Spaces of Calculation: Street Addressing and the Making of a Geo-coded World

About

Street addressing is one of the most basic strategies employed by governmental authorities to tax, police, manage and monitor the spatial whereabouts of individuals within a population. Despite the central importance of the street address as a "political technology," few scholars have examined the historical and contemporary practice of street addressing with respect to its broader social, political and ontological implications. When, where and why did the technique of house numbering historically emerge as a mechanism of spatial ordering? How did it come to be so taken-for-granted as part of everyday life in post-industrial societies? In this presentation, Kluge Fellow Reuben Rose-Redwood explores the cultural and political history of street addressing in the United States, from the late 18th century to the present, including the recent shift from rural route and box numbering systems to 911 addresses. More than a mere technical device best left to postmasters and planning professionals, the spatial practice of street addressing is one of the fundamental mechanisms of the production of calculable space and is, in a more general sense, the socio-spatial equivalent to the mathematicization of nature that has dominated modern thought since the Enlightenment.

Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress: talks and concerts

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

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