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

Central to Deidre Mask’s argument in The Address Book is that street addressing systems can meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world. Throughout the book, Mask highlights how street addressing systems can serve as a catalyst for positive change, aiming to create more equitable and inclusive societies.

Mask’s arguments about the positive impact of addresses hinge on the access they provide to essential services like banking and education. Mask illustrates how individuals without formal addresses, such as those living in informal settlements or unhoused individuals, face immense challenges in accessing basic services. In her chapter on Kolkata, Mask writes that although “the slums seemed to have more serious needs than addresses—sanitation, sources of clean water, healthcare, even roofs to protect them from the monsoon,” it was the lack of a permanent address that “was depriving those living in the slums [of] a chance to get out of them” (19). The juxtaposition in this passage between obvious obstacles (sanitation, lack of clean water, leaky roofs) and seemingly bureaucratic details (an address) demonstrates the deadly importance of permanent street addresses in determining quality of life. Mask shows that the computer-driven addressing systems at use in the Kolkata slums allowed residents to obtain bank accounts, materially improving their living conditions.