Urban commentators have long portrayed New York's gridded landscape as a hallmark of the rationalist ethos that has characterized the tradition of modern urban planning over the past two centuries.Footnote 1 To both supporters and critics alike, the numbered streets and avenues of the city's grid plan of 1811 have been taken to signify the triumph of Cartesian rationalism as the spatial foundation of the modern urban experience. In his much-cited study, Seeing like a State (1998), political theorist James Scott contends that the ‘geometric order’ of the grid satisfied the utopian desire to design cities as spaces of legibility that would be more amenable to the workings of modern government. Turning his attention to Manhattan's street plan, Scott maintains that since ‘the cross streets are consecutively numbered and are intersected by longer avenues, also consecutively numbered, the plan acquires even greater transparency’.Footnote 2 According to this argument, the legibility of the urban grid was central to the establishment of modern forms of statecraft.
Drawing upon Michel Foucault's work on governmentality, a number of scholars have similarly argued that the partitioning and gridding of geographical space is crucial to understanding the way in which governmental rationalities have rendered the world intelligible through the deployment of various technologies of power. Foucault himself suggests that the grid was a political technology which facilitated the individuation of the population as an object of government. In his discussion of nineteenth-century working-class housing estates, for instance, Foucault maintains that ‘the very grid pattern, the very layout, of the estate articulated, in a sort of perpendicular way, the disciplinary mechanisms that controlled the body, or bodies, by localizing families (one to a house) and individuals (one to a room)’. Foucault therefore concludes that ‘[t]he layout, the fact that individuals were made visible, and the normalization of behavior meant that a sort of spontaneous policing or control was carried out by the spatial layout of the town itself’.Footnote 3 One of the primary ways that ‘individuals were made visible’ was by assigning them to discrete spatial locations within the urban grid, which was achieved through the establishment of official street addresses as one among many ‘technologies of location’.Footnote 4
Recent studies have convincingly demonstrated that the adoption of house numbering as a political technology of urban spatial organization during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries played an important role in the production of calculable space,Footnote 5 thereby facilitating a broad range of governmental functions and reconfiguring the geographical milieux of urban social life.Footnote 6 Yet, the rise of the house number as a socio-spatial ordering device was by no means the result of a simple process of spatial rationalization that was accomplished once and for all at the dawn of the modern age with the imposition of an urban street grid. In fact, when one begins to scratch beneath the surface appearances of the grid's aura of Cartesian calculability in cities such as New York, a far more complicated history emerges of the ad hoc, piecemeal way in which the logic of ‘number’ came to be inscribed into the fabric of the urban landscape.
This article examines the history of house numbering in Manhattan since the eighteenth century to illustrate how the production of a spatial regime of numerical inscriptions was riddled with contradictions from the very outset. Consequently, a genealogical investigation of house numbering within the context of the United States does not easily lend itself to triumphalist narratives of the march of progress in the modern city or to declensionist tales of the intensification of social control by the sovereign state.Footnote 7 To be sure, the numbering of houses was part of the broader project of ‘governing by numbers’ that characterized modern governmentality,Footnote 8 but it is worth reminding ourselves that the production of actually existing spaces of calculability has been anything but a straightforward process historically.
In retrospect, what is perhaps most striking about the history of house numbering in US cities and towns during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is not so much the totalizing governmental vision of spatial transparency at work in the production of legible spaces. Rather, it is the utterly haphazard and unsystematic manner in which such calculative techniques were initially adopted, and the inability of city authorities to devise house-numbering schemes that could keep pace with the rapid changes in the built environment at least until the mid-nineteenth century. One of the fundamental contradictions that plagued the early history of the house number is that its chief purpose was to provide a sense of spatial fixity, yet city governments continuously found themselves having to renumber the same buildings time and again in order to maintain a logical sequence of street addresses as new buildings were constructed and old structures demolished. The ‘temporal instability’ of urban renumbering campaigns, therefore, largely undermined the goal of producing spaces of legibility.
