When the City Cannot Be Read: Sana'a's Street-Naming Crisis and the Collapse of State Power

In the global landscape, cities are the highest creations of human civilization and the most direct showcases of state power. From the boulevards of Paris to the digital streets of Singapore, a modern city's navigability is the foundation for its integration into the global economic network. However, in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen and one of the world's oldest cities with a two-thousand-year history, an anomalous spatial condition prevails: street names are chaotic, landmarks replace house numbers, and residents rely on oral directions and fragments of memory. This seemingly trivial municipal issue is in fact a profound spatial projection of a national crisis.

Sana'a's predicament did not arise overnight. After the establishment of the republican system in 1962, large numbers of rural residents flooded into the city, rapidly expanding Sana'a into a multicultural melting pot. However, prolonged political turmoil, war, and the collapse of state institutions rendered urban planning ineffective. Compared with other Arab capitals such as Cairo and Beirut, Sana'a failed to establish a standardized addressing system. In Cairo, and even Beirut, despite historical complexities, the state at least achieved a certain degree of "spatial clarification." Sana'a, however, remains entirely embedded in an oral naming system reliant on collective memory. A resident of Sana'a trying to find a wedding hall ultimately has to rely on colloquial descriptions such as "near the military academy" or "next to the red building" to navigate. Taxi drivers refuse delivery requests at night because they cannot find the address—it costs time and fuel, and may even endanger lives. Emergency services are delayed due to difficulties in locating addresses, becoming an invisible killer in the city's daily life.

This spatial disorder is by no means mere administrative negligence; it is a symptom of the power relationship between the state and the city. French sociologist Bourdieu viewed the naming process as a contest over "symbolic capital," through which the state displays its authority and inscribes its political ideals by giving streets official names. American political scientist James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, explicitly points out that standardized naming systems are a strategy for the state to make society "legible," facilitating taxation, conscription, and governance. Vernacular naming, by contrast, embodies local knowledge, historical memory, and communal identity. When a state cannot unify street names, or even put up street signs at corners, it signals that the state has lost its ability to transform space into "territory." As Scott puts it, this state of "illegibility" is itself a form of silent resistance—communities reject the state's singular narrative through informal means.Sana'a is a quintessential mirror of this kind of "unreadable" city. Official names and popular appellations coexist in conflict, street signs are absent, and navigation relies on an oral network of personal connections. This not only impedes everyday mobility but also pushes Sana'a to the margins of the global urban system. The core of contemporary urban competition has shifted from the height of skyscrapers to data connectivity and the precision of infrastructure. Without standardized addresses, digital maps cannot cover the city, and logistics, courier services, emergency services, and even international aid struggle to function effectively. In an era of artificial intelligence and drones, cities without a "readable" coordinate system will be abandoned by automated services. Many post-conflict cities in the Global South face similar dilemmas, but Sana'a is distinctive in that it possesses a complete and ancient historic quarter, yet has failed to turn this historical heritage into an asset for modern spatial governance.

In the long run, Sana'a's naming crisis hints at a deeper structural transformation: the state needs to regain legitimacy in urban space, while the populace needs to extract order from informal knowledge. Scott warned that blindly promoting modern standardization could destroy social resilience, but leaving things completely alone would also plunge the city into functional paralysis. Sana'a may need a "dialogical clarification"—merging popular cognition with official coding into a dual system, drawing elements from historical place names so that it can be managed by the state and accepted by the community. This requires state reconstruction, and even more so, a political solution.

In the broader global urban agenda, Sana'a reminds us that cities are never passive geographical containers but fields of action charged with political tension. When the state is absent, streets remain carriers of memory, silently recording the contest between power and resistance. Sana'a's streets are both evidence of the Yemeni state's failure and testimony to its civilizational vitality. The future of naming is about whether this country can find a way to reconcile with its own history. In today's global restructuring, every city needs to find its own "readable" grammar; otherwise, it will quietly disappear from the map of the world.