Embroidering the city map

Street names are omnipresent but hold an often-overlooked symbolic function of representing societal power balances, rendering women largely invisible. With this embroidered T-shirt, we aim to bring attention to this gendered imbalance and create a conversation starter around the topic of equality. Street names are omnipresent but hold an often-overlooked symbolic function of representing societal power balances, rendering women largely invisible. With this embroidered T-shirt, we aim to bring attention to this gendered imbalance and create a conversation starter around the topic of equality. The power of fashion to provoke, whether it is haute couture or street fashion, cannot be overestimated. T-shirts, in particular, offer an affordable and effective canvas for communicating messages about the views and identities of the wearers and/or instigating reactions from the receivers. Some of the most iconic messages have been imprinted in our memories after seeing them on numerous T-shirts, from music band logos (Rolling Stones, Beatles) to commercial products and political catchphrases to the self-deprecating "all I got was this lousy T-shirt." Beyond the apparel industry of ready-made T-shirts, there is a whole parallel industry of printers who imprint photos and texts on bespoke fashion T-shirts at affordable prices. Against this "on-demand" industry, more recently, there has been a revival of hand embroidering items of clothing with messages and images. A post on X (formerly Twitter) by Lucy Alice of a hoodie with an embroidered London Tube map was the inspiration behind this Creations. This embroidered T-shirt (Figure 1) is a visualization of the evolution of gendered street names in the Eastern German city of Frankfurt (Oder). Each color symbolizes the street's namesake, with red for women, blue for men, turquoise for generic masculine words, green for families, and gray for non-gendered streets. Since street names are often present in our everyday lives, we take them as given and rarely question their legitimacy. However, street names have a function beyond spatial organization as they encode who holds (or at some point in time held) power over the city and therefore who deserves to be visible in the streetscape.1Azaryahu M. The Power of Commemorative Street Names.Environ. Plan. D. 1996; 14: 311-330https://doi.org/10.1068/d140311Crossref Scopus (381) Google Scholar Previous linguistic landscape studies have pointed out a lack of visibility of women in public spaces, with a female share of rarely over 10% in European cities2Rusu M.S. Gendering Urban Namescapes: The Gender Politics of Street Names in an Eastern European City.Names. 2022; 70: 11-25https://doi.org/10.5195/names.2022.2233Crossref Scopus (6) Google Scholar and female streets more frequent in areas far from the city center.3Gutiérrez-Mora D. Oto-Peralías D. Gendered cities: Studying urban gender bias through street names.Environ. Plan. B Urban Anal. City Sci. 2022; 49: 1792-1809https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083211068844Crossref Scopus (7) Google Scholar While assigning genders based on names and gender markers is problematic because it relies on a binary understanding of gender and therefore perpetuates cissexism, "the lack of gender representation in many aspects of society is a reality,"4Asr F.T. Mazraeh M. Lopes A. Gautam V. Gonzales J. Rao P. Taboada M. The gender gap tracker: Using natural language processing to measure gender bias in media.PLoS One. 2021; 16e0245533https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245533Crossref PubMed Scopus (18) Google Scholar which makes the investigation of gender imbalances necessary. This creation therefore aims to make visible the strong gender imbalance that is present in the German city of Frankfurt (Oder). The street name database for the research reported here was created by the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded project Memory and Ideology in the Linguistic Landscape (MILL) that investigated commemorative (re-)naming in East Germany and Poland between 1916 and 2018.5Buchstaller I. Fabiszak M. Alvanides S. Brzezińska A.W. Dobkiewicz P. Commemorative city-texts: Spatio-temporal patterns in street names in Leipzig, East Germany and Poznań, Poland.Lang. Soc. 2024; 53: 291-320https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000040Crossref Scopus (4) Google Scholar The MILL street name database was further enhanced for Frankfurt (Oder). Four time points serve as a diachronic comparison of the streetscape strongly associated with German modern history: 1916 and 2018 as the earliest and latest data points, 1944 as the end of the Nazi-dominated period, and 1975 as the second wave of feminism. Through a coding scheme based on documents with information about the streets' namesakes and the gendered nature of the German language, each street was assigned one of the following categories.●Feminine—named after a woman, e.g., Rosa Luxemburg Straße●Masculine—named after a man, e.g., Richard Wagner Straße●Generic masculine—named after the grammatically male form of an abstract category name, e.g., Bauerstraße (farmer masc. street)●(Generic feminine—named after the grammatically female form of an abstract category name, e.g., Bäuerinnenstraße [farmer fem. street]; none present)●Family—named after a family's last name, e.g., Golzhorn●No person—streets that are not named after a person, e.g., cemetery street Figure 2 shows the absolute numbers and percentage distribution of each category over the four time periods. The increase in street names is due to the urban expansion of the city over 100 years. The maps in Figure 3 show that there is a constant increase in streets being (re-)named after men (blue) while the streets named after women (red) fluctuate in small numbers and only start increasing slightly from 1975 to 2018. The maps also illustrate the increasing densification and expansion of the city, which took place mostly in the post-war period from the 1950s to the 1990s.Figure 3Frankfurt (Oder) maps of the four time snapshots colored by genderShow full captionBackground © OpenStreetMap.View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT) Background © OpenStreetMap. The images of the 1916 and 2018 maps were digitally mirrored, printed out onto transfer paper, and ironed/stuck onto the T-shirt. The fabric was then secured in an embroidery hoop, and the streets were embroidered in their respective colors. As it is the earliest point of the investigation, the 1916 map was placed on the front of the T-shirt, the side of the clothing that usually falls into the eye first in an interaction. The 2018 map, which in comparison shows how much the city has expanded in the time frame of 102 years, was placed on the back, in addition to a play on words. The slogan "Don't turn your back on history" warns the viewer about the dangers of choosing to ignore historical developments while highlighting the necessity to learn from the past. Wearing the city maps makes it possible to transport the findings from research into everyday life and initiate conversations. Intentionally, there is no legend, and it is not stated which city is shown on the shirt to arouse curiosity in those who see it. Wondering about the meaning of a T-shirt, an everyday element, can invite questions and therefore encourage critical thinking about other everyday elements, like the gendered street names. Additionally, using the modality of the body and the connection via art adds a playful element to the otherwise rather heavy topic of gender imbalances and discrimination over space and time. The "masculine default,"2Rusu M.S. Gendering Urban Namescapes: The Gender Politics of Street Names in an Eastern European City.Names. 2022; 70: 11-25https://doi.org/10.5195/names.2022.2233Crossref Scopus (6) Google Scholar meaning new streets are more likely to be named after a man than after anyone else, is clearly present and visible here. This creation should inspire people to see the cityscape through new eyes, questioning what they take for granted and, most importantly, engaging in conversations with others—about both the past and the future.