If you’re trekking around the City of Milwaukee, it’s likely that you’ll be traveling on a street named after a man. Streets named after women make up a very small portion of Milwaukee’s map.
Recently, Ayodeji Obayomi wrote a piece for the Milwaukee Neighborhood New Service, bringing this issue to light. He’s a Ph.D. student of urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
As an international student from patriarchal Nigeria, Obayomi was curious about how women engage and interact in urban spaces. "I was interested because the research gave me a regenerative opportunity for me to think about myself or reflect on my upbringing, or learn also about what women want, how their values could have been excluded and how women shape their activities in the urban spaces," he says.
Renaming streets could be controversial, he continues. Yet, Obayomi contends that if there is objection from the public, this would be a good time to have a conversation.
Obayomi says adding more streets with names of women decentralizes power in who we remember, and including the names of women of color would ensure that their voices are heard.
When choosing someone to be memorialized for their history, he says their impact needs to be considered holistically — history should portray positive contributions and impact on the people.
"There are other cities in America moving towards the direction of changing the memory in the physical spaces, changing all these memory spaces to represent the whole community — both the dominant and the marginalized communities," says Obayomi.
