Hoodmaps: The Rude, Honest Map of Every City

Hoodmaps is a crowdsourced map of what a city is really like. Locals paint neighborhoods in color-coded blobs, hipsters, tourists, rich, suits, students, normies, and slap short, unfiltered labels on top. It is free, it is often very funny, and it will tell you more about a city in thirty seconds than a guidebook does in thirty pages.

What is Hoodmaps?

Every city has two maps. There is the official one, with district names and transit lines and tasteful beige. And there is the one that lives in locals’ heads, where an area is not “the fifth arrondissement,” it is “where people go to be photographed eating.”

Hoodmaps is the second map, written down.

You pick a city, and it loads a map covered in translucent color patches, each one voted into place by people who live there. Over the top sit the tags: a few words each, blunt, sometimes affectionate, sometimes savage. “Tourists asking where the tourists are.” “Everyone here works in crypto.” “Actually just a car park.”

The colors are a fixed set of stereotypes, think hipsters, tourists, rich people, suits, university students, and regular folks, which sounds reductive until you see it applied to a city you know and find yourself nodding grimly. The crude categories are doing real work. They compress an enormous amount of local knowledge into something you can read at a glance.

And because anyone can contribute, the good cities are dense with commentary and the quiet ones are near-empty. That imbalance is part of the charm.

What can you do on Hoodmaps?

• Look up a city you know. Do this first. Nothing calibrates your trust in a crowdsourced map like checking it against a place you understand in your bones.
• Look up a city you are visiting. Read it before you book. The zones tell you which area is going to be dead at 9pm and which one is going to be loud at 3am.
• Read the tags, not just the colors. The colors are the summary; the tags are the article. Zoom in and actually read them.
• Paint your own zones. Pick a category, drag over the area you know, and it becomes part of the map. Takes seconds.
• Add a tag. One good line about your own neighborhood is a real contribution. Be specific, not just mean.
• Vote. Tags get pushed up or down by other users, so the map self-corrects over time. Voting is the quietest way to make it better.

Tips to get the most out of it

Start with your own home turf. You will immediately learn whether that city’s map is well-populated or was made by three people in 2018. That tells you how much to trust every other city.

Read it as vibes, not verdicts. Nobody is fact-checking “this street is entirely dentists.” Hoodmaps is a mood board for a city, and the moment you treat it as data you have misread the tool.

Use it for the hours, not just the places. The best planning trick here is timing. A “suits” zone is excellent for lunch and a wasteland on Sunday. A “students” zone is the reverse. The colors are basically a schedule.

Cross-check before you commit. Found a neighborhood that sounds perfect? Drop it into a street-level view or a hotel map before you book anything. Hoodmaps points you at a candidate; it does not do due diligence.

Contribute the unglamorous truth. The most valuable tags are not the jokes, they are the ones that say “great during the day, avoid the underpass at night.” Write the thing you would tell a friend.

Check smaller cities and be disappointed on purpose. Then fix it. A city with four tags is an invitation, and adding a handful of honest ones is a genuinely nice thing to do for the next visitor.

If you like Hoodmaps, also try…

• Atlas Obscura: the opposite energy, same curiosity: a global catalog of genuinely strange places worth going out of your way for.
• Random Street View: get dropped somewhere completely arbitrary on Earth and look around with no context whatsoever.
• Drive & Listen: cruise through a city in a dashcam video with the local radio playing, which is the closest thing to feeling a neighborhood from your desk.

Browse more in our Maps & Exploration collection, then go check what strangers have written about your neighborhood on Hoodmaps. Try not to take it personally.