However, the systematization of house-numbering practices gained momentum during the mid-nineteenth century with the advent of the ‘decimal’ system of house numbering, which allocated 100 numbers to each city block.Footnote 9 This new regulatory mechanism was seen as providing a spatial fix to what Foucault has called ‘the problem of the series’; that is, the governmental task of managing an indefinite series of mobile and stationary elements within an ever-changing urban milieu.Footnote 10 The production of a serialized space entailed the designation of a unique serial number, or ‘geo-code’, for each element or spatial unit within a delimited urban area. Yet, such calculative techniques of spatial organization were rarely imposed in a comprehensive manner. As we shall see in the case of New York, the decimal system of house numbering was established to systematize the street addresses on the city's east–west cross-streets but not along the more prominent north–south avenues. In more general terms, this study supports the claim that uniform space was not uniformally produced in the modern city. Put simply, there was a geography to the making of calculable space, which was characterized as much by the unevenness of its spatial coverage as by the wonders of its ‘greater transparency’.
House numbering and the making of a spatial regime of inscriptions in Manhattan, 1793–1861
On 2 December 1793, a group of residents on Partition Street in lower Manhattan petitioned the city authorities to initiate the ‘numbering of Houses’ along their street, yet when the Street Committee submitted their report to the Common Council of New York later that month, they recommended that a uniform set of rules should be devised not only for the numbering of houses on Partition Street but for all streets in the entire city.Footnote 11 This resulted in the adoption of a law to separate odd and even house numbers on opposite sides of each street – a calculative technique which had been devised to rationalize Philadelphia's house-numbering system in 1790 as part of the political apparatus of enumeration deployed to conduct the first federal US census.Footnote 12 This new set of rules was in sharp contrast to the current state of affairs in New York at the time, where in many cases the same number was given to more than one house on a given street, in large part because few street signs were posted at intersections to officially distinguish one street from another.Footnote 13 To resolve such spatial ambiguity, the 1793 law required that ‘a Board be put up at each end of every Street with the Name of the Street and an Index or hand pointing towards the Street painted thereon’.Footnote 14 As a preliminary measure, numbers were to be inscribed on to buildings using chalk and then paint, followed by the installation of more permanent tin plates.Footnote 15 It is through these mundane and largely overlooked strategies of street addressing that the spatial organization of cities was radically transformed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 16
Although the law of 1793 provided general guidelines for street addressing in New York City, within less than a decade the local editor of the city's directory, David Longworth, was already complaining about the dismal state of Manhattan's house-numbering system. ‘There are many streets that are not numbered’, he noted in 1801, ‘and others so imperfectly as to make it impossible, to furnish any accurate information of the residence of their inhabitants’.Footnote 17 Nearly 20 years later, the very same criticism was laid against the city by Longworth's son, Thomas, who had taken over as editor of his father's directory business. The younger Longworth exclaimed that ‘in many of the streets the numbering is so very irregular as to be of no use’.Footnote 18 Similar sentiments were expressed on the editorial page of the New-York Evening Post in 1825, which put it thus, ‘Is it not a reproach to the public authorities of New York, that neither are the great majority of houses, designated by numbers, nor one in ten of the streets pointed out by name, to the passing stranger?’Footnote 19 By the end of the 1820s, many streets remained haphazardly numbered. ‘Much irregularity and confusion exist in the numbering of houses in some streets’, explained Thomas Longworth in the 1829 issue of the city directory.Footnote 20 He went on to insist that such confusion was the result of ‘queer notions’ and found it virtually ‘hopeless to expect a consistent plan to be adopted in reference to this measure’. In particular, Longworth singled out the numbering of houses along Wall Street as having been reduced to ‘an intermingling variety and a regular state of beautiful confusion’. How is it possible that Manhattan's house-numbering system was in such disarray so soon after the governing authorities had adopted a uniform plan to standardize the numbering of houses in the city?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that until the mid-nineteenth century, most urban house-numbering plans in the United States and elsewhere allocated a single address number to each existing built structure; yet, as cities expanded and the built environment was transformed, municipal street-addressing systems often could not keep pace with the ‘creative destruction’ that resulted from shifts in the real estate economy.Footnote 21 The problem, in short, was that the initial numbering plans in most cities did not take into account the dynamism of urban socio-spatial transformations. This led to countless efforts to renumber houses along a street following the construction or demolition of buildings, which suggests that the numerical sequence was continuously being undermined by changes in the built environment.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, New York was on the cusp of a period of tremendous urban growth, and in 1807 the Common Council petitioned the state legislature to establish a committee that would create an official plan for the city's northward expansion. As is well known, the state-appointed street commission completed their plan in 1811, which consisted of a rectilinear grid of 12 main avenues and 155 cross-streets, all numbered in consecutive order, in stark contrast to the narrow and crooked streets on the southern tip of Manhattan Island.Footnote 22 With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York City became the primary entrepôt on the eastern seaboard, and many of the streets and avenues of the city's grid plan were laid out in the decades that followed. However, it was not until the late 1830s that the city passed another major law to regulate the numbering of houses. In 1838, Mayor Aaron Clark approved a local house-numbering law, which for the first time officially partitioned the city into an ‘East’ and ‘West’ Side, with Fifth Avenue serving as the great dividing line that has shaped the ‘urban imaginaries’ of New Yorkers ever since.Footnote 23
The law of 1838 required that all cross-streets north of 13th Street should be numbered starting with No. 1 on either side of Fifth Avenue and were then to extend sequentially to each river. This law explicitly stated that streets must be described based upon their position with respect to Fifth Avenue (e.g., East 13th Street and West 13th Street). Significantly, however, these guidelines only applied to New York's cross-streets, not the city's north–south avenues. Each avenue had a different starting point in southern Manhattan, so the house numbers did not coincide along the avenues as one travelled from south to north up the island.
