The article presents one of the manifestations of the socio-communicative function of urbanonymy, namely the symbolic role of renaming in the context of foreign policy. The purpose of this article is to establish and describe the signs of foreign policy démarches or similar symbolic acts in renaming (changes in urbanonymy, renominations). To achieve this goal, the author does the lexical-semantic analysis of the concept ‘démarche’ using the induction and deduction methods; the features of démarche were found in certain types of urban renaming of the new period, recorded in the mass media. Finally, with the help of the induction and generalization methods, seven basic criteria for the presence of démarche features in renaming acts are formulated. Materials of the research were presented at the International Scientific-Practical Conference «Language. Society. Journalism» (Kyiv, November 02, 2018).