House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you

"The great enterprise of numbering the houses,” Tantner writes, “is characteristic of the eighteenth century. Without any trace of irony, the house number can be considered one of the most important innovations of the Age of Enlightenment, of that century obsessed, as it was, with order and classification.” House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police. House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you.

D. Mask, The address book (2020), 91

Addresses were helping to empower the people who lived there by helping them to feel a part of society

And inclusion is one of the secret weapons of street addresses. Employees at the World Bank soon found that addresses were helping to empower the people who lived there by helping them to feel a part of society. This is particularly true in slum areas. “A citizen is not an anonymous entity lost in the urban jungle and known only by his relatives and co-workers; he has an established identity,” a group of experts wrote in a book on street addressing. Citizens should have a way to “reach and be reached by associations and government agencies,” and to be reached by fellow citizens, even ones they didn’t know before. In other words, without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it’s often people who don’t know you who can most help you.

D. Mask, The address book (2020), 30