When the city legally divided Manhattan into the East and West Side through Fifth Avenue in 1838, this appeared to provide a ‘rational’ solution to the perplexities that confounded Manhattan's numbering system downtown. However, both systems still shared one fundamental contradiction: they were each based on the procedure of treating buildings as distinct ‘objects’ to be numbered without considering what would happen when new buildings were constructed in between existing structures. As I have documented in a previous study, one of the first attempts to seriously contend with this issue was a plan commonly referred to as the ‘decimal system’ of house numbering that was devised in Philadelphia in the mid-1850s.Footnote 24 The decimal system allotted 100 numbers for every block, which would provide ample room for contending with changes in the urban built environment without fundamentally altering the sequence of numbers along the entire length of a particular street. Recognizing the utility of Philadelphia's new numbering plan, city authorities in New York soon adopted an ordinance in 1861 that applied the decimal system to all cross-streets north of 9th Street in Manhattan, yet again this plan did not apply to the north–south avenues (Figure 1).Footnote 25
The spatial distribution of house numbers in Manhattan (cartography by Ole Heggen).
These three spatial transformations – the odd/even separation in 1793, the establishment of Fifth Avenue as a dividing line for cross-street addresses in 1838 and the adoption of the decimal numbering system in 1861 – mark the pivotal turning points in the history of house numbering in Manhattan. Taken together, such calculative techniques were instrumental to the process of constructing a ‘spatial regime of inscriptions’ that reconfigured New York's landscape according to the logic of numerical calculation. At first glance, it would appear that the decimal plan of 1861 resolved the spatial contradictions in Manhattan's house-numbering system once and for all – at least with respect to the city's east–west cross-streets – yet, as the next section illustrates, the story of spatial rationalization in New York is not so simple.
The contested politics of street addressing in twentieth-century New York
Manhattan's street-addressing system may have been established during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the numbering of houses – and the enforcement of existing city house-numbering ordinances – was subject to contestation, neglect and dissolution throughout the twentieth century. After the Greater City of New York was consolidated in 1898, the metropolis was divided into different boroughs and each elected its own borough president. The duties of the borough presidents changed a number of times during the twentieth century, yet the authority over house numbering eventually became one of the borough president's responsibilities (via the borough topographical offices). The city council, however, retained the power to officially name streets throughout the city.
