99% Invisible - 414- The Address Book

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and taken on great political importance. Deirdre Mask is the author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, which looks at all the ways the world has changed since the popularization of street addresses during the Enlightenment. The book examines how addresses impact wealth and poverty, and how they serve as proxies for our most contentious debates. Mask also explores a digital future where we aren't reliant on the numbers on our homes to tell us where we are or where we're going.  The Address Book Order The 99% Invisible City

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Humans have been living in cities for a really long time. But like a lot of things about the past, getting around cities used to be just needlessly difficult because we didn't have reliable maps or street signs or even addresses. And address is something we all take for granted today. But in ancient Rome, if you wanted to go to a friend's house, you had to use all kinds

of context clues. Like yet to remember that the house was two blocks away from a big column. But if you reach the horse tables, you'd go too far. And you had to rely on non-visual cues, like smells and noises. Well, you had all sorts of noise and street hawkers, and you had different smells. You had the smell of a meat market. Yes, sometimes you had to use meat smells

to figure out where you were going. Maybe one of the ways you navigate, you navigate much more by your senses. You can actually use what you're seeing and what you're smelling, and what you're hearing as a ways of navigating around the city. This is Deirdre Mask. I'm the author of the address book, What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race,

Wealth, and Power. Deirdre's book looks at how the world has changed since street addresses became popular during the Enlightenment. So today, we're going to take a tour through some of the many ways street addresses shaped our lives, including how we fight disease. 54 Fritz Street, London, England, the Office of Dr. John Snow. So street addresses come up in the 1700s and they made all sorts of new things possible. And one of the first things they revolutionized was our approach to public health.

So can you tell me how addresses related to the cholera epidemic in London? A doctor called John Snow. This is in the Victorian London. He was actually a very prestigious doctor, but he lived actually right next to a slum. And when a case of cholera broke out in London, he was able to track the cholera in the slum. Now at the time, there was no germ theory of disease, but he had this idea that it was spreading through water, and he was basically able to get desertific hits, get people's addresses, do some shoe leather work himself, and trace where everybody was, and then they clumping around this pump. John Snow took off the handle,

or not John Snow himself, the government took off the handle or not Jon Snow himself. The government took off the handle of the pump. The cholera epidemic goes away. He was able to use these location and disease to find the source of the cholera. But speaking of modern epidemiologists, I learned that actually what Jon Snow did in two days in Victorian London is actually impossible and huge swaths of the world today. Yeah, you mentioned the book that countries without good address systems have a much harder time fighting disease.

And you bring up Haiti as an example. Tell me what happened there. You know, there was a terrible earthquake as we all know in Haiti in 2010, which was followed by a vicious case of cholera that spread throughout the country. And when I spoke to logisticians at doctors without borders who were coordinating the response to the epidemic, basically, they weren't able to track down their patients in the

same way that John Snow could track down the patients in this London slum, which severely hittered their ability to stop the spread of the disease. So it's a complicated story, but basically, if you don't have a way of finally tracking where people are, you don't have a way of finally tracking where people are, you don't have a way of finally tracking where disease is. Adresses have a lot of positive effects like tracing disease and they make it possible for the government to provide services and things like that. But they also give the state a lot of power and that power can be abused. So could you talk about the tyranny of addresses, so to speak? Yes, in the book I talked about the example of Austria

during the Habsburg Empire, during the reign of Maria Teresa, who had an issue, a problem, which is that she was fighting all these wars and she needed good strong men to fight in the wars, but she was having trouble finding them. So she ended up sending out the military to number the houses in her kingdom and while doing so taking a kind of census. And people did not like these house numbers. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about it, especially if you've never had a number before, because numbering is, as there's a scholar named Anton Tantner, who's written about this extensively, it's dehumanizing. You know, nobody likes to think of themselves as a number.

But also, it has this function of, if you were able to live your life in relative privacy, and then suddenly you're revealed to the state by a number painted on your wall, there is something deeply upsetting in this. So, this was a good thing in a sense to get numbered because often this assured in positive changes, like, you know, taxes and and getting around and people love the post But there are downsides this as well because now the state can can find you it can imprison you They are all sorts of negative aspects to being found as anyone who's ever received junk mail or solicitations can know it a milder form The story of what happened in Austrian also across Europe as house numbers came up is a story Basically of the conflicting views we have about the state being able to find us and identify us.

