The Street Names of Budapest

Over 2,600 locations in Budapest have place-names which derive from people. Names and Spaces - Budapest is a fantastic mapped analysis of who Budapest's streets and public spaces were named after and what this reveals about the city's history.

The map is in Hungarian but works fairly seamlessly with Google Translate in Chrome. If you don't have access to Google Translate then you can still enjoy Atlatszo's recent article about the map on the European Data Network. The article, Poets, Politicians and Saints: Budapest's Changing Street Names, takes a detailed dive into the history and politics of the 8,598 streets and squares which have been renamed at least once in Budapest's history.

The interactive map actually allows you to explore the names of Budapest's streets for yourself. Click on a colored street on the map and you can read a short biography of the person who the street was named for. The map also provides a guided tour of some of the data behind the map. For example, like nearly every other city in the world Budapest doesn't like women very much. In fact 93% of streets named after people in the city are named for men.

Further analysis in the map explores the number of statesmen, politicians, writers, scientists etc who have roads named after them; how many Hungarian streets are named for real as opposed to fictitious people; and the political periods in which place-names have been most altered.

If you are interested in the derivation of place-names then you will love the many other maps listed under the toponym tag on Maps Mania. If you are interested in the sexist street naming histories of other cities then you can explore the many maps produced by Geochicas on Las Calles de las Mujeres and by contributors to the Mapping Diversity project. Both of these projects have created a number of maps which visualize the inequality of streets named for men and women in cities around the world.