The long-defunct literary magazine Wigwag ran a monthly essay by an Angolan writer named Sousa Jamba titled "Letter from Springfield." For each installment he visited a different U.S. Springfield.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigwag_(magazine)

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wigwag-the-magaz...

Plenty of European countries have conflicting city/town/village names as well. If they grow to large they are sometimes specified by adding more locality to their name.

Denmark has three cities names Nykøbing, typically specified as Nykøbing Mors, Nykøbing Sjælland or Nykøbing Falser. Small places are just allowed to conflict as long as they aren't in the same postcode.

Indeed, Italy has a ton of cities called something like "old town", "new inn" or "castle", for obvious reasons.

Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany.

I made the mistake once of "flying to Frankfurt!" on some low-cost airline out of the UK and landed in Frankfurt-Hahn. Yikes.

In "Frankfurt-Hahn" the "Frankfurt" is still the same Frankfurt you (probably) wanted, you just got a different airport located further out. "Frankfurt an der Oder" is on the other side of Germany on the border with Poland, a ~7h drive away.

So this is more like you going to NY and landing at Newark when you expected JFK where Frankfurt an der Oder would be like ending up in New York, Iowa.

Every time o put directions to my local market town of Newport in Shropshire, google insists on thinking I want to travel two hours to Wales.

I guess it could be worse and I’d end up in the Isle of Wight.

Reused names isn’t just an American thing.

Ashford Kent and Ashford Middlesex are common issues in the southeast.

As for Hawkridge in Devon...dark night (not stormy) and it was only when I saw Dulverton road signs I got the sense this wasn't going to plan.

At least two Whitchurch stations I have used. There then the two Newcastle

Oh and Shakespeare isn’t from East London

My favourite thing about the Newcastles is that one is under and one is on. I was pondering just recently whether there's any other under/upon pairs in the UK.

I knew city names were repeated in different US states, but they repeat even within a state?

Yes, There are multiple Springfield in Wisconsin, multiple Madison in Pennsylvania and multiple Clinton in New York. These are some of the examples I remember. And yes it is annoying if you live in one of these towns.

Many US states are larger than many European countries.

Okay but how do you agree in which Springsteen, Wisconsin to meet? How do you tell your favorite navigation software where you're going to be departing from? How is this disambiguated if not by country and state combined?

I assume by zip code.

Or drop a pin.

> It's a funny cultural thing that it wouldn't have even occurred to me that someone in Europe wouldn't realize city names can conflict

The irony is that a lot of our city names came from Europe.

> and probably confusing a lot of people is Springfield, which is the name of at least 42 different cities

And a person, who wrote a song about name confusion, but wrt Springsteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW1Frr4OcRc

We usually don’t think much about duplicate city names in America, but we sure notice that you‘ve taken all of ours!

Guess Austin, MN hackers are just going to have to join Austin, TX hackers :)

The amount of cities called "white city" around here is annoying to, but at least they have the decency to be spelled differently.

Maybe they can do something like Discord, and append a 4 digit unique identifier?