I'd never really considered this inside of addresses until a little while ago, actually, at a friend of mine who was a journalist and long time in Cambodia, the government was trying to impose addresses in parts of Cambodia who, you know, within living memory had genocide and a purge of people. And the citizenry there was like that. Like I don't want the government to have any knowledge of where I am. And I kind of blew my mind because I thought of addresses. I mean, I really didn't think of them at all. I thought of them as neutral things.

Did you notice in your research that, depending on how benevolently you viewed the government and viewed type of control, how people took to the concept of addresses versus people who didn't have that experience? It sounds very familiar to me. And so the way I got started on this whole project, the first thing I wrote about was about West Virginia, about a very rural county in West Virginia called McDowell County, which at the time had no street addresses. The state embarked on a huge project to give them street addresses. And so I went and I interviewed lots and lots of people.

And in some ways, it was sort of like a quirky story because people would fight over naming their street Crunchy Grenola Road. There was a street, one official told me, a certain kind of older lady lived on that was called Cougar Lane. It was just, first it was quite quirky. But then you started hearing stories about people who really didn't want addresses. And you talk to the addressing coordinators, and they actually found their work really difficult.

And there were reports of people coming out and meeting addresses with machetes in their back pockets. People often say, oh, those are just, you know, they would see them as being ignorant or backwards or, you know, but you know what, the more I read about addresses, the more I realized that they knew a lot of other people didn't knew that these addresses weren't just designed as they were being pitched to provide emergency services, even though that's extremely important. I'm not denying that that's not an excellent reason to give addresses, but they knew there were other benefits to the government of being able to finally track citizens. This was seen as a violent act, actually exposing them to the eye of the state. I guess a lot of it comes down to how much you trust your government as well.

Obviously, in the example you gave, if you're dissident or you're someone who the government is not going to like, for whatever reason, you're probably not going to like addresses either. Today, it's believed that over a billion people in the world do not have an address. That includes people without a home and residents of small towns and encampments. And not having an address creates a lot of problems. No fixed address. No fixed address. So you make a case that having an address is actually an equity issue.

Not about just having a home, but like having an address. So what does an address give you access to? Well, this really comes up when I was researching homelessness because then you're in my head. I was like, who are the people who don't have addresses? And obviously it's people without homes. And one thing I found from talking to experts on homelessness,

but also activists, was that when people are asked, when people without homes are asked, what do you need? Well, by definition, they need a home. But what a lot of them said was they needed an address. And so there were stories, you know, of people saying that basically what they needed was a way of pretending that they weren't homeless. When you apply for jobs, it lists address.

Even though there's no way you're going to get mail to this address or employers going to show up at your door, but they said they needed an address even if they were just called. Yeah. When you're homeless, it's hard enough to get a job, but you can't even apply for a job in many cases. When they have these mandatory address lines on an application form. The World Bank has seen addresses as one of the cheapest ways of lifting people out of poverty because if you give people addresses, they have a way of pretending that they

aren't homeless in a way of accessing all kinds of services. So to go back to your question, there's all sorts of things you can't do. You'll struggle to get a bank account, you'll struggle to vote, you know, where I live in England, and there's a national health service. Almost all communication is done through letters. And when I was researching this, I was calling up GP practices to find out how you register while being homeless. And even though I am a person with a home, I found it incredibly difficult to get out

to even pretend for my, you know, investigating into homelessness, but on that incredibly difficult. Is there a way to level the playing field for people without addresses? Yeah, so one of the proposals that's been made is something called BAM the address, which has been modeled on this BAM the box movement in the US, and by the box it means not allowing employers to ask about your criminal history, basically stopping people from discriminating at first glance against someone. And there's something similar about BAM the address. There's no reason that employers need your address,

at least at those early stages of interview process. There's also a very clever way that's become come up with in England by a man named Chris Hildry, where he's basically teaming up with royal mail to use the addresses of empty homes so that if you could just be assigned the address of an empty home, and you could use this and the mail does not go to the house, you know, even if the home gets moved into it doesn't matter.

