Find Hipster Neighborhoods in Any Major City Quickly With This Tool
When you first visit a city, it can be quite difficult to understand the area. Especially if you are moving to a new location, it is difficult to tell if you would be better off living in one area than in another, or if you happen to (or intentionally) rent an apartment in the most hipster area of the city. Now there is an app for that. Or actually a website.
A site called Hoodmaps has crowdsourced maps of major cities filled with information on whether certain areas attract hipsters, tourists, or wealthy people, and what you can find there.
For example, every San Francisco resident can tell you that at the marina you will usually find “brother brothers”, and in the Castro area there is a corner where on a warm day you will probably see a naked guy strolling (this turned out to be a difficult journey on the bus on my first weekend in town). But this is not exactly the information that you will find in the guidebook, or at least not all the information in the same guidebook.
The idea came to the founder of Pieter Levels from his own travels.
“Every time I travel to a new place, it is difficult for me to know which part of the city I should go to. I very often go to the tourist center. I come from Amsterdam and I know that 90% of tourists will never understand the “real” Amsterdam because they just stay in the tourist center. This is a fake area and has nothing to do with Dutch culture, ”reads a blog post about the web application. “I want to get a quick overview of the city. What are the steep “hips”? Where are the richer areas? Which districts are more suburban (and maybe boring for me?) ”.
He actually built it all up publicly from start to finish, chronicling every step of the way. If you are an app developer, his blog post will be potentially interesting to read. It is currently available in 2,000 major cities around the world.
Hoodmaps are color-coded according to the type of people you might meet in the area. The options are Hipsters, Rich, Tourists, Suits, University, and Normies. You can turn multiple items on and off as map overlays: tags, cafes, and rental and housing prices.
Tags share things like the idea of a naked guy or that the Richmond area of San Francisco is going to be foggy and can be sorted by all tags or just new ones.
As City Lab notes , the idea is flawed. The user participation aspect makes it easy to perpetuate negative stereotypes that may or may not be true. The labels for each area are also pretty white-targeted, so you definitely won’t get the full picture. And what does “normal” mean anyway?
However, if you’re heading to a new city, this can be a quick and dirty way to quickly get a feel for what awaits you and come up with a slightly more thoughtful plan of where to get that hotel room. …