From Cultural Claims to Institutionalized Governance: Toponymic Heritage-Making in Shanghai, China

Place names function both as spatial identifiers and as condensed repositories of urban history, local memory, and social relations. Using Shanghai as a case study, this article examines how multiple strata of place names—including old-city lane names, Jiangnan water-town toponyms, concession-era road names, province-named streets, revolutionary commemorative names, names associated with the development of Pudong New Area, and commercial place names—have accumulated and continue to coexist within the urban fabric. Their coexistence provides a particularly revealing case of the transition from cultural claims to institutionalized toponymic heritage governance in China. Together, road names, signage, spatial distribution, and everyday usage constitute a visible and lived toponymic landscape. Toponymic heritage protection therefore unfolds not only through archives and regulatory frameworks but also through street-level representation and everyday systems of spatial orientation. Drawing on published literature and policy documents, this article traces the historical layering of Shanghai’s place names, the recognition of their heritage value, and their incorporation into institutional governance, with particular attention to how established local governance mechanisms have interacted with increasingly formalized national regulations and how this interaction has been translated into planning, heritage inventories, archival systems, digitization, and urban regeneration. The study identifies an institutional trajectory of “local institutional accumulation—national regulatory reinforcement—institutional re-embedding.” Through the interaction of expert knowledge, public memory, and planning practices, historically significant place names are progressively recognized as heritage and incorporated into spatial governance; however, this process remains constrained by tensions surrounding spatial continuity, the interpretation of contested histories, and institutional implementation. The article makes two principal contributions. First, it advances an integrated analytical framework of “historical layering—value recognition—institutionalized governance—spatial enactment and feedback,” which links critical toponymy, linguistic landscape research, and critical heritage studies to explain how place names become institutionalized objects of heritage governance. Second, it demonstrates empirically how Shanghai’s early accumulation of routine place-name administration provided the institutional foundation into which strengthened national requirements for toponymic heritage protection were subsequently re-embedded, thereby offering a mechanism-based account of toponymic heritage-making that is transferable beyond the Shanghai case.