A new geolocation system is helping people get around in places where the streets have no name. PHOTO: Mapcode

Rely on numbers to get around the neighbourhood? Then this one’s for you. A nonprofit called the Mapcode Foundation, has designed a system that assigns a unique and easily remembered address to any spot on the planet, without reference to landmarks or street names. Mapcodes consist of between four and nine digits and letters, which correspond to a five-square-metre patch on land or sea. Vowels have been eliminated from the system—so that mapcodes would not look like words, and because “O”s and “I”s cause confusion—but the remaining Latin consonants can be replaced with characters from the alphabets of most major languages. And the addresses are largely sequential: take a few steps in any direction and you’re in another square with a similar mapcode.

The algorithm and the data tables behind mapcodes—and that is essentially what mapcodes are—were developed by Pieter Geelen and Harold Goddijn, two of the founders of the Dutch navigation company TomTom, in 2001.xThe technology went more or less unused for about a decade, but recently it has begun to take hold. When he was in Kenya, Kewal Shienmar, head of the Foundation, met an energy consultant who claimed to have mapcoded most of the major electrical infrastructure in his home country and Uganda. The Transport Corporation of India, meanwhile, is using mapcodes to help drivers locate loading docks, and the South African Post Office is using them in areas of the country without formal addressing systems. In South Africa and parts of Kenya, Shienmar suggested, mapcodes are already playing a more substantial role, allowing people with a home and land but no address to borrow against their property. “By giving the collateral a mapcode, all of a sudden this collateral has a value and the bank will accept it,” Shienmar said.

Read more on how mapcodes fare against traditional GPS and other systems of navigation here.