The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 3-4

Part 2, Chapters 5-7

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Introduction-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Development”

Introduction Summary: “Why Do Street Addresses Matter?”

Deidre Mask opens the Introduction by noting that street name changes are a surprisingly hot topic: In some years, over 40% of the local laws passed by New York City Council dealt with street names. Most changes are simply honorary, so that West 84th Street is also known as Edgar Allen Poe Street, but these honorary names carry serious significance, and can lead to critical and contentious debate. In 2007, Brooklyn residents protested the City’s rejection of a proposal to rename a street for Black activist Sonny Carson. The protestors objected to Mayor Bloomberg’s dismissal of Carson as a racist, pointing to streets honoring other flawed men like Thomas Jefferson. Mask uses the anecdote as an example of the emotional aspect of street-naming.

Mask’s research into the significance of street addresses began in West Virginia, where streets in many rural communities lack formal names. Although people within these communities can navigate by familiar landmarks and knowledge of local history, outsiders—including emergency workers—often struggle to find their way. Although many residents are in favor of formal street naming, others are resistant to government intervention: Addressing coordinators working in West Virginia were occasionally met by armed and hostile residents. The process of formalizing street names was, however, occasionally joyful, resulting in street names like Beer Can Hollow and Crunchy Granola Road.

For Mask, an African American woman, the significance of street names is a personal issue. She recalls touring a house in London on a street called Black Boy Lane. Although no one has been able to verify the street name’s origins, Mask sees the name as indicative of Britain’s complex relationship with slavery. Mask explains that, ultimately, she and her family chose a house on Wilberforce Road, a street named after the abolitionist William Wilberforce. The Introduction ends with the book’s thesis: Although street names may seem like a function of postal administration, they are in fact a way of expressing power.

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Kolkata: How Can Steet Addresses Transform the Slums?”

Mask focuses on efforts to formalize an address system in the slums of Kolkata, India (formerly Calcutta). Mask uses Kolkata as a case study for the importance of street addresses in maintaining a healthy, democratic, well-connected citizenry. She shows that formalizing street addresses increases access to social services, helps government workers better understand a community’s needs, and empowers citizens by making them feel like part of society.

Mask’s guide in Kolkata is Subhashis Nath, a social worker working as a project manager for Addressing the Unaddressed, an NGO dedicated to establishing formal addresses in the slums. Mask describes Nath’s work in a number of slums across Kolkata, including Chetla, Panchanantala, Bhagar, and Sicklane. Although the dense, nonlinear organization of the slums’ streets present a challenge, Nath and his colleagues assign each resident a GO Code, a unique nine-digit code linked to their specific GPS location and displayed on the residence. As a result of the organization’s efforts, nearly 8,000 people were given formal addresses. These addresses allow the residents to obtain an Aadhaar card, a government-issued ID that gives citizens access to healthcare and educational services, bank accounts, and social benefits.

Mask reflects on the history of census work in Kolkata, starting with the establishment of “Calcutta” as a British colonial outpost in the 18th century. The British colonial government divided the city into two racially segregated sections, the White Town (where the colonists lived) and Black Town, which quickly exploded into slums. The first British census was a disaster: The colonists and local government administrators disagreed on what constituted a residence, and the British ultimately refused to try to understand Indian ways of living. Since the British did not know how many people were living in slums, Mask argues, they were able to ignore the increasingly desperate living circumstances the slums were producing.

Mask suggests that, in modern Kolkata, there is similar resistance to formalizing street addresses in the slums. Some governmental officials fear that “studying squatters will give them a false sense of legitimacy” (23). Mask acknowledges critiques of Addressing the Unaddressed’s project, which uses a new addressing specific unique to the slums, rather than incorporating residents into an existing system. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that no governmental organization is engaging in this work, and suggests that the system’s benefits outweigh these valid criticisms.

The chapter ends with an anecdote in which Mask, returning from a day working in the slums, forgets the name of her hotel and has to ask local police officers for help. Since she is a foreigner, there is a record of where Mask is staying, and the officers are able to escort her home. Mask reflects on the experience of the billion people living without addresses in slums around the world. She suggests that formalizing address systems would allow people living in slums to establish their place in society and advocate for their needs.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Haiti: Could Street Addresses Stop an Epidemic?”

Although Chapter 2 is called “Haiti,” it begins with an extensive history of John Snow, a British doctor working in Victorian London who helped to identify the cause of a deadly cholera outbreak by mapping the locations of the victims’ homes.

