+ How did you end up writing a book about street addresses?

It was an accident, really. I was living in the west of Ireland, and I had to mail a birthday card home to my father in the US. While I was buying the stamp, I thought about how I was giving Ireland all the money, even though the delivery and much of the processing would happen abroad. I thought I would just quickly look up how the US got its cut, and it was then that I stumbled on the website of the Universal Postal Union. Featured there were articles about how many people in the world don’t have reliable addresses, and how addressing is one of the cheapest ways to help lift people out of poverty. When I found out that even parts of the US don’t have addresses, I borrowed my dad’s car on a trip home and went to see for myself.

After the article I wrote about the trip was published in The Atlantic, I kept reading and hearing more address stories from people all over the world. I realized that this seemingly bureaucratic detail could tell us so much about our past, present and future. And so I found myself writing a book – about street addresses.

(May 23, 2020)

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

I’m sometimes 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. Almost certainly, the billion or so people who live in slums, for example, don’t have reliable 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 Bank have 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.” Just writing a number on your door with a sharpie does not give you a modern address.

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 that 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 comfortable saying that, no matter how you dice it, millions, and more likely billions, of people lack reliable addresses -- and thus are often deprived of the many advantages experts have discovered strong addressing infrastructure brings.

(May 23rd, 2020)

+ What new perspective do you hope people will take from The Address Book?

We take so much for granted about this little bureaucratic detail of our lives, and we don’t really stop to think about it. But thinking about street addresses is so revealing! We can learn so much about ourselves, our societies, and our governments. I never argue in this book that “street addresses changed the world”; instead, I believe that “street addresses illuminate the changes in the world we live in.” And what you can tell about a place from looking at its street addresses is amazing once you dig in.

And yet, I wonder if we know this already, without even thinking about it. Recently, I was in Ireland for a wedding, and I chatted with the hair stylist. She asked me what I did, and I told her about the book. Her first reaction was one I often got – utter surprise that you could write a whole paragraph, much less a book, about street addresses. But after a minute of wielding the curling iron, she told me that her daughter was kind of named after a street. It turned out that when she and her husband were living abroad as newlyweds, they often passed a road called Blythe, and now it’s their daughter’s name.

I wasn’t surprised. (I know other babies named after streets!) But for me, it illustrated a point; we often think street addresses are dull and administrative, but they add richness to our lives and the experience of the places where we live. They also often reflect our ideals and agendas. The process of figuring all of this out, through interviews with artists, historians, geographers, activists and neuroscientists, made The Address Book a fantastically exciting book to write – and, I hope, to read as well.

+ I want to learn more about street addresses. Where do I start?

First, follow the work of leading geographers in this field, including Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, Maoz Azaryahu, and Anton Tantner. Between them, they have written dozens of books and articles that will point you in the right direction. I learned so much, for example, from Tantner's incredible book, House Numbers.

If you're interested in development and the technical aspects of street addresses, The World Bank has a terrific (and free!) street addressing course that lays out all the requirements of designing a modern address infrastructure.

If you'd like to support organizations working on these issues, look out for Missing Maps, Addressing the Unaddressed, and Proxy Address, all profiled in the book.

FInally, in the acknowledgements, I note how two books in particular, James Scott's Seeing Like A State and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's book Paris as Revolution inspired and informed so much of this book. Both are chock-full of ideas and revelations, and also happen to be extremely readable.

+ Do you visit book clubs?

Absolutely - email me!

+ I have a question/comment/request.

By all means, email me. I can sometimes be slow to respond, but I WILL respond.