It's the same way as if you move your mail gets forwarded for months and the people currently living there will have no idea this is happening. And so people can get the letters that they need, but they can also use it as a shield showing to people that they have an address which sometimes becomes a proxy for, you know, a productive member of society. A street address can indicate that someone's been fortunate in life. Many streets like Park Avenue in New York have become associated with luxury and prestige.

While others have developed preputations as bad neighborhoods, reputations that are sometimes totally unfair. has bad neighborhoods, reputations that are sometimes totally unfair. One Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Atlanta, Georgia. There are hundreds of Martin Luther King streets in America. They're often in neighborhoods that are less well off. Why is that? What is the cycle that has created the idea

and the stigma of Martin Luther King? I think the estimate now is 900 streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. in America today. And they're often interestingly enough in the American South right next to the names of Confederate generals. And commemorating a street after Martin Luther King, who was obviously the most prominent icon of the Civil Rights Movement,

largely he was black communities that named streets after Martin Luther King as a way of commemorating him. Sometimes they were put in neighborhoods to inspire the residents, I put inspiring quotes, but in some of these situations these were neighborhoods that didn't work particularly nice to put a point on it because of the forces of racism and poverty. And this meant that the name for some people was entrenched with this idea of poverty and crime. And it's why Chris Rock, you know, in his stand-up had a routine in which I'm paraphrasing, but, you know, if you find yourself on Martin Luther King, Junior Street Run. It ain't the safest place to fit. You can't call nobody, tell them you lost on MLK. I'm lost, I'm on Martin Luther King Run!

Run! Run! Run! The video's there! Everybody laughed at me, you know, I'm black myself, I laughed as well. But you know, in a lot of ways, it's not funny at all. And sometimes you can track MLK streets and find out about Black America.

But also, you can find about the perception of Black America as well. Because one thing I found in my research was that there are researchers, for example, who have found that if you compare the economic fortunes of streets, same after Martin Luther King, with streets, same after JFK, or even with just main streets, MLK streets aren't that much economically worse off.

You know, they're different. They have more churches, for example, or they have more, you know, more schools, because these are white collar jobs that were open to black people. But they weren't any worse. And one of the conclusions that I come to when I write about this is that, you know, yes, a lot of these streets have suffered, but also perhaps we think of MLK's junior streets as dangerous streets because they're black streets

and we're always gonna associate black streets with being dangerous and poor and neglected. And thinking about that is another way of thinking about race in America today. Today, more and more streets around the world are named after famous people from history, and this is why street names have become a proxy for so many arguments about who we are and what we stand for. The British Embassy at Ferd book was about the Bobby Sand Street

in Tehran. There's this incredible tense history between the UK and Iran, and making a Bobby Sand Street makes it, it seems like a real provocation. How did it end up that there was a Bobby Sand Street in Tehran? Yeah, it's interesting. There is a Bobby Sand Street in Tehran, which is right by the British Embassy. And for anybody who doesn't know,

Bobby Sand's was a hunger striker in Northern Ireland, a member of the Irish Republican Army. And so it was an unusual name to have in Tehran, especially by the British Embassy, because the British really were Bobby Sands's enemies. Yeah, I'd heard the story about these teenage boys who had changed it, so I tracked one of them down. Who told me this amazing story that,

after the revolution, there were a lot of young people who were very politically involved, including himself. We'd gotten involved in politics at a very young age, and they're very wealthy residents of Tehran, so they're in quite a fancy neighborhood near the British Embassy, and they had this idea they were gonna change the names. Sounds to me a bit like, you know, stranger things.

They're all on their bikes going to the hardware store and they buy this glue that they have to powder and mix water and then they're basically able to mimic signs and they change the sands to read Bobby Sandstree, and this would have been shortly after Bobby Sandstide, after his hunger strike. The city later ratified it and there's Bobby Sandstree, and weirdly enough for a hunger strike or there's a Bobby Sand's burger bar.

Oh my god. Also in Tehran. And the reason I found this fascinating was that it's just a light on commemoration. Why does this matter? And in fact, we know it does matter because the British Embassy actually ended up opening up a new entrance so that they didn't have to be on Bobby Sandstreet, which I believe used to be Winston Churchill Street, you know, so they could have a new address because obviously they cared.

