What I Am Reading: "The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power" by Deirdre Mask

I found this book on Goodreads, where somehow the uneducated philistines who vote in the Goodreads Choice Awards elevated it to a finalist position. It is an urban studies book about street addresses, an overlooked aspect of a city's infrastructure; and how they relate to politics, race, and class.

The book was well-researched both bibliographically and in a shoe-leather sense. Its segments jump between the focused history of a topic and the interviews and experiences that the author, a writer and teacher with a Harvard law degree, had while researching the topic. The book is non-academic and intended for a general audience, and each of the topics tackled is tied in to a specific place; and so it usually does not provide a broad survey on its specific subject so much as it does a specific case study.

Deirdre Mask apparently grew this book from an article in The Atlantic on the same subject, and the stories that readers sent her in response. She both starts and finishes the book by demonstrating the importance of street addresses through people who don't have them: residents of the slums of Kolkata and homeless people in New Haven and London. In this context, acquiring a street address (whether a computer-generated geo-tag one or through a scheme to forward mail through the addresses of rich absentee residents) is the formal difference-maker in getting access to government services and bank accounts and other necessities, and the informal difference-maker in acquiring enough social legitimacy to gain employment. Another contemporary example of the usefulness of street addresses comes from Haiti, where (with a digression to pioneering epidemiologist John Snow) street addresses are part of the data that allow public health officials to map, and therefore trace the origins of, disease outbreaks.

From there, the book heads backwards into the history of street addresses. The Romans didn't have them, and navigated more based on the "mental maps" of the city they internalized through repeated exposure to its landmarks and the city's internal logic. This segment involves discussion of the links in matter between navigation and memory, and on Kevin Lynch's idea of the "imageable" city, based on its paths, nodes, edges, landmarks, and districts. Next (though not chronologically next) comes London, where the city's expansion into neighboring rural towns meant a massive patchwork of generic "Church Streets" and "Hill Streets" and the like. This was rearranged and standardized in the Victorian era, when Rowland Hill's penny post (switching from a policy where addressees of mail needed to pay for it) caused an explosion in deliveries, and the people in charge realized that the dead letter office could not handle it all, impressiveness of some of their puzzle-solving aside. Mail necessities continued to drive address technology down to the development of the zip code and its international counterparts.

From there it is back to Vienna, where Maria Theresa was one of the first to mandate house numbers. These were based on the house's date of construction rather than its positioning; clearly (as I had not considered) address technology has evolved over time. This was part of the grand rational order-seeking of the Enlightenment, and also served statist purposes of allowing conscription and police pursuit and the like. Street numbers and censuses allowed rulers a greater knowledge of their subjects, for good and for ill. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Enlightenment also brought the street-numbered grid system to Philadelphia, courtesy of William Penn and the Quakers. The grid, often a system imposed from afar by those planning a community, never caught on in dense Europe, but was used extensively in America, both in cities and in surveying the land acquired in the West. We think of the grid as stultifying nowadays (something the book didn't touch on), but at the time some viewed it as a symbol of freedom, unfreighted by the power politics inherent in European social geography.

The book then takes an interesting detour to Asia, where it discusses how Japan and Korea conceptualize their cities on the basis of blocks and not of streets, and how the author thinks this may be attributable to the differences in how their languages are written compared to Western languages. This becomes interesting in Korea as the country adopted a street-based address system formally in 2011, but still makes heavy semiformal use of its Japan-imposed block system. This was an interesting section, with notes on the meeting point of Korean nationalization and economic globalization, and how direction is conceptualized differently by people like the Australian Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayore (who use no right and left, but orient by cardinal directions - to the extent of putting cards telling a story in order from east to west, regardless of how they are facing). It mostly explores this through Western writers however, and only uses one Korean source (and no Japanese).

After this history, the book turns to explore contemporary examples of how the naming of streets is an exercise in social power. One political example come from Iran, where the brief period between the Shah's overthrow and the Ayatollah's ascension saw streets named after all manner of international revolutionaries. The other is from Germany, where the obvious Nazi renaming was reverted to old street names in West Germany, but proactively changed to honor Communists and Anti-Nazi activists in East Germany. This caused flashpoints after reunification when streets (and other locations) named after heroic resisters to and victims of the Nazis were changed back to banal, even monarchical names. The book also covered an issue I read about recently, the renaming of Berlin streets from Wilhelmine colonizers to African resisters. Finally, Germany also ended up with many Judenstrasses of Medieval origin, many of which of course no longer had any Jewish population to walk them.

The book focuses on the United States, of course, for coverage of racial issues, and discusses both the familiar topic of the renaming of Confederate streets and the proactive naming of streets after Martin Luther King. Many of these eventually came to stigmatize a neighborhood as poor and Black, and the book follows a nonprofit activist, Melvin White, as he tried to beautify the Martin Luther King, Jr. Street of St. Louis. The book also hits South Africa, where Mandela tried to go easy on conspicuous re-naming to keep the country's white majority from getting too restless, but the issue has intensified in recent years, often to the consternation of Afrikaaners. In all of these cases, it is a question of public memory through street names, and of the symbolism of who has power over the geography people live in. You can’t avoid telling people your street address.

Finally, the issue of class. As noted above, the last chapter is on homelessness; the chapter before is on those Manhattan billionaires who have their pick of street addresses, and try to aim for those that confer more prestige when siting (or purchasing vanity addresses for) their upscale businesses. The book ends on the subject of geo-addresses, already covered by some earlier do-gooders, such as the website "what3words," which assigns three randomized words to every 3x3 meter parcel of land on the earth. These can be helpful in some circumstances where fast location is needed or addresses are unavailable; but Mask also finds it sinister to replace neighbors numbered sequentially on the same road with navigation by randomized, unrelated words that one must access a third party to learn.

I'm from one of those rural places where addresses are based on landmarks or neighboring geography: sort of the most basic level of street naming, where the meaning behind the name is obvious. This book was a good look at a subject that people not familiar with urban studies or social geography probably don't think much about. The history of street numbers is interesting, but the symbolism of street names is the important part. It isn't just my address that has meaning, and the meaning behind some other street names may actually be as obvious as Old Hardwick Road. More than just a survey of good writers on the subject (some of which I am interested in pursuing further), this book's on-the-ground reporting brought the subject to bear in a useful way, and I think that that was an important contribution.