Although the Borough President's Office was in charge of determining official house numbers in Manhattan during the twentieth century, individual property owners themselves were responsible for actually inscribing the numbers upon their buildings. As might be expected, not every property owner followed the law to the letter, and the Manhattan Borough President's Office reported in 1921 that a ‘great many premises were found not numbered, or on which the numbers were illegible’.Footnote 26 To illustrate the scale of non-compliance, there were 11,279 inspection notices sent out by the Borough President's Office in 1929 for house-numbering violations.Footnote 27 In the years that followed, the number of reported violations varied yet remained a persistent issue with which municipal officials and the postal authorities had to contend. The total number of violations must have been much higher than those reported, since city officials only had enough time and resources to inspect about 10 per cent of the approximately 100,000 buildings in Manhattan at the time of the Great Depression.Footnote 28
Between 2,500 and 11,000 violation notices were sent out each year up until 1935, with around 30 inspectors hired to survey the borough of Manhattan. The number of address violation notices that were sent out declined markedly during the early 1950s, to approximately 50 notices each year. This drop in reported violations, however, had nothing at all to do with the actual number of existing violations but simply from the fact that ‘[i]nspectors retired, died, or went into more lucrative fields, and weren't replaced’.Footnote 29 Yet, in 1957, Borough President Hulan Jack began to enforce the city's house-numbering regulations again and sent out 20,000 violation notices.Footnote 30
In addition to the difficulties with enforcing the city's house-numbering ordinance, considerable confusion arose over how to locate an address along Manhattan's north–south avenues. There had been calls as early as the nineteenth century to standardize the avenue numbering system, yet the laws of 1838 and 1861 had only applied to Manhattan's east–west cross-streets. Elaborate devices were made to aid New Yorkers in the ‘knight errant’ quest to ‘unravel’ what the New York Times called ‘one of the most baffling mysteries known to man – where to expect to find a given house number on a north–south avenue in Manhattan’.Footnote 31 There was a co-ordinated attempt to rationalize the house-numbering regulations for Manhattan's avenues during the late 1930s and early 1940s. This effort eventually failed to achieve its desired goal, but the controversy that arose shows how conflicting interests and contradictory logics were at play in attempts to rationalize the spatial organization of the city.
On 14 March 1939, the New York City postmaster, Albert Goldman, gave a speech to the Lions Club at a luncheon held at the Astor Hotel. He urged the city to adopt a new house-numbering plan for its north–south avenues and attacked the current system as ‘outworn and obsolete’, speculating that it had been devised ‘without giving the matter much thought’.Footnote 32 Goldman proposed a system of hyphenated numbers, where the first set of numbers corresponded to the nearest cross-street south of each building and the second set were the specific numbers for each house on the block (with odds on the west side and evens on the east side of each avenue). For instance, an address of ‘48–01 Fifth Avenue’ would be the first house located in between 48th Street and 49th Street on the west side of the avenue. The plan was to take effect for all avenues above 8th Street.
In the months that followed, Goldman's plan gained the support of Manhattan Borough President Stanley Isaacs as well as many influential groups and agencies in the city (including the Bowery Savings Bank, the Chamber of Commerce, the New York Steam Corporation, the Postal Telegraph Company, the Railway Express Agency, the United Parcel Service and various department stores). The city's Department of Housing and Buildings as well as the Tax and Police Departments also endorsed the plan. When Borough President Isaacs announced on 10 January 1940 that a non-partisan bill would shortly be introduced to implement Goldman's proposal, the New York Times made the outcome seem almost inevitable that a resolution with such ‘wide backing’ would pass through the city council easily.Footnote 33
However, when the council's Committee on Parks, Playgrounds and Traffic held a public hearing on the renumbering proposal, there was strong opposition from the Fifth Avenue Association's spokesperson, William Pedrick. He claimed that such a change would be a great burden on Fifth Avenue businesses, since they would have to buy new stationery, revise their business records and would lose much of the symbolic capital that had been invested in establishing their specific Fifth Avenue addresses as a form of status and prestige. Pedrick also reminded the committee that Fifth Avenue businesses contributed around a quarter of Manhattan's total tax revenues, so their interests should be given considerable weight when it came to renumbering the city's avenues.
By contrast, Isaacs argued that ‘[t]here is no sanity in the present numbering system’, and he went on to add that finding an address on one of Manhattan's avenues required that one ‘carry an index card around with you’. ‘It is simply historical nonsense’, declared Isaacs, ‘Of course you will find opposition on the part of people who think they have the right to patent numbers, and because of a selfish interest think they have the right to stop a reform which is for the benefit of all the citizens.’ Likewise, Postmaster Goldman defended his proposal and displayed a chart illustrating the efficiency of the plan to the committee. He pointed out that Brooklyn and Queens already had similar systems and that most major US cities had some type of systematic numbering plan. ‘Apparently the whole method of numbering was left to chance’, he noted of the addresses along Manhattan's avenues.Footnote 34
A week later, Goldman wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times claiming that ‘the vast majority of the residents of our city’ favoured his renumbering plan. Moreover, he insisted that ‘the interests of the entire community in this matter should be the basis of action rather than the objections urged at the hearing, which mostly represented individual opinion’.Footnote 35 The committee, however, did not approve the plan and instead the council passed another bill giving the borough presidents the authority to enforce already existing regulations. As the Times reported, Borough President Isaacs ‘voted for the bill after complaining that the earlier plan for renumbering Manhattan thoroughfares north of Eighth Street had been ignored’.Footnote 36 A later observer remarked that social ‘inertia’ was the ‘rock on which all attempts at reform have foundered . . . and the fact that people resist change because numbers are permanently attached to buildings, appear on a large supply of letterheads and other printed matter, or are a matter of pride, tradition and business prestige’.Footnote 37 This avenue-renumbering controversy nicely illustrates the contradictions of spatial rationalization and the conflicts that often arise over what constitutes the ‘rational’ when it comes to the production of calculable urban spaces.
