While browsing books on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble, on a whim, picked up a paperback copy of The Address Book - What Street Addresses Reveal about Identify, Race, Wealth and Power by Deirdre Mask. Interesting light read. As an African American descendant and scholar (Law School followed by academic career in US & UK) the topic must have been quite important and intriguing to the author. She has put in an earnest effort, visiting multiple countries, offices, universities and personalities to gather the material and has put together the book in an entertaining flow. She seems to have thought of it as a vast, comprehensive work that covers history, geography, civilizations, continents and so on, but it comes across as a fun, light and fluffy work.
Her opening line on the introductory chapter is catchy enough, "In some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes." You'd never think so much of the NYC council time will be spent debating street names. This goes to show how emotionally connected these names are, as different groups seek to commemorate or fight against a given name. There are also parts of rural US (e.g. in the state of West Virginia) the local citizens, not used to having regular door number and street addresses, resist attempts to give them proper addresses, as they they it will lead to government surveillance. She then moves on to illustrate how slums in Kolkata, India that don't have addresses struggle to receive many government services (such as mail delivery or emergency medical care) and what an NGO (Non Government Org) called Addressing the Unaddressed is doing to create GPS coordinates based Go Codes that can be used to locate specific residences within the slum. Seeing the YouTube video I have linked might give an idea of how difficult giving regular street addresses to these houses could be. In the next chapter she has discussed the the famous Victorian era London Doctor John Snow's efforts to locate the source of a Cholera epidemic (it was a water pump) and how UN operations in Haiti resulted in their Cholera epidemic as recently as 2010 and the role of street addresses played in these root cause investigations.
Subsequent chapters on Rome, London, Vienna, Philadelphia discuss how street addresses and house numbering was invented over the centuries and how it helped and hurt Governments and people (which delivery of services might be good, being able to identify all the Jewish homes during second world war is bad). She has taken the pains to travel many of these cities to get a personal account of the details for her story telling endeavor. There are lots of interesting factoids spread around the book. Japan uses a city block naming convention, treating (unnamed) streets as just empty spaces between those blocks, Korea gave street names to its streets moving away from the Japanese imposed conventions to modernize itself similar to western nations but has names that are often misleading (e.g. bunch of streets in an area named after precious stones may make you think that is where perhaps the jewelry stores are but has no such relevance), Iran, South Africa, Florida and other places struggling with racist pasts or using the street names to stick it to the countries/cultures they hate and so on.
In New York city, you can actually buy pretty much any address you want. So, in order to make their property appear more posh, real estate developers like Trump pay the city and own prestigious sounding address (e.g. 1 Central Park West, while it should have been 15 Columbus Circle). Thus there are so many Park Avenue addresses that don't actually exist on Park Avenue! You can imagine the confusion such numbering/naming causes when an ambulance need to get to a dying patient fast! This is bizarre in a city like New York, compared to a slum in Kolkata, both struggling with addresses.
Since I knew and have written about What3Words years back that is specifically works to provide a clean address to every point on the surface of the planet, I was hoping she wouldn't miss it while writing this book. To my satisfaction, she didn't and has visited there office to understand the technology and has written about it. But she is skeptical since this is a privately run business that will be interested in monetizing the solution they have developed while she believes being able to write down a regular address as your own, emotionally connecting to it, learning all the neighborhoods near it, all have lot more significance to human beings than the mere utilitarian values an address provides. A very easy read.
-sundar.
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