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

by Deirdre Mask

ban employers from asking for it before giving a job offer.

The lack of a home address was crushing people’s chances of ever getting a home again.

An address does not have to be connected to an actual home.

The homeless person receives an address of an empty home, and then enters it in an online database where she wanted her mail forwarded—to a shelter, a friend’s house, etc. The post office would then redirect the mail to that location.

The home may be empty, but an address never need be.

Burnham is now widely known for spurring the City Beautiful movement that inspired urban planning for decades. But before Chicago could be beautiful, it had to be organized.

In much of apartheid South Africa, as I already knew, there were no street names or numbers, particularly in the townships which were often simply called Blocks and were unmapped.

Every spot on the world’s surface now has its own what3words address.

Digital addresses can make these problems disappear.

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

The people understood the new numbers meant that they could now be found, taxed, policed, and governed, whether they liked it or not. They understood that addressing the world is not a neutral act.