The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

The benefits were almost immediately obvious. Street addresses boosted democracy, allowing for easier voter registration and mapping of voting districts. They strengthened security, as unaddressed territories make it easy for crime to flourish. (On a less positive note, they also make it easy to find political dissidents.) Water and electric companies had been forced to create their own systems for collecting bills and maintaining infrastructure—a street addressing system made that task far easier. Governments could more easily identify taxpayers and collect what they were owed. Researchers found a positive correlation between street addresses and income, and places with street addresses had lower levels of income inequality than places that did not. All this, for pennies a person.

And inclusion is one of the secret weapons of street addresses. Employees at the World Bank soon found that addresses were helping to empower the people who lived there by helping them to feel a part of society.

without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it’s often people who don’t know you who can most help you.

When asked about snakebite statistics in Brazil, scientist Maurício Rocha e Silva once said there were none. “Where there are snakes, there are no statistics; and where there are statistics, there are no snakes.”

There’s also increasing evidence that O’Keefe, who was first searching for our memory stores in the hippocampus, was right to look for it there. “For some reason,” Jeffery writes, “nature long ago decided that a map was a handy way to organise life’s experiences.” Place and memory are deeply connected.

“We may grimace when we hear people talk of ‘finding themselves,’” Nicholas Carr has explained in his book The Glass Cage. “But the figure of speech, however vain and shopworn, acknowledges our deeply held sense that who we are is tangled up in where we are.”

The Romans understood this connection between memory and place long before modern scientists began to test it. In De Oratore, a dialogue on the art of speechmaking, Cicero discussed the “method of loci.” When memorizing a speech, imagine walking through a familiar building, for example, assigning parts of the speech to different locations on an imaginary walk around it. The first sentence of your speech might belong by a coat hook, the anecdote about your childhood in the hallway closet.

House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police. House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you.

Maria Theresa’s orders had been specific; red numbers for Vienna, black for everywhere else. The numbers must be Arabic numerals—1, 2, 3, rather than the Roman i, ii, iii. Only the homes of Jewish people, whom Maria Theresa despised, were assigned Roman numerals.

The new London house numbers, together with the rise of street signs, revolutionized the job description for footmen who, for the first time, had to be literate and numerate to deliver a message.

In America, the British first began to number Manhattan to keep track of revolutionaries.

to master a society, they first had to discover who was in it. The state “had to create citizens with identities,” Scott wrote. “It had to create citizens with names that could be recorded, with matching addresses, put down in cadastral surveys.” State-making in early modern Europe required a “legible” society; the state had to understand itself before it could do anything. “And in the process of making society legible,” Scott says, “it changed it radically.”

Before they addressed houses, governments were blind to who their people were. House numbers gave them eyes.

Destroying their house numbers was, for the powerless, akin to taking back their humanity. When men gouged out their teeth or cut off their thumbs to avoid military service, they were exercising the only power they had. Violence against themselves, violence against the house was, as Tantner writes, “all that was left in the face of the power of addressing wielded by the state.” If they couldn’t number you, if they couldn’t conscript you, if they couldn’t see you, they didn’t own you—you really were a free man.

Scott describes how even seemingly harmless government decisions like requiring last names could have nefarious consequences. In the United States, federal officials openly despised Native American naming practices, which were often gender-neutral and fluid (Five Bears might become Six Bears, Scott points out, after a successful hunt) and forced them to change names as part of a grander “civilizing project.”

Prussia allowed Jews to be citizens in 1812, in exchange for taking fixed surnames. An edict of 1833 required all Jews, not just those who were nationalized, to take surnames from a list the government chose for them, like Rubenstein and Bernstein. But soon after, in 1845, Jews were legally confined to a closed list of surnames, names they could not change, setting them up for effortless identification later by the Nazis. As historian Dietz Bering has said, “the Jews, for whom in 1812 the gates of the legal ghetto had been opened only half-heartedly and not even completely, were to be imprisoned again in another ghetto: one of names.”

I was curious about Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, who was born in Paris, educated in Vienna, and had plopped this outrageous French château in the middle of the English countryside. In his memoirs, he spoke of the origins of his surname in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt, whence his great-grandfather sent his five sons to the European capitals to create an international banking dynasty. “I should say that my ancestors derived their name from the red shield—in German, Rothschild—which hung over the door of their house in Frankfort,” he wrote. “This shield served the office of a sign at a time when houses were not yet numbered, and when Jews, as a rule, had no surnames, and the family adopted it as their crest in 1819 when they were ennobled by the Emperor of Austria.” That emperor was Francis II, Maria Theresa’s grandson.

poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote, unsurprisingly gloomy, from his rented farmhouse uptown. “In some thirty years, every noble cliff will be a pier and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brownstone.” Much of Manhattan was still farmland. (During the Revolutionary War, George Washington rode through cornfields on his way to rally his troops against the British at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.) Yet the commissioners’ plan included hardly any green space at all, explaining that “those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan island” meant that New Yorkers didn’t need so many parks for fresh air. Land was simply too valuable. (Central Park was only added to the plan in the 1850s.)

