Made by locals for young travellers: volunteer creators gather in Prague for first USE-IT map conference in Czechia
Over 50 young creators from around 20 cities in 10 European countries gathered in Prague over the last few days for the first ever USE-IT map conference to be held in Czechia. These free, non-commercial maps are intended to promote sustainable tourism by giving young travellers tips on where to go without spending a lot of money and how to blend in and act like a local.
Have you ever gone to a new city as a tourist, paid for some overpriced low-quality food and thought, ‘I wish I knew where the locals go’? In that case, a USE-IT map might be just the thing for you.
These brightly-coloured square paper maps are created by young local volunteers and are intended to give tips to visitors on where to go for lesser-known attractions. The maps have their origins in a hippy community in Denmark in the 1970s, but the first official USE-IT map in the form it is in today came out just shy of 20 years ago in 2005.
Nowadays it encompasses a network of European cities stretching from Oulu, Finland in the north to Nicosia, Cyprus in the south and all the way from Guimaraes, Portugal in the west to Tbilisi, Georgia in the east. Jozien Wijkhuijs from the Netherlands, the editor-in-chief of USE-IT Europe, explains the guiding principles behind the maps.
“We are up-to-date, we are free, and we are no-nonsense – people cannot buy their way into a USE-IT map. That’s really important. The maps are always square, and on the