There are a couple issues with this building’s address. The first being it doesn’t tell you exactly where to go. This building has three visitor’s entrances. One is on the northwest side of the building at 16th St. and 9th Avenue, one on the northeast side at 16th St. and 8th Avenue, and one on the southeast at 15th St. and 8th Avenue.

But before you play “what’s behind door number three” with the visitor entrances, you need to make sure you have the right address. It turns out this building has two valid street addresses; 111 8th Avenue, and 76 9th Avenue .

With Plus Codes, we can get granular. The NW entrance is PXRW+R7, the NE entrance is PXRX+C8, and the SE entrance is PXRX+75.

You might think this is all trivial. You may easily just give a street address to a friend and say “go to the northeast entrance” and it’s pretty easy to figure out. In a lot of areas around the world, though, this same issue of address precision has very real consequences.

In most industrialized countries, physical — and, of course, electronic addresses are part of everyday life. Just like roads, running water and health services, physical addresses are often taken for granted. Yet, in developing countries, physical addresses frequently exist only in major city centres. In such countries, many streets have no names and properties are not numbered. It is therefore difficult or impossible for public services and businesses to reach their target customers… Physical addresses are taken for granted in most industrialized countries. But for billions of people, addresses effectively do not exist. (Addressing the World — Universal Postal Union)

At the Plus Codes session at the summit, we heard from members of the Navajo Nation who shared the challenges they faced living in the Utah/New Mexico/Arizona region, and how Plus Codes helped address those challenges.

In areas such as this, you get a lot of locations far off from the roads the street address is on, you get addresses that are incorrect by miles, and generally have lots of problems locating things.

The officially listed address, and where the building actually is. When it’s this far off, it creates a lot of issues.

Here’s another example of someone recounting their experience having a package shipped to this region.

Around 2005, I wanted to purchase a new laptop online and tried having FedEx deliver the packages to my hogan in Dilkon, AZ since I lived approximately 0.5 miles from the main highway (Navajo Route 15). The address I submitted to FedEx looked like the following: Name

1 mile North of Dilkon Chapter Office

Blue hogan with gray roof

Winslow, AZ 86047 In the further instructions part of the order, I put the following: Go north from the Chapter Office past the police station and a large church building. Past the church building, you will cross a large wash. The road curves a bit but keep heading north. You will begin to see a patch of large trees. Head toward those trees. They should be the only patch of trees in the area. My hogan will be near those trees, blue hogan with a grey roof. I also left my cell phone number in case there were issues. I tracked the delivery process through the FedEx site and made sure I was available by phone on the day of delivery. I was secretly hoping that my instructions were enough for the delivery guy to find my hogan and deliver the packet. However, around 4:00 PM, I received a call from the FedEx delivery guy. He was lost. He had tried to follow the directions but ended up at a house where there was no one home. After asking him for a description of the area, I concluded that he had not gone far enough. He was actually only halfway to my house near the large church building and had not gotten to the wash yet. So while he was on the phone and driving, I led him to my home, giving turn by turn directions as he described what he saw. Eventually he got to my house, but the experience was less than ideal. (The driver didn’t know what a hogan was.)

Hearing things like this resonated with me from my experiences growing up in South Korea. Until the mid-2000’s, we didn’t have building addresses in the traditional sense. There were defined tracts and neighborhoods, but buildings didn’t have street numbers. When giving directions, you just kind of had to know where things were. Telling someone something along the lines of, “take the sixth exit from the subway stop, turn left into the alley after the Family Mart, keep walking and it’s on the second floor above the LG cell phone store” was commonplace. Street addresses weren’t typically used, and still aren’t today.

Seoul is fairly developed so the impact to me was maybe being a little bit late to meet my friends. In other areas though, it’s a serious issue.