Rodni aspekti javnog gradskog prostora
Gender Aspects Of Public Urban Space

Summary/Abstract: The street city network and the street names represent structural public symbolic system which is characterized by readability. This readability gives identity; the city is clearly divided in significant and less significant zones used for different purposes with different levels of communicativity. It is explicitly connected with public memory evocation– with collective memory and the state ideology. Having that in mind, the names of streets in Belgrade given by female names will be analyzed. It is analyzed how it is in structural manner the street network in Belgrade on symbolic level (through the names of streets and their distribution in the street network structure) expresses gender based distribution of power in the public space– using relation between the center and periphery in certain municipalities and the city as a whole. Investigating different city zones, it can be showed “rationalization of political domination” – the parts of the city where the residencies of foreign countries, embassies and consulates are situated, representative and private, as well as zones which belong to different social stratums – higher and lower layers, which are also the zones of different communicative capacity (determinated by the structure of street network). This analysis clearly points out on distinctive, even though implicitly inherited difference in power distribution and gender based standings in social organization of the space. Streets which got the name by women are very few and they occupy marginal positions in the street network structure – they are mostly peripheral, smaller streets, which are in high percent dead end streets. In the same time, the dynamics of the change of the street names in the last decade is not in favor of the names from National Liberation Army (NOB). Street name change affirms historical females characters from XIX century, expressing on the direct way the ideological change and the need of classes and stratums which tend to establish their social position today and their influence on the changing the view on history in order to consolidate their own legitimization.

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