Why did you write a book about street addresses?

As I describe in my book, I happened upon the Universal Postal Union's website, and found an initiative they were undertaking to give every person in the world an address. It turns out that billions of people in the world don't have reliable addresses. Some brilliant experts at the World Bank had also been using addresses as a way to help pull people out of poverty all over the world. Soon, I found out that some communities in rural West Virginia didn't have street addresses either. I ended up writing about West Virginia for the Atlantic, and later about streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Guardian. Soon I was collecting stories about street names all the time, and I found myself writing a book about street addresses.

How many people in the world don’t have addresses?

I’m often asked about a point I make early in the book: that “most households in the world don’t have an address.” Conversations with readers have made me think I should clarify this claim. Certainly, it’s undisputed that the billion or so people who live in slums, for example, don’t have addresses.

But they are not alone. How many others lack addresses? It depends, in part, on how you define an “address.” An address might, it seems, just be a way to identify your house to neighbors. But actually, at least in the modern world, a “street address” is more complicated than this. Today’s world requires a rigorous “address infrastructure” -- the precise, methodical, data-driven system of addressing that’s necessary for much of modern life. Further, as experts at the World Bankhave said, the real advantage of addresses “lies in the potential of the urban information database, which, in conjunction with a street addressing plan and a street index, can be used for various applications and benefit the population as a whole, local governments, and the private sector.”

This kind of information-driven addressing is hard to implement, which is why so few countries have mastered it. The Universal Postal Union describes how “[i]n many developing and least developed countries, addressing systems are either inexistent or only partially developed.” The founders of what3words, a company who has developed an alternative system of identifying places, estimate that “around 75 percent of the world (135 countries) suffers from inadequate addressing systems.”

So the number of people who don’t have addresses really depends on whether you include in that number those whose governments lack effective addressing infrastructure, as well as those who have no addresses at all. I tend to include both in my estimations. Either way, I feel confident saying that billions of people lack reliable addresses -- and thus are deprived of the many advantages experts have discovered strong addressing infrastructure brings. (May 23rd, 2020)

Do you visit book clubs?

Absolutely -- email me!