Distances; Irradiation; Measurements; Political colonization; Street signs; Urbanonymy

The goal of the article is to present two quantitative methods of assessing the degree of political colonization of municipal space by official urbanonymy. This is done in order to provide a tool which will enable the researchers to test hypotheses and measure the property with needed exactitude. To this end, four municipal units from the Moravian-Silesian region, the Czech Republic, have been selected – namely, the former village of Ostrava-Hošťálkovice, the intra-estate city quarter of Ostrava-Pustko-vec, the village of Dolní Lhota, and the medium-sized city of Studénka. The methods presented are street-sign distances (SSD), which map the density of the street sign-car-rying objects, and street-sign irradiation (SSI), which measures the number of street signs placed on individual objects. It has been proved that both metrics may furnish some information about the way the public space is colonized in the chosen settlement units, and some interpretations were provided on their bases. In order to draw a general picture of political colonization, two things need to be carried out – more indexes should be brought into the game, and more municipalities investigated.