During the latter twentieth century, other more mundane conflicts over street addressing also arose as different city administrations adopted contrasting policies concerning property owners’ requests for address changes. When David Dinkins was borough president of Manhattan in the mid-1980s, the Topographical Bureau distributed ‘vanity’ addresses, which added a sense of prestige to a building's location, as a deliberate strategy to reward real estate developers and corporations for locating in Manhattan. In 1988, the director of the Manhattan borough president's Topographical Bureau, Anthony Gulotta, estimated that around 100 addresses were changed each year. While vanity addresses may have been a boon to developers, and were encouraged by Borough President Dinkins, the New York City branch of the US Postal Service as well as the Metropolitan Taxi Board of Trade were generally opposed to the practice.Footnote 38 For instance, in 1987, Borough President Dinkins assigned the address 201 East 86th Street to a mixed-use building whose actual front entrance was on Third Avenue.Footnote 39 Before making the decision, the Borough President's Office consulted the Postal Service for its recommendation. The latter strongly opposed the measure and argued that it would be a great inconvenience since the delivery of mail was based on north–south and east–west route systems, which would be disrupted if a cross-street letter carrier had to deliver mail at the building's entrance on Third Avenue. Nevertheless, Borough President Dinkins went ahead with the change anyway.
In an internal memorandum to Dinkins from one of his staff members, Charles Williams III, the Postal Service's objections were dismissed as ‘mere administrative concerns’, which were not a justifiable ‘basis for denial of an otherwise legitimate address’.Footnote 40 This decision was consistent, he suggested, with the house-numbering policy that Dinkins had agreed to at the beginning of his term as borough president. ‘At the commencement of your term’, Williams reminded Dinkins,
we discussed how best to implement and enforce this process. Taking into consideration the financial value to the developer of being granted a specific address, it was decided that to ensure fairness and prevent impropriety, address requests should be approved unless their exists a substantive basis for denial. This approach would eliminate discretionary decisions and thereby limit the possibility of abuse.
In short, this policy amounted to a full-fledged embrace of vanity addressing as a matter of public policy (except in extreme cases where ‘the address desired was so misleading as to make it difficult to locate the building’). Interestingly, Williams painted a very different picture when interviewed by the press. ‘When Mr. Dinkens [sic] took office’, Williams explained to a New York Times reporter, ‘we held a meeting and determined internally that changing addresses was not a gift that we should bestow indiscriminately’. He went on to note that ‘[w]e could either go easy or be very tough, and we decided to be very tough so the changes would not cause a great deal of confusion’.Footnote 41 Williams’ internal memo to Dinkins cited above, however, belies the rhetoric of his public statement.
When Dinkins became mayor of New York City in 1990, the new borough president, Ruth Messinger, decided to create tougher standards and criteria for awarding vanity addresses. The biggest criticism of previous practices was that accommodating the wishes of every developer led, in a number of cases, to out-of-sequence and confusing numbering schemes. ‘Addresses must be assigned with public safety and convenience in mind’, Messinger insisted, ‘[t]hey should be able to be easily found by everyone from ambulance drivers to postal workers to tourists’. She thus concluded, ‘I may be biased, but all of New York is still a prestigious address.’Footnote 42
The same year she took office, Messinger received a request from Chase Manhattan Bank to readdress a building as Two Chase Manhattan Plaza. Before Messinger had made her decision, Deputy Mayor Sally Hernandez-Piñero, under Mayor Dinkins, sent her a letter supporting the address change.Footnote 43 In it, she reminded Messinger that Chase Manhattan Bank was ‘an outstanding corporate citizen’ and suggested that the borough president should keep the following in mind:
As you formulate a policy on address changes, I would encourage you to consider this as an economic development tool and craft a policy that rewards the firms that stay in the City. Chase, with its name as part of the address[,] would have an even greater stake in the vitality of the entire area. Address changes can be used to further this type of psychological commitment.
