Address (geography)

An address is a code and abstract concept expressing the fixed location of a home, business or other building on the earth's surface.

Functions

Addresses have several functions:

Providing a means of physically locating a building, especially in a city where there are many buildings and streets,
Identifying buildings as the end points of a postal system,
A social function: someone's address can have a profound effect on their social standing,
As parameters in statistics collection, especially in census-taking or the insurance industry.

History

Until the advent of modern postal systems, most houses and buildings were not numbered. Streets may have been named for landmarks, such as a city gate or market, or for the professions of their inhabitants. In many cities in Asia, most minor streets were never named. This is still the case today in much of Japan. When postal systems were introduced, it became necessary to number buildings to aid in mail delivery.

Current addressing schemes

House numbering

In most English-speaking countries the standard has become an alternating numbering scheme progressing in one direction up a street, with odd numbers running up one side (usually west or south) and even numbers up the other (usually north or east), although there is significant variation on this basic pattern. Cities in North America, particularly those planned on a grid plan, often incorporate block numbers, quadrants (explained below), and cardinal directions into their street numbers, so that in many such cities, addresses roughly follow the Cartesian coordinate system. Some other cities around the world have their own schemes.

Quadrants

In cities with Cartesian-coordinate-based addressing systems, the streets that form the north-south and east-west dividing lines constitute the x and y axes of a Cartesian coordinate plane and thus divide the city into quadrants. The quadrants are typically identified in the street names, although the manner of doing so varies from city to city. For example, in one city, all streets in the northeast quadrant may have "NE" prefixed or suffixed to their street names, while in another, the intersection of North Calvert Street and East 27th Street can only be in the northeast quadrant.

Street-naming conventions

Street names may follow a variety of themes. In new developments, streets may all follow the same theme (e.g. bird species), or start with the same letter. Streets in Continental Europe and Latin America are usually named after famous people or auspicious dates. In many North American cities, such as Manhattan and Edmonton, Alberta, streets are simply numbered sequentially across the street grid. Washington, D.C., uses a system of numbered north-south streets combined with lettered and alphabetically named east-west streets; diagonal avenues are typically named after states.

Postal codes

Postal codes are a relatively recent development in addressing, designed to speed the sorting and processing of mail by assigning unique numeric or alphanumeric codes to each geographical locality.

Postal alternatives to physical addresses

For privacy and other purposes, postal services have made it possible to receive mail without revealing one's physical address or even having a fixed physical address. Examples are post office boxes and poste restante (general delivery).

Geographical Address Conventions in the Media

People may be said generally to get used to the form of geographical address used in their home location. However, this can cause confusion when people naturally extend their written generalisations from nationally used conventions to media where the audience is global.

This can be observed most frequently with internet usage, and in films where a scene opens with the location listed on screen.

A good example of this is Wikipedia, where a significant number of the contributors are Americans. For example it can be guessed that a contributor writing this phrase is American:

Birmingham, AL

It is common in the US to include state codes in addresses, but these are often meaningless to persons outside of North America who are not accustomed to the US address format. In addition, the contributor in this example has assumed that others would not only understand from the use of a state code that their city of Birmingham is in the state of Alabama, but also that their city is in the USA. Another example of this phenomenon of US address forms being exported to a global audience is with Google Earth which is marketed globally -- try a search for Birmingham and then Birmingham, England. Next try St. Petersburg and St. Petersburg, Russia.

External links

Human geography | Postal system

Postanschrift | Adresse postale | Adres (woonplaats) | Адрес | Adres

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