London’s streets had been mapped for centuries, but formalized house numbers had only been recently introduced, as had a General Register Office that recorded the city’s births and deaths. This system of house numbers allowed doctors like Snow to produce a map of the homes where cholera victims had lived. Snow correctly hypothesized that cholera spread through contaminated drinking water, and interviewed victims’ relatives to discover where they had gotten their water. Unsurprisingly, all of the victims drank water from the same waterspout, on Broad Street in Soho. Snow also discovered that the majority of residents who were not impacted by the outbreak had their own water source, further suggesting the Broad Street pump was the source of the outbreak. Although Snow’s work was not widely celebrated in his own time, modern experts revere Snow as a key figure in the history of epidemiology.

Mask then discusses how similar mapping techniques aided researchers fighting the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti. Thorough, accurate maps of Haiti are rare, leaving doctors working in Haiti struggling to get accurate information about their patients’ addresses. The lack of maps also complicated the efforts led by French researcher Renaud Piarroux to track the spread of the disease and identify its location.

Working alongside Haitian epidemiologists, Piarroux collected information from residents and produced a map that suggested the source of the outbreak was a UN sewage leak into a tributary of the Artibonite River, which was the main water source for hundreds of thousands of people. Despite the evidence, Piarroux struggled to publish his research, and the UN vehemently denied responsibility. It was only in 2016 that the UN finally admitted that Piarroux was right: A pipe carrying sewage from a UN base had leaked contaminated feces into the tributary, causing the outbreak.

The chapter ends with a description of a “mapping party” organized by an organization called Missing Maps, which enlists volunteers to use satellite images of unmapped places to identify roads and buildings. Mask and her fellow mappers enjoy searching their assigned satellite images of Niger, and debating what, exactly, the fuzzy images show. Mask wonders about the lives of the people living in this region, and what new epidemics might lie in store.

Introduction-Part 1 Analysis

The first section of this book, called “Development,” focuses on the importance of mapping street addresses in so-called “developing” nations: Chapter 1 focuses on formalizing addresses in the slums of Kolkata, while Chapter 2 describes efforts to map a cholera outbreak in Haiti.

Mask’s discussion of the slums introduces the theme: Street Addresses as a Tool of Social Justice. In the case of Kolkata, the lack of street addresses speaks to the disenfranchised status of the residents, who were both discriminated against under the British colonizers and who continue to have difficulties accessing modern government services without formal addresses. Mask attributes the explosion of slums in Kolkata during the colonial period to the fact that the British colonial government “simply did not care who its Indian subjects were” (22), suggesting that the British government’s lack of interest in mapping the slums mirrored its racial prejudices towards its colonial subjects.

Similarly, the current slum residents are dependent upon the work of NGOs to address this issue, suggesting that the Indian government continues to ignore or neglect the conditions of the poorest, further perpetuating social inequality. In granting formal addresses to slum residents, NGO workers can help the residents gain easier access to social and government services, allowing them to participate more actively in democratic society. In this way, having a street address is directly linked to social and political enfranchisement.

Chapter 2’s discussion of mapping and epidemics reinforces the importance of addresses in resolving societal issues, especially those that disproportionately affect the poorest. As Snow’s research in Victorian London highlighted, wealthier residents who had their own water source were less likely to be impacted by the cholera outbreaks than poorer residents who used a common water source. In using mapping to locate the source of outbreaks, Snow could identify which water source was the problem. Similar work in 21st-century Haiti and Africa reinforces the idea that effective addressing and mapping systems are a crucial component of combating epidemics, helping to save the lives of the most vulnerable.

Mask uses a personal, intimate narrative voice throughout these opening chapters, reflecting her adherence to the more subjective conventions of creative nonfiction (See: Background). The Introduction establishes Mask’s intimate, informal tone almost immediately. The second sentence of the book includes a direct address to the reader: “Let me give you a moment to think about that” (1). Mask’s usage of self-referential narrative markers like “But first, another story” (3) and “One last story for now” (10) gives Mask’s narrative style a conversational tone, rather than being a scholastic deluge of information. Similarly, Mask’s use of vivid, sensory details—such as “slabs of pork [hanging] from the ceilings of their shacks, swarms of flies buzzing” (26)—helps to emphasize Mask’s own experiences while touring the slums, inserting her into the narrative.

Mask also uses anecdotes to connect her research to her personal experience. The anecdote about Black Boy Lane in the Introduction highlights Mask’s personal stakes in this conversation: She believes in the symbolic power of street names, and, as an African American woman, has an understanding of how names and naming reflect The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality, which will be explored in greater depth later in the book. Similarly, Chapter 1 ends with Mask getting “lost” in Kolkata after a day working in the slums. Although she forgot the name of her hotel and had to ask police officers for help, Mask notes, “I was never really lost: I was going to a place that had an address, a hotel that existed in the police officer’s directory, and I had an American passport” (34, emphasis added). Mask uses this anecdote as a way of demonstrating the privileges she has that are denied to residents of the slums: a home with an address known to herself and others, and paperwork identifying herself as a resident of that address. Such markers are therefore indicative of who does or does not have power and privilege within a given society.