And so it opens this window of what commemoration means and why we care so much really. Yeah, they were angry at the British Empire and they knew that Bobby Sand's would be a finger in their eye, basically, you know, just like it just could poke them. Yeah, so there's Bobby S. H. to Toronto, but there's Bobby Sand Street all over the world, you know, just like it just would poke them. Yeah, so there's Bobby S. Taron, but there's Bobby Sandstreet all over the world, you know, I think I kind of five in France, for example. But the interesting thing I found was that there aren't any actually in Ireland, so this is actually sort of a fascinating idea that you have this fighter who, for a lot of people depending on your belief system, would have been a martyr and a great man. And yet you have all these names and bathroom elsewhere.

But you don't have any in Ireland. And basically the explanation I came to is that Ireland doesn't have any consensus on Bobby Sands. Up close, his legacy is a lot more complicated than it was for those teenage boys in Iran. This whole idea of commemorating is really trying to figure out what we're about. And what Ireland has said by not giving a Bob Sands

street is that at this point, at least that's out what we're about, and what Ireland has said by not giving a Bob-San street is that at this point, at least that's not what they're about. You know, Bobby Sands is Ireland, is not today's Ireland, and that's really for me why there is no street name after Bobby Sands in Ireland, or North or South. 2-2-1-1 Freedom Street, Hollywood, Florida. So right now, there are lots of arguments about street names, especially in the US where they're named after Confederate generals and historical figures like Christopher Columbus.

And you spent months covering street names in Hollywood, Florida in particular. So what was happening in Hollywood, Florida when you were there? Yeah, well in Hollywood, Florida, there were parts of the city that were historically black. Part of the city called Liberia had three street names that were named after Confederate generals. And the worst of them of all in the eyes of campaigners was Nathan Bedford Forest Street. People knew who Nathan Bedford Forest was.

He was not only, he was, you know, a major figure in the Confederate war, but he was also seen as one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. And so you have these street names, not only in this part of Hollywood, Florida, that was really intended for black people, when black people weren't allowed to live

in integrated areas. And so there was an activist, a man who actually just recently passed away, I'm sad to say, in Benjamin, Israel, is a really interesting man, who's from New York, he's African-American, but also orthodox Jewish. And he basically just for months, just appeared at every city council meeting. And I watched many of these things, you know, where he would be talking about these street

names while everybody else was talking about Airbnb regulations. And finally, it really started to click. And eventually, they did overturn them. And it really, in a lot of ways, exposed a lot of racism, but also a lot of other feelings about street names in the battle. And for me, one of the most interesting thing was, you know, I'm African-American. I did, yeah, in the book in general, I tried to stay fairly neutral about these things, but I'm not really neutral in this. I thought the street names would change. But it was interesting hearing the other side, and I listened to

it, you know, many speeches about this, that there were people who would say things like, I live on Lee Street, named after Robert E. Lee, and I don't care anything about Robert E. Lee, but you know, I met my husband on Lee Street, my babies were born on Lee Street, I wanted to be Lee Street, and my head, I connected to that, which makes a lot of sense, because in our brain, we do tend to connect place and memory. So it makes sense to me. I'm not actually promoting Lee, I just like the name Lee. And I think that now the conversation has changed. And it's like, we can't just rest on this nostalgia argument. Even if you say, you're not actually racist.

And I actually believe this, I don't actually think this, you know, for a lot of the people, this was a show of racism. But it's this idea now that I think people are having this thing, well, we just have to change them. You know, you have to take action to change them, which I think was often missing. But in Hollywood, Florida, they did change the street names. Yeah. And so what did you think of the solution of Hollywood, Florida?

They didn't replace, like, Robert Lee Street with, like, so rights icons. They replaced him with, like, freedom street and hope street. So what do you think of that outcome? This became a debate as well over the course of the talk, because people wanted to name it after an activist, for example, who helped integrate beaches in Florida and they're like, there was even a suggestion at some point by one council member to just number the streets,

it's obviously an American solution. And then nobody wanted that either. And then I would think about it as like, well, why is that, I mean, just thinking about it from an objective standpoint, why is that such a bad solution to number of streets? And the reason is that street names have become like monuments away where we preserve our memories.

