of urban narrative spaces where different stories are written into the built environment. Street names are arguably the most economical means through which these stories are told, and yet remain hidden in plain sight. When mapped collectively, they reveal how memory, identity, and power are unevenly inscribed across the region. In this sense, the map is not only descriptive, but also representational: it makes visible whose histories, cultural worlds, and symbolic claims to place are most strongly embedded in public space. Seen through this lens, Gauteng’s street names become part of a wider social and informational system in which identity is communicated, belonging is negotiated, and representation is unevenly distributed across the urban landscape.

Method

Street-name data for Gauteng were extracted from OpenStreetMap and cleaned to standardise spelling, remove duplicates, and separate street names from road-type suffixes such as Street, Road, and Avenue. Each named street was represented by a centre point. This offers a cleaner and more legible visualisation, although it also introduces a limitation, since long streets are reduced to a single point and their full spatial extent is not shown. To reduce overplotting, street-name points were aggregated into 2 km² spatial grid units in QGIS, making broad regional patterns easier to interpret. This decision was taken since street lines are harder to visualise at larger scales compared to centroids, especially when using this particular aggregation method. Street names were then classified into one of the four semantic categories based on the dominant name to which it most directly referred to, namely: People, Geographical locations, Fauna and Flora, and Other. Introducing a linguistic-origin category in the dataset extends the analysis beyond identifying what is named, to interrogating whose cultural and historical worlds are made visible through those names. Ambiguous names were classified according to their most direct and contextually likely meaning in a South African street-naming context. For example, Green could refer either to a colour or a surname, but in the absence of an explicit colour category, it was treated as part of People. Where names remained too uncertain, they were retained in Other rather than being forced into a category without sufficient evidence. It is recognised that some of the uneven density of names is due to differences in the weave of the street grid. Little or no street-name data in a few places may also be due to gaps in the OpenStreetMap dataset, but our estimation is that this effect is very minimal.

References

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Inputs, edits, and comments: Graeme Götz, Dr Laven Naidoo, Dr Samkelisiwe Khanyile, Christian Hamann, and Dr Robert Harland.

Suggested citation: Burger, Y. (2026). The stories in Gauteng’s street names: Street naming as a form of urban storytelling in Gauteng. GCRO Map of the Month, April 2026. Gauteng City-Region Observatory, Johannesburg. https://doi.org/10.36634/HIBU2345.