When you’ve lived in NYC for a while, you start to learn the city in your own unique way.
And if you’ve ever wanted to label a map of the city by your own personal definitions, you’ll definitely enjoy spending some time on Hoodmaps!
The website’s interactive maps are updated by ordinary people every single day, using different colors to categorize zones like “hipster,” “business,” “student area” and so on. It’s an intuitive and easy way for city dwellers (and visitors) to find ideas for tourism or alternative neighborhoods and to contribute to the mapping out of your own city.
This map is quite literally all over the world with over 1,000 cities on the site, each with varying levels of interaction with their users to date. At the moment, New York is in the process of mapping itself out so you can take part in helping others find out a little bit more about the Big Apple’s best neighborhoods by adding information.
Seven categories break up the map and include: “suits, rich, hipsters, uni, normies, tourists and nightlife.” The interface uses Google Maps as the base and encourages users to paint onto the zone they want to define. In the case of conflict between users in defining the zone, the color that most people select dominates.
Hoodmaps also offers the possibility of adding brief comments about each place. As users approve the comment, it gains importance and size on the map. For instance descriptions like “tourist trap,” “Chinatown,” “clubbing,” and “hipster zone” easily help people understand what it is they’ll be getting in each geographical area. The labels that have the highest approval ratings in the shortest period of time are defined as “hot”- something similar to the term “trending.” The website also features the option to create your own map without sharing it.
The map is working particularly well in cities like Madrid where users have taken an active interest in defining each neighborhood. This active interest has helped the map gain a certain level of accuracy in terms of defining hipster and trendy neighborhoods vs. tourist traps.
So New Yorkers, you can help not only tourists, but our fellow city dwellers define each neighborhood and hopefully stay on top of the trendiest places to be!
See also: This Map Shows Where All NYC Neighborhood Borders Are Once & For All
Featured image: hoodmaps.com