A Street Name Story

 Public TV (ARD, Channel One) laid out this interesting story on modern times and street names.

This story centers on Magdeburg (population 237k), which is located on the eastern side of Germany (yes, in what was old DDR).  

It's a historic town.  If you wanted note five of the big-name towns of the Roman era, and extended into the early 1600s....Magdeburg would be on that list.  

The city has two fairly well known universities in the local area.  If you were looking upon industry and production....it's fairly diversified (it's not a one-industry town).

So there's this one unique thing about the 1,600 streets in town....three-percent of them are named for women.  To be honest....it's only around thirty-percent which are named for men.  The rest?  Mostly named after non-human things.

This effort started up....that more streets need to be named after ladies.

The push?  Well...the suggest is that as all new streets are built.....they can only be named after women, until they reach equal standing (meaning the 46 female streets need to reach the status of the 460 male name streets).

This created a a huge discussion in the city council.  

They did the math and statistical count.  It's not really a clear thing but the city generally only approves three to six new streets a year, so some members of the city council said that it'd take around 100 years before another street could be named after a guy.

So they worked on this mess and eventually wrote up a compromise.....for each three female streets named....there would be one male street named.  

I know....in most cities, there's a priority list of things to work on (potholes, poor planning, recreational events, crappy bridges, wild boar on  the loose, too much graffiti, dog crap on the sidewalk, lack of art, too much art, etc).  

I often go walking in major urban areas (like Mainz, Wiesbaden, Heidelberg, Koblenz, etc) and you tend to notice a lot of street names.  Doctor-so-and-so strasse, Professor-so-and-so strasse, Mayor-so-and-so strasse, etc.  Yeah, it is a mostly male-dominated naming convention at work.

Yeah, there's no doubt that male names stand out.  But you have non-human names which are part of the structure as well.  

The problem left in Magdeburg?  You will have to find publicly known women (most likely buried six-feet under) to use for the naming convention.  I'm guessing they probably have twenty-odd female names ready for the first batch over the next three years, but eventually.....you will have to go and find mostly unknown women (like women convicted and killed in the 1630s for witchcraft).  

Will this become some national trend?  No evidence of that....but you just have to wonder how this discussion started.