From Berlin to the world: The history of streetnames

Hi, I’m Jona, a member of Datawrapper’s design team. Today, I’m looking into Berlin’s street names and the places some of them are named after.

Street names are easy to take for granted. We walk past them every day and rarely stop to really think about or question them. Yet each street name is imbued with history, chosen at a specific point in time and with a specific reason or motivation.

In the case of Berlin, several visualization projects have already critically examined streets named after people — for example, Mapping Diversity has investigated gender distribution (just 12.1% of streets named after people are dedicated to women), while Rename This! has chronicled name changes across the city (for political and decolonial reasons). For this Weekly Chart, I wanted to see whether patterns and stories could also be found by looking at streets named after places.

For this, I gathered data from Wikipedia. Across 97 entries, one for each of Berlin’s subdistricts, every street has been meticulously catalogued, including a reference to the origin of its name. So for each namesake reference, I checked whether the corresponding Wikidata record included geographical coordinates. The result: 3,769 of 11,928 official streets, roughly one third, refer to a place.^¹

The referenced places range from locations in a street’s immediate vicinity to places many hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. Mapping these different proximities reveals a few patterns. Rather unsurprisingly, streets named after similar locations appear in clusters. When new neighborhoods are established, a common theme is often used for all newly-created streets. For example, there is an English, Belgian, and Scandinavian Quarter, which feature streets named after cities and countries in those respective areas. Most neighborhoods using a place-inspired theme refer to locations across Germany and Europe.

Streets named after places in Berlin, however, tend to be much more scattered and often represent longer, wider, more important roads. Their names are usually older and were chosen for practical purposes: signifying a direction, destination, or referencing a prominent park, landmark, or body of water nearby. For instance, many arterial roads are still named after places that used to be outside the city’s borders and that these streets used to lead towards. As Berlin grew, some of these places became part of the city.

Overall, whereas streets named after far-away places received their names for political or urban planning reasons, ones referring to close-by locations serve (or used to serve) purposes of orientation and navigation — a fact that makes a lot of sense, but which I hadn’t really thought about before.

Beyond these patterns, each street’s and neighborhood’s name has a specific historical background. Let’s look at a few examples by zooming into a smaller area of Berlin:

Zooming out, one can notice that streets named after places in Europe most commonly refer to Germany’s immediate neighbors: Poland, France, Switzerland, and Austria. However, this classification only tells part of the story. A significant share of places in present-day Poland and Russia used to be part of the Prussian state at the time the streets were named. Therefore, they still reference the former German names of towns and provinces instead of the contemporary Polish or Russian ones — a relic of past political reality that still lives on in the street names of today. Examples include Danziger, Greifenhagener, or Stargarder Straße, all of which are located around the area of Helmholtzkiez (see ➍ in the map above).

These observations only scratch the surface — for instance, comparing street naming patterns and referenced locations to historical and political periods could be an interesting next step. Still, I hope you might have learned a thing or two about Berlin’s streets and will perhaps, like me, now pay a little bit more conscious attention to the many street names encountered in daily life.

That’s all from me for this week. Thanks for reading! Next week, you can look forward to a Weekly Chart by my colleague Shaylee from the support team.