The address change eventually went through partly because it was recognized that ‘Chase Manhattan Bank has contributed significantly to the welfare of the City of New York, in terms of economic development and employment.’Footnote 44
Conclusion
The chief aim of the current study has been threefold. First, I have sought to challenge the excessive formalism of the morphological tradition in urban historical geography, which has long influenced accounts of the spatial organization of cities and towns among historical geographers as well as architectural and urban planning historians. The ‘Grand Manner’ of the baroque style – with its diagonals and distinct focal points – is often contrasted with the rectilinearity of the grid. Similarly, debates have raged over the competing merits of the straight line and the curve as well as the organicism of the so-called ‘unplanned’ city and the rigidity of the methodically gridded plane.Footnote 45 This article, on the other hand, contends that the traditional focus on competing morphologies, while not without merit, has lost sight of one of the most profound transformations of space in urban history: the emergence of house numbering as a calculative spatial practice during the eighteenth century and its consolidation as a taken-for-granted mode of socio-spatial ordering during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The dominance of the grid, no doubt, remains central to understanding Enlightenment and modernist modes of spatial organization – at both the urban and continental scale – yet it was not geometry alone that gave the grid its calculative power. Rather, the combinatory effect of linking a gridded frame with the logic of ‘number’ is of primary importance to the spatial history of modernity.
Second, if I have sought to convince urban historians that the mundane practices of house numbering are actually quite fundamental to understanding the spatial organization of the modern city, this study has also cautioned critical theorists not to overemphasize the omnipotence of such spatial techniques of calculation. It is all too easy to fall into the historiographical trap of simply integrating the history of urban house numbering within a narrative of the social control exerted by the sovereign state in regulating the everyday spaces of urban social life. In certain respects, there is quite a bit of evidence to support such an argument, particularly considering the use of house numbering as a military strategy in eighteenth-century Europe.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, as the current case-study shows, it is one thing for the governing authorities to map out and legislate a space of calculation according to the dictates of ‘number’, yet it is quite another thing to actually establish and maintain such a regime of spatial inscriptions on the ground that is free of contradictions and violations of the symbolic ‘order’ of urban governmentality. In short, by concentrating on calculation as a technology of power, we perhaps unwittingly run the risk of conflating the calculations of power with the powers of calculation. The history of house numbering in New York offers a useful corrective to such quandaries, because it complicates and problematizes conceptions of Manhattan's gridded streetscape as the ultimate model of order and rationality imposed upon urban space. Indeed, a genealogy of Manhattan's house-numbering system supports a counter-narrative that acknowledges the spatial contradictions of calculable space as opposed to the standard storyline that pivots around the grid and the triumph of the ‘rational’ in modern traditions of urban planning.
Lastly, as the failed attempt to renumber Manhattan's avenues and the debate over vanity addresses indicate, there is more to a street address than simply its utilitarian function within a governmentalized regime of spatial inscriptions. The prestige associated with certain addresses, such as Fifth Avenue, is commonly used as a form of ‘symbolic capital’.Footnote 47 In some instances, a specific address acquires a certain reputation based upon the perceived activities occurring in that particular section of the city. In other cases, individual property owners have requested that municipal officials change their address to a more prestigious designation in the hopes that the name alone will carry with it an element of symbolic importance. As one developer explained in the late 1980s, the craze for vanity addresses was ‘the newest and most successful gimmick in Manhattan real estate promotion – one that can be of enormous financial value when used in the right neighborhood’.Footnote 48 Indeed, corporate property owners have often cared more about the social prestige of their own address than they have about the system as a whole.
To the extent that city government accommodates each individual property owner's request to acquire a more prestigious address as a ‘tool’ of urban economic policy, this may conflict with the governmental desire for standardization and spatial transparency. How such issues get resolved is, of course, not a deterministic process but contingent upon the politics of governmental administration. One should not automatically assume, therefore, that the local state (or capital) will always seek the standardization of urban space over other competing projects of capital accumulation. These contradictory logics are best examined through theoretically informed historical investigations rather than through abstract theorization alone.