And there have been a lot of historians, Pierre Nora, comes to mind. We talk about history moving incredibly quickly. This idea of the acceleration of history that things just changed so fast that we really have to start salting away and packing away our memories into things so that we don't forget when things start to change again. And I think that's why

suggestions like numbering don't fly because it's not just that people don't want Robert E. Lee's name down. They want to make a statement and they want their street names to make a statement. So it's not simply about the taking down, it's the putting up as well. And so hope liberty and freedom ended up being something that united people in some sense. But yes, the bolder move would have been to actually name it after an activist who actually fought against the principles that the Confederate generals were aiming for. Yeah. Anything that's solution is okay, like that compromise of a freedom hope and liberty. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, it's not really for me to say whether it's okay or not,

but at the same time, I mean, people often decry these arguments are terrible. I mean, I like these arguments. I mean, as I say in the book, you know, arguments divide communities, but they make communities as well. You know, if we didn't have these arguments, they simply numbered if they simply changed it. I think actually there's a lot to be gained from people talking and listening. Even now, I know people don't often listen, but there's engagement there.

There's an exposure there. We're trying to decide what these things mean for a society. For Hollywood, they decided that hope, liberty, and freedom would be great. Obviously, in a lot of ways, I think it would have been even better had they pushed it further from my own personal perspective. I do like that there's this process through street names often that, you know, exposes what people believe and what they believe their community is about. And I think that's valuable.

As more of our life becomes digital, our physical address is becoming obsolete. More with Deer Dramask after this. Soap Heavy Pounds, Oakland, California. We don't really need addresses anymore. You mentioned this, that there are ways to get a driver's license or pay or taxes. You can do a lot of stuff online. Could you imagine a world without addresses in the future? Oh, yeah, I know I absolutely could. I mean, you kind of imagine in some developing countries that they're going to bypass addresses altogether for something more digital. Yeah, and there are lots of companies that are really getting that.

Google's gotten them the act. They've got a great sort of digital system. There's this company I described called What Three Words, which is given addresses in just three basically random words that they've mapped the whole world. So I can in some ways imagine it. Could you describe what three words and how it serves as an alternative to physical addresses? Basically this company has divided up the world. I believe it's three meters by three meter squares, but I could be wrong about that, but very small chunks. And they basically given every single one of these squares a three word

address. It's not a street name like we think of they've given it three words so I clicked on a random spot not too far from where I live that's you know create door statue. You know three entirely random words and point of this is that you can isolate things much much quicker you know just three meters by three meters and also you can find things much, much quicker, you know, just three meters by three meters. And also, you can find things that generally don't have addresses like the middle of a park, you know, if you're on a hike and you want to map out where you took a picture, you can use the Wethree words address. But they've also been used in places that don't have addresses. So

they've been used, for example, in Mongolia, where there isn't the traditional street addressing system that we're familiar with say in the US. And you can remember it because you can remember three words pretty easily as opposed to like some map coordinates which are very long and abstract stringing numbers. But what is the limitations of something like what three words? Well, I mean, one of the limitations, I think of all of this is that I spoke earlier about how, you know, the state was in control of addresses, but in a lot of ways, we tend to trust states more than we trust companies. I mean, let's see if that's true anymore, but in general, in general, we do this idea. So you have a component of what three words, which I think has come up

with this sort of brilliant invention, but they are a private company. This what three words technology is bound up in patents. Using it, you can't use them as freely as you could use your addresses. It does mean that you're sort of beholden to a private company to find out where you are in a little ways. And that something about that makes me really uncomfortable. Also, it takes away the meaning. We talked all about these commemorative street names and how street names have meaning for better or for worse. Addresses are sort of the way we navigate the world when we connect ourselves to other people. So one problem with a lot of these digital addresses is that you become a string of numbers

or in what three words case, a string of words that don't connect us to our neighbors or don't connect us to our communities. So I think it has many uses, especially for places that don't have traditional addresses or for these others' uses, but I still would like to hold firm to our traditional addresses. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Baroube, music by Sean Riel.

Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Leigh, Abby Madon, Christopher Johnson, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project in 91.7KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered across the North American continent, but will always be centered. And beautiful. Downtown. Oakland, California. We're a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of

the most innovative listeners supported 100% artist-owned and operated podcast in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet me at Roman Mars on the show at 99PI org, or on Instagram and read it too. We have lots of new merch in a 99PI store, including a Mabyee masks and t-shirts with funiculars on them, plus we have links to purchase the 99% Invisible City. It's the new book, it's out October 6th. It's all at 99PI.org.

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