On World Cities Day, Deyan Sudjic explores the intriguing stories behind cities’ names – from Soweto to Milton Keynes – in an extract from his new book

To make a city, the first thing you need is a name. Any name can work, though some certainly suggest a more successful future than others.

Chechnya’s capital, for example, is called Grozny, which translates from the Russian as “fearsome”. It goes back to the name of the colonial fort that the Tsar established in Chechnya at the start of the 19th century, around which a city of what is now 271,000 people eventually grew. It is a name that certainly reflects Grozny’s tortured history: from Stalin’s genocidal mass deportations and Putin’s murderous war to force it back into Russia’s orbit, to its subsequent descent into warlord-ism. But it is not necessarily the kind of identity that attracts eager new citizens or investors.

The sense of purpose that can eventually turn a settlement into a city – even one born in the most difficult circumstances – begins when it acquires a name. In 1630, a group of English Puritans fleeing religious persecution at home left for North America and named what would some day be a city of 3 million after Boston, the town in England they had left behind.

Tel Aviv, meanwhile, was founded in 1909 by a handful of refugees displaced by European pogroms. They gathered on a beach outside Jaffa, drew lots for sites on which to build homes, and gave the land a Hebrew name.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The name of Rio’s favela Complexo do Alemão, came from the immigrant who originally owned the land. Photograph: Felipe Dana/AP

Slums are different. Mostly they do have names, even if they were acquired with random promiscuity, but it doesn’t lead to investment or permanence. The lack of infrastructure is limiting.

One name that attached itself to a city in this way is Complexo do Alemão, the violent Rio de Janeiro favela that started to grow faster and faster from 1950 onwards. More-or-less illegally, it has spilled breeze blocks and corrugated asbestos cement roof tiles over every inch of the land that was once owned by an immigrant referred to by the first squatters as the “Alemão”, Portuguese for German. (Alemão is also the faintly dismissive term in Brazil for any fair-skinned foreigner, but the particular foreigner who owned Complexo do Alemão had actually been born in Poland rather than Germany.)

Another randomly acquired name is that of Soweto, the bleak city on the edge of Johannesburg that grew, equally bleakly, out of the English acronym for south-western townships. Soweto has its roots in a settlement process that is very different from the shanty towns of Brazil; it is the product of an attempt by the vanished apartheid regime to force black people out of those city-centre areas that it designated for whites. In Complexo do Alemão, life is also lawless, short and harsh – but it is a community initiated by the people who live in it, rather than a settlement that was imposed on them.

A city sometimes reflects the act of will of the individual who brought it into being. Alexander the Great named Alexandria for himself, while – scarcely less immodestly – Peter the Great gave St Petersburg the name of his patron saint. George Washington chose the location of the US capital but not the name; that came as a tribute from the commissioners put in charge of the construction of the US capital by Congress. When Juscelino Kubitschek surprised his electorate, and perhaps even himself, by carrying out the provisions of the Brazilian constitution and building a new capital within his five-year term in office as president, he named it for his country: Brasília.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Milton Keynes got its name from the village it was built upon. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

In 1967, the British government decided to call a new city of 250,000 people it planned to build half way between London and Birmingham, Milton Keynes. This was not an attempt to couple the author of Paradise Lost with the 20th-century economist, as if in some earnest effort to erode the line between culture and science. Nor was it capitalism’s riposte to Karl-Marx-Stadt, as the East German city of Chemnitz was called between 1953 and 1990.

In fact, Milton Keynes was the name of a Buckinghamshire village that was about to be engulfed by the new city. The village died, but its name lives on in the entity that extinguished it. Ancient lanes and Georgian brick houses still survive in the midst of Milton Keynes, trapped among the precast concrete terraces, the business parks and the traffic-segregating underpasses.

Cities with contested identities come with multiple names. To use one rather than another – Derry rather than Londonderry, for example – is to demonstrate a particular interpretation of the city’s history. When the names of cities are changed for political reasons, outcomes can be unpredictable. Mumbai’s English speakers – for the most part members of an Indian intellectual elite – are much more likely to use the old name of Bombay than their British counterparts, who may be overcompensating for past offence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Icelanders have their own name for Istanbul, dating back to the 11th-century when they referred to it as the ‘Great City’. Photograph: Alamy

Mumbai’s roots go back to the successive waves of the European colonisation of India. The Portuguese handed over the cluster of islands and fishing villages that constituted Bombay to the British in the 17th century. The 20,000 inhabitants of those days have swelled to an estimated 18 million, as a port city successively became a mill complex, a railway hub, a financial centre, and a centre for the Indian cinema industry.

Some cities measure out their histories in multiple identities, throwing light on to the varying political and cultural agendas of their leaders. Istanbul, once called Constantinople and before that Byzantium, has been the capital city of three different empires. It is shaped by the surviving fragments of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman civilisations that built it.

What makes a city a city - and does it really matter anyway? Read more

Although modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Atatürk, was born in what is now Greece, he moved his capital from Istanbul in European Turkey to Ankara in Asia, a city created from almost nothing. And he insisted on Istanbul as the name for what much of the rest of the world continued to call Constantinople.

In Slav languages it was known as Tsarigrad, a name that is still used in Bulgaria. Iceland too has its own name for Istanbul, which goes back to the time of the 11th-century Viking raids on the Black Sea, when they referred to it simply as the “Great City”. Ever since 1930, however, the Turkish post office has refused to deliver mail addressed to any other version of the name for the city than Istanbul.

The more historic trading connections, the more linguistic variations there are for a city’s name. The more powerful the city, however, the more likely all its trading partners will be to use its common name.

This is an edited extract from The Language of Cities by Deyan Sudjic, published by Allen Lane (RRP £25.00). Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussion



