Internet
A map is created that tells you whether you live in a dangerous, posh or full of drunken foreigners neighbor
Do you want to know where you live? Hoodmaps is a collaborative mapping platform where users describe their residential areas with real and funny results.
Imagine if Google Maps could give you a description of a city according to the people who inhabit (and the way they behave in) each of its neighborhoods. But rather than an anthropological description, a biased, stereotyped and prejudiced one. Well, that's what you find in Hoodmaps.
Hoodmaps, the stereotyped Google Maps
What is Hoodmaps? Well, it is a collaborative online platform where anyone can participate, but this one is focused on interactive maps. Its creator and self-taught developer Pieter Levels, author of several successful websites and speaker and influencer who gives online talks for young entrepreneurs, wanted to show what the neighborhoods of big cities are really like, beyond the directional aseptism of Google Maps, among others.
And Hoodmaps is the result: an interactive map of a city divided by districts and with its own color code:
So far so good, but the problem is that being Hoodmaps a collaborative platform, and not even requiring you to register to enter your opinion or description of each area of the city, it makes that right now what we see on their maps are typical stereotypical reviews.
- Blue: Suits
- Dark Blue: Students
- Red: Tourists
- Green: Rich
- Grey: Normies
- Yellow: Hip
Drunk, posh and surfers
If we do a search to see what New York City is like, the Times Square area is marked completely in tourist red, with places described as "avoid at all cost", others like "Real NYers don't go here", or recommendations like "Visit the Museum of Modern Art" (which maybe you should). If we move to Brooklyn, specifically to Williamsburg, we have descriptions of areas like "the internet told me this hood was cool", or more straightforward ones like "Hispter Central". Technically, that''s not a lie.
If we go to the other coast, straight to downtown Los Angeles, for example, we have "hella cranes in the sky" to the constant construction in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center. The former Staples Center, now crypto.com Arena has legends like "Lakers for Life", or "Home than Elon Made". If we move a little further north to Hollywood, we find descriptions that go to the point like "people's names on the sidewalk" and "Tourists everywhere".
