Addressing the Urban Poor | Part 1: What's so interesting about an address?

Community Worker explaining the new address to a household head in Tebikenikora, Kiribati.
(Credit: Colleen Butcher-Gollach,  Dec 15, 2017)

This is the 1st of a four-part blog.

An address - something that is taken for granted by most of us who have one and yet without fully appreciating how much of our lives depends on having one.  Obtaining a birth certificate, attending school, recording property usage or ownership rights, opening a bank account, buying and activating a phone sim card, registering to vote, applying for an electricity or water supply, accessing social and emergency services, buying and selling goods and the last mile delivery of those goods – the list goes on.  An address provides a stamp of recognition that I exist and is profoundly tied to my rights as a citizen member of a larger society; having an address means that I am not ‘an alien’.  

But being able to precisely locate where we live, work and socialize is not a given for people everywhere.  A quick Google search throws up one estimate that three quarters of the world’s population has no address although it’s not clear which agency is tracking this – and how would they?  The answer may lie buried inside countries’ land administration records.  Scholarly research calculates that there are some 6 billion land parcels in the world, and that about 25 percent of these (around 1.5 billion parcels) are accurately captured in formal land administration systems i.e. recorded by means of a physical description and associated rights.  UN agencies - using country governments’ census data and voluntary reporting, calculate a similar order of magnitude of between a quarter to one half of the world’s urban (only) population living in unplanned and marginalized slum and informal settlements.  The majority of these, by definition, would be settlements that are informally organized around streets and footpaths that have no names.  UNDESA’s data-rich 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects predicts that the world’s cities and towns will grow by an additional 1 billion people in the next decade and another 2.5 billion by 2050. Ninety percent of this growth is happening in low income countries that already face backlogs in forward planning, infrastructure financing and urban absorptive capacities and so one might expect that addressing will fall even farther behind the curve. 

© OpenStreetMap contributors. (2015)   [Screenshot – labelled by author] 
Retrieved from: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/14.5897/120.9687.  
Open Database License, "ODbL"

One need not look any deeper than a typical online map of a city in the global South to see that for the majority, addresses are glaringly lacking.  As only one example, the screenshot (above) is from open source mapping that many of us increasingly rely on for our development and humanitarian work.  The image shows the sparse location details and absence of street names, street numbers or lot numbers in Barangay 649, Manila a.k.a. Baseco compound or informal settlement – one of the poorest neighborhoods in Manila.  Baseco’s anonymity lies in stark contrast to the nearby, richly street-named tourist area of Intramuros (to the east).  Both neighborhoods are roughly 60 ha in size.  However, whereas some 6,000 people live in the planned, well-addressed neighborhood of Intramuros, there are about 10-times that number (60,000 people) living in Baseco - completely anonymous … until their existence becomes blindingly visible by turning on a satellite image layer for the area (below). It’s also worth noting that within Intramuros are pockets of nondescript shanties that are not included in the street addressing system - homes to the tuk-tuk and auto rickshaw drivers who work but may not live permanently in the area ... and so do not exist in the official population statistics.

Source: “BASECO Compound” 14035’21.87” N and 120057’46.51” E. Google Earth. April 3, 2018.

(Screenshot retrieved and labelled September 2, 2018)

Source: “BASECO Compound” 14035’21.87” N and 120057’46.51” E. Google Earth. April 3, 2018. 

This is the end of the 1st part of this four-part blog. “Part 2: Addressing the hard way (manually) in Epworth, Zimbabwe” continues below.