Which way is home? It’s complicated
I live on the corner of a busy avenue and a side street. My address is on the avenue, but the residential entrance is around the corner, on the street. This causes some minor confusion with delivery drivers. I usually put in the notes that I’m on the side street, between the 7-11 and the burger restaurant. The drivers don’t always see the notes.
But this is a minor inconvenience. Imagine if I didn’t have an address at all! It might surprise you to learn that more than half the world’s population doesn’t have a reliable, mappable address that would allow people to find them without asking around or searching.
Addresses in most developed countries follow a similar pattern: a house number, a street name, a district or a neighborhood, followed by a town or city, and a post code. With that information, you can find almost any registered house or business, without much trouble.
But it’s not like that everywhere. In India, for example, many addresses are incomplete, meaning that they get you close, but they don’t pinpoint a location. To help with that, many people add directions relative to a landmark. For example, they might put their names and their district, and then add, “near Green Park” or “behind the ATM.” If you know the area well, you can find the address with a little bit of searching and asking around. But if you don’t know the area well, it can take a long time to find a house or a business.
The same thing is true in other countries, especially in urban areas that have expanded rapidly, without much government supervision. Nigeria, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Indonesia are good examples: buildings might not be numbered, not every street has a name, and locals rely on landmarks to find their way.
Perhaps the most staggering example is the city of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. There are some street names and numbers, but nobody uses them—not even the post office.
To find their way, everyone just uses landmarks. A person’s address is really a set of directions from a well-known place. And the landmark doesn’t even have to exist: sometimes, directions are given based on where a church or a shop used to be a long time ago.
One local resident said that she gives directions relative to a yellow car, since the car has been parked in the same spot for ten years, and everyone knows where it is. And to make matters more confusing, they don’t love using cardinal directions like “north” and “south” in Managua. They tend to give directions relative to the lake or the mountains.
Locals can typically find their way around without fixed, permanent, logical addresses. But the system has a lot of waste. Consider this. If you’ve ordered a package for delivery, the driver might have to search for your address. The driver would waste time and fuel trying to find an imprecise address, and it would increase costs.
It’s sometimes possible for recipients to share a geographic pin, but that’s an extra step the receiver must take. It won’t surprise you to learn that many packages languish undelivered in cities around the world without logical address systems.
That’s package delivery. It can have more serious consequences, too. Imagine you want to open a beauty salon or a bakery. You want to advertise your business: you need people to come visit in person. But if your address is imprecise, it can be hard or impossible to attract customers from outside your immediate neighborhood.
Cities also have trouble planning infrastructure improvements. How can they know which areas need schools, water pipes, and electricity lines if they can’t accurately map where the houses and businesses are?
Fixed addresses can also be necessary for residents to access services that many of us take for granted. Getting a bank loan requires proving your income, residency, and identity.
You can see where this is going. You might be denied a loan if the deed to your house, your government ID, and your utility bills all have a different version of your address. This can increase inequality: relatively wealthy people in cities can access financial services much more easily than those in rural areas without adequate addresses.
Finally, think about emergency services. If there’s a fire, or if someone needs medical attention, you don’t want the drivers getting lost on the way; you don’t want to have to give them directions in a moment of crisis.
Those of us who live in developed countries, with perfect addressing—we might listen to this with smug satisfaction. But not so fast. You see, for there to be an address, there must be a road and a building. But not every place has that.
Let’s say you want to take professional photos of your family in a large park. How do you tell the photographer where to find you? You might say, “by the benches on the north side of the large pond.” Hmmm…sound familiar?
Or imagine that you’re on a major highway and your car breaks down. You call for help. They ask you where you are. You look around: all you see are trees and cars speeding by. There are no addresses here. In some places, you might be lucky to find a mile marker. But if not, there’s no good way to describe where you are.
The same can happen if you need medical attention while you’re out on a hike, in the middle of a large farm, or on a boat in the sea. These are all places with no addresses.
This is a problem made for the age of high tech. And in our next story, you’ll learn about the ways innovators are trying to make sense of the vast parts of the world that don’t have an address.
Jeff’s take
When I first heard that Managua, the capital city of a country, did not use addresses—I just couldn’t believe it. The idea that a whole city wouldn’t even try to have addresses! It just blows my mind. But it’s true.
I just have so many follow up questions about that yellow car. How is it possible that a car has been parked in the same spot for ten years, and it’s still yellow? I would think it would be covered in a thick layer of dust by now.
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