Crowdsourced map confirms long-held stereotypes about NYC neighborhoods

People sure do love maps about New York City, particularly ones that confirm their long-held stereotypes about neighborhoods around the city. (Remember the one that purports to ID the types of people found at Manhattan subway stops? Or Joe Larson’s Judgmental Maps? Yeah, it’s been a thing for a while now.)

But the latest purported truth-telling map takes the idea a step further by giving its users input into the process: Hoodmaps (h/t ArchDaily), a tool that launched earlier this month, calls itself “a crowdsourced map to divide cities up into hipsters, tourists, rich, normies, suits, and uni areas." (You know, the six types of people you find in every city, right?) Each category is assigned a color—tourists are red, hipsters are yellow, and so on—so that users can “paint” an area of the city to correspond with where that group of people is found.

Via Hoodmaps

Users can also add their own keywords to various neighborhoods, which has led (thus far) to some pretty amusing tags: the area around Times Square is “INFINITE TOURISTS”; LaGuardia is tagged as “3rd world airport” (thanks, Joe Biden); Long Island City is “towers and more towers”; and so on.

Its creator, Pieter Levels, said in a blog post that the idea for Hoodmaps originated out of a desire to get better intel on where to go in a new city; “usually i end up in the tourist district and it takes me at least 2 weeks to figure out where to go,” he wrote. This tool, then, functions as a way for locals to give their perspective on what you’ll find in a city. (Of course, there’s the opportunity for this to go off the rails and get really offensive, but it’s not there … yet.)

• Hoodmaps: New York City [Official]
• Where Are the Hipsters in Your City? These Crowdsourced Maps Will Show You [ArchDaily]