“But as I told him,” Penn later wrote, “the Tower was the worst argument in the world to convince me; for whoever was in the wrong, those who used force for Religion could never be in the right.”

William Penn, imprisoned in the Tower for being a Quaker.

And researchers have long known that bilingual students with dyslexia can excel at reading character-based languages like Japanese and Chinese but struggle with even the most basic English.

Before the Revolution, French forenames were largely restricted to Catholic control—which meant sticking to biblical and saints’ names. (The nobility could, as in most everything else, get away with more flair.) But in September of 1792, just one day after the National Convention of France unanimously voted to abolish the monarchy, French people were handed a new right: the right to name their children—and themselves—whatever they wanted. Many chose new names with revolutionary zeal, such as Fleur d’Orange Républicaine, Lucius Pleb-Egal, and Simon la Liberté ou la Mort. Children were named La Loi (the law) and Raison (reason). It was this kind of creativity that would in 1803 spur Napoleon to come up with a closed list of prénoms (first names) that people could name their children. (The list was scrapped in 1993, though French courts have nevertheless rejected names like Joyeaux,

One Citoyen Chamouleau wanted to name every street in the country after a virtue, with names like rue de la Générosité and rue de la Sensibilité. “Thus the people will ever have virtue on their lips and soon morality in their hearts.”

Around the world, revolutionary governments kick off their regimes by changing the street names. Mexico City has more than five hundred streets named after Emiliano Zapata, the leader of its peasant revolution.

Street names are, in a way, the perfect propaganda tool. Saying them requires no thought or consideration, and, better yet, you are forced to use them every time you give directions, write your letters, or apply for virtually anything at all. The state can literally put words in your mouth. The Nazis understood this best of all.

Most heart-wrenching were the Judenpfade (“Jews’ paths”) or Judenwege (“Jews’ lanes”), Hansel-and-Gretel-like wooded paths beaten in a time when Jews were not allowed to walk through the city but had to go around it.

The more I read about German street names, the more I came across this word, a word that reminds me why I avoided German in school: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It’s made up of two ideas—“the past” and “the process of coming to terms or coping.” It’s a word that is very German, and is often used to describe the nation’s reckoning with its Nazi past and the German division during the Cold War. But its meaning is universal. We all have the need to confront the past, memorialize it, struggle with it, do something with it. That something often involves street names.

Pierre Nora, who has written extensively on collective memory in France, has argued that before the nineteenth century we didn’t need objects to remember the past. Memory was engrained in local cultures, habits, and customs. But as the great changes of the twentieth century seemed to speed up history, and as memory became more removed from everyday experience, we began to feel a powerful urge to hold memories not just in our minds but in specific things and places—like monuments and street names. We want our lives to be predictable, and predictability requires a “narrative link” between the present and the past that reassures us that everything is as it should be.

So memorializing the past is just another way of wishing about the present. The trouble is that we don’t always share the same memories. And not everyone has an equal opportunity to enshrine their group’s memory on the landscape. As the novelist Milan Kundera has said, “The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.”

The growth of the Civil War monuments peaked twice: first, in the early twentieth century, when Jim Crow laws were being made, and then again in the 1950s and ’60s when the laws were being challenged.

Philosopher Henri Lefebvre has said that “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential.” If Mandela didn’t want to change names because he didn’t want to make it too obvious a revolution had happened—well, in that respect, he might have succeeded too well.

In New York, even addresses are for sale. The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000 (as of 2019), to apply to change the street address to something more attractive.

It’s not just the street’s first name that matters. In the UK, addresses ending in “Street” fetched less than half of those that ended with “Lane.” “Is it the association of the word street—street urchins and streetwalkers?” Richard Coates, a professor of linguistics, asked in the Guardian. “You don’t get avenue urchins, do you?” Disturbingly, houses on roads named “King” or “Prince” were also worth more than those on “Queen” or “Princess.”

