Cross-border town naming

Cross-border town naming refers to a toponymic phenomenon in which adjacent settlements located on either side of an international boundary adopt identical, equivalent, or historically related names, reflecting their origin as a single settlement or their development as an interconnected borderland urban system.

In the context of the frontier dynamics, such naming practices are best understood as expressions of functional and spatial continuity across political borders, rather than as purely administrative or linguistic coincidences.^[1] They may arise through:

• the division of a unified settlement by the imposition or shifting of a border
• the parallel growth of paired settlements linked by trade, mobility, and infrastructure (e.g., transport corridors)
• the influence of cross-border economic and informal urbanization processes, in which emerging settlements reproduce or adapt an existing toponym to signal connection, dependence, or collective identity.

Within the context of urbanism and transgressive borderland development, cross-border naming can therefore be interpreted as a symbolic layer of a broader phenomenon: the formation of integrated yet politically fragmented urban regions shaped by circulation, informality, and infrastructural networks such as the Pan-American corridor.^[2]