Local and translocal impulses in late post-socialist Prague: Scalar configuration of commemorative street renaming under geopolitical rupture

This article explores the scalar politics of street renaming through a 2023 case in Prague, where Koněvova Street, named after Soviet marshal Ivan S. Konev, was replaced with Hartigova Street in the Žižkov district, elevating a nineteenth-century local figure within the commemorative landscape. Situated within the late post-socialist context and the geopolitical rupture following Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, the study examines how the commemorative replacement is negotiated across intertwined institutional, political, spatial and temporal scales. Based on analysis of official documents and semi-structured interviews with the local initiator, district authorities, and members of the municipal toponymic board, the article reconstructs the justification process and unfolds the case across four scalar dimensions. The analysis demonstrates how formal competence, symbolic authority, and political accountability diverge within urban toponymic governance, extending critical toponymic debates on scale and power beyond formal top-down accounts. The paper concludes by discussing the case as a unity of toponymic cleansing and foundation, a two-fold political objective underlying the commemorative replacement within a geopolitical rupture that enabled this symbolic revision. Eventually, it discusses the implications of the act on existing mnemonic frames, notably the Red Army’s role in the May 1945 liberation and the district’s history.