Park Avenue hadn’t always been fancy. It hadn’t always been Park. Initially, when the grid was devised, it was plain old Fourth Avenue. Like much of Manhattan, it had been wooded; roads were cut in the seventeenth century through primeval forests. But by the nineteenth century, the street was smoky and dirty, with railroad tracks stretching down the middle, and factories, breweries, and saloons lining the roads. (A newspaper reported workmen contracting cholera from eating green apples they picked along what is now Park.) But once the railroads (which had once been pulled by horses) were moved underground, the street became increasingly appealing. This section of Fourth Avenue had been ambitiously renamed Park in 1888, when coal smoke still filled the air, but a decade later it finally began to suit its name, the sunken tracks filled with greenery and flowers.

By definition, homeless people don’t have homes. But an address is not a home. An address, today, is an identity; it’s a way for society to check that you are not just a person but the person you say you are. How many times have I been asked to show proof of address to register a child in school, to vote, to open a new account? It’s not for the bank manager to come and meet me at the door. In the modern world, in short, you are your address.

Goffman described how some people seek to avoid stigma by trying to become “normal”—a person stigmatized for a facial deformity, for example, might undergo plastic surgery. For the homeless, one obvious way of managing stigma is to acquire some form of street address, which means not having to identify as homeless to the doctor or to a prospective employer. And this need for a positive identity is essential. Psychologist Abraham Maslow theorized that people need to satisfy their basic needs first—shelter, food, water, etc.—before they could fulfill their psychological and self-fulfillment needs. But this sequence may not be so straightforward: What if people struggling with homelessness need a positive identity before getting out of poverty?

Sarah’s solution: ban the address. Or, rather, ban employers from asking for it before giving a job offer. Employers contact applicants by phone or email—what did they need the address for anyway? Simply taking that line off the application would stop discrimination—and perhaps give homeless people the confidence to apply.

Chris told me how developers create luxurious lobbies and atria for their full-price apartments, but build separate entrances for the affordable housing—“poor doors,” they called them. In Fitzrovia, luxury flats developed from a former workhouse have their own entrance and courtyard; flats built as affordable housing enter through a public alley. One developer only allowed children from the full-price apartments to play on the playground.

On his computer, Chris pulled up a list of all the things you can’t do without an address: get an ID card, a passport. You can’t get a marriage license without a street address, nor, in the UK, can you use a post office box. Credit agencies use them to give your credit score. To inform patients of their appointment dates, the National Health Service sends out letters. I knew this firsthand: I’ve missed NHS appointments I didn’t know about, simply because I hadn’t paid attention to my mail. And while you can technically vote without a street address, you will struggle to obtain the forms of identification you need to prove your eligibility. To receive unemployment benefits—known as “Jobseeker’s Allowance” in the UK—the applicant must turn up in person at a Jobcentre. Jobcentres, too, still issue their appointment letters by mail. If you miss an appointment after a letter was sent out, you can be sanctioned by losing your benefits, Chris told me, for between four weeks and three years. A man who went to his dying mother’s bedside was deprived of his benefits, even though he told the Jobcentre in advance. A man who missed an appointment because his baby had been stillborn was reportedly sanctioned. A man who had a heart attack during a work capability assessment: sanctioned. One recent study found that 21 percent of people using homelessness services had become homeless because of sanctions.

Again, criminalizing poverty..

I suspected that we are no different now, celebrating what we see to be beautiful and neglecting the value of invisible infrastructure.

Sheldrick thought it was a problem he could tackle. With a mathematician friend, a fellow chess-player from Eton, he came up with an ingenious idea—divide the world into squares, 3 meters by 3 meters. Instead of using coordinates, they decided to use words, which are easier to remember than a string of numbers. Three words per square: 40,000 words, 64 trillion 3-word combinations. And so what3words was born. Every spot on the world’s surface now has its own what3words address. It’s easy to look up on the company’s website or on its free app. The middle of the Taj Mahal is at doubt.bombard.alley. The Eiffel Tower is at daunt ing.evolves.nappy. What3words can lead you to places without traditional addresses. The middle of the White House Rose Garden is army.likes.jukebox. The playground slide my kids love to careen down is at shot.pokers.clock. The uses of the technology are endless. Want to find your friends sitting under a tree for a picnic? Use a what3words address. Need to pin exactly where on a sidewalk you took that picture? Or find your Airbnb tree house in Costa Rica? What3words can help with that, too. The technology has more serious uses. The Rhino Refugee Camp in Uganda is using what3words to help people find their way to the camp’s churches, mosques, markets, and doctors’ office. The Mongolian postal service is using the addresses to send mail to nomadic families. And Dr. Louw now uses the three words to find patients in the townships of South Africa.

Giles took me to see Jamie Brown, a kind-faced young linguist with reddish hair knotted in a loose bun, who helps to translate the map into other languages. It’s not just a matter of translating the existing word map into the new language. Instead, what3words hires native speakers, often culled from linguistics programs at London universities, to speak each word out loud to rule out homophones that would be confusing—blue and blew, for example. The advisers also sift out rude words or slang. (The word “tortoise” doesn’t appear in the Bengali list because some people think it’s bad luck to have one in your house.) They weed out words that don’t work; Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, for example, meaning “insurance companies providing coverage for legal expenses” is too long for an address whose selling point is brevity. And they make sure that every word is unique to all editions of the map—barn, the Norwegian word for “child,” can’t be used in the Norwegian map because “barn” already appears in the English-language version. Eventually the linguists cleverly whittle down the list of words. And then the most familiar words are allocated to places on the map where speakers of the language are most likely to live. On the French map, the word chat (“cat”) is likely to form part of a what3words address in Paris, or perhaps Montreal. On the Korean map, the word for cat will appear most often in Seoul. Less common and more complicated three-word addresses were put in the A...

And it’s not just what3words. Google has devised Plus Codes that use a string of numbers and letters to provide an address for any spot in the world. Plus Codes, which are derived from longitude and latitude coordinates, are about the length of a phone number. But the length can also be shortened when combined with a place name. So my regular spot at the British Library becomes GVHC+XW Kings Cross, London. Addressing the Unaddressed, the nonprofit addressing Kolkata’s slums that I visited in chapter 1, is now using Google’s technology to finish the addressing project in India—to extraordinary success.

E-commerce is growing rapidly in many parts of Africa. In Nigeria, for example, Jumia is vying to be Africa’s Amazon, selling everything from generators to perfume to cornflakes. Delivery start-ups compete to send drivers on motorcycles to deliver packages all over Lagos. Because addresses are hard to find, deliverymen often need to call clients for further directions. But as Kent adds, phone calls are expensive: a single call might cost 40 cents, a pretty deep cut, he points out, into a pizzeria’s profit on a $7 order.

Finding people is a problem the Enlightenment was poised to solve, and yet it’s still a problem that so often defeats us today. These new technological solutions seem like the easy answer. So why can’t I get more excited about them? The first problem, unsurprisingly, is money. What3words is out to get rich from its clever invention, and has raised tens of millions of dollars in start-up funding. This isn’t in itself a bad thing—coming up with the three-word addresses is a lot of work—but it’s unfortunate that in an age when data matters more than ever, the new digital addresses are bound up in patents. You can’t find out your own what3words address, or any of your neighbors’ addresses, without asking what3words’s app or website. And even though what3words told me it isn’t trying to replace traditional addresses, they do have the potential to become the official addresses in places like Mongolia, whose postal systems have adopted the system. The company has promised that the app and website will always be free, but I’m not sure I want a young start-up’s software to be the only place I can find out where I am. Google has impressively made its data open source, unlike what3words. Still, it’s Google, one of the richest and most powerful companies in the richest and perhaps the most powerful country the world has ever known. If nothing else, their Plus Codes pull people online and toward Google products. I can’t quite see how Facebook can monetize addressing streets, but at thi...

At first, I thought clinging to our current system was just nostalgia. But it’s more than that; it is, perhaps, a symptom of the modern condition. We don’t know what the near future is going to look like—technologically or politically. Change seems to come more outrageously every year. And the more things change, the more we feel the need to anchor ourselves to the past. Street addresses have become one way to remember. And remembering is one thing digital addresses cannot do. Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, at the edge of Syria, houses almost eighty thousand refugees, with thirty-two schools and fifty-eight community centers. By some estimates, it is Jordan’s fourth largest city. But it was only in 2016 that it got street names: Basil Street, Olive Street, Anise Street, Zaytoun Street. “The street names are civilized ones, and they remind the individual of his country, and now an individual has an address. We used to live in a neglected area and now we have an address,” one refugee, Abu Ismail, told Reuters. “Where do you live? In this specific street. Thank God, I now have an actual address.”

And digital addresses don’t make communities. In a way, they can divide them. Your neighbor’s what3words address is completely unrelated to yours. You can’t learn her address from looking at her house—you have to ask an app, a third party. You can’t ask anyone on the street for directions. And, as Graham Rhind, an addressing expert, told me, digital addresses like what3words “don’t provide any link between our mental maps and addressing, and removing that link stops addressing being effective. There is no relationship between horse.town.faster and what I experience when I traverse through my world.”

Digital addresses create a world in which we all exist as dots on a map, each our own island, named by a corporation.