Addresses
Begin with what “no address” actually means, because it is less absolute than it sounds and the details matter.
It rarely means that a place cannot be described. It means that the description is not standardised, not written down in a central register, and not resolvable by a stranger.
In practice you get a spectrum. There are cities with named streets and no house numbers. Cities with numbers assigned in the order buildings were constructed, so that 14 sits between 7 and 92. Neighbourhoods where the street names exist on a municipal map and are unknown to residents, who use different names. Settlements with no street pattern at all, where the paths between structures are too narrow for a vehicle and change as buildings are extended. Rural districts where a village name and a family name are a complete and sufficient address for anyone within fifty kilometres and useless beyond it. And places where all of these exist within a few hundred metres.
What replaces the address is a procedure: a sequence of landmarks, a phone call, and a person who comes out to meet you.
The phone call is the crucial piece and it deserves to be understood as infrastructure rather than as a workaround. In much of the world, the operative addressing system for a delivery is: the courier telephones the recipient when he is close, describes where he is, and the recipient talks him in or walks out to the road. The mobile phone did not merely make this convenient. It made an entire model of commerce possible in places where the postal address never arrived, and it did so about fifteen years before anyone in the addressing-technology world noticed.
Think about what the call achieves. It resolves ambiguity interactively, which no static address can do. It confirms that the recipient is present, eliminating the failed delivery in a single step. It allows renegotiation — meet me at the junction, I’m at work, give it to my sister. It transfers the final navigation problem to the person who knows the answer. It is, in effect, a dynamic, bidirectional, self-correcting address, and it costs a few seconds of airtime.
