Street numbering was often imposed from above to make populations legible to the state: to tax, conscript, police and surveil individuals who had previously been hard to locate. The utility to ordinary residents was frequently secondary to the government's interest in finding and counting people.
In the 1770s the Habsburg Empire under Maria Theresa numbered houses across its territory primarily to identify and conscript young men for the army, sending soldiers door to door to paint numbers. Residents resisted, understanding that being numbered meant being found by the military.
Lacking a street address can bar a person from banking, credit, employment, voting and government services, so the absence of an address functions as a form of exclusion independent of poverty itself. Initiatives that assign addresses to informal settlements can unlock these institutional doors.
What a street is named encodes whose history a society chooses to honor, so renaming becomes a battleground over race, revolution and national identity rather than mere wayfinding. Reading a city's names reveals who held power when and whose memory was erased or elevated.
A street name or neighborhood designation can raise or lower property values and signal class and race, which is why residents lobby to rename streets or buy vanity addresses. The address is not a neutral locator but a marker that markets and people read as a verdict on worth.