What do street names tell us? The 'city-text' as socio-cultural data
Abstract
This paper proposes the use of street names as a source of geographic-specific cultural data for quantitative analysis in social sciences. Street names reflect the cumulative commemorative decisions of municipalities and, as such, can be used as proxies for their social and cultural characteristics, which is particularly useful given the scarcity of cultural data at the local level. The utility of street names as a data source is illustrated through the study of religiosity and local economic development. The street-name indicator of religiosity is shown to be strongly correlated with the cultural factor it is supposed to capture, and appears to be negatively related to economic development at the local level. Finally, the article explores a range of other potential empirical applications to important topics in social sciences.
Citation
Oto Peralias , D 2018 , ' What do street names tell us? The 'city-text' as socio-cultural data ' , Journal of Economic Geography , vol. 18 , no. 1 , pp. 187-211 . https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbx030
Publication
Journal of Economic Geography
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1468-2702Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2017, the Author. Published by Oxford University Press. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbx030
Description
Financial support by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland through grant number 70433 is gratefully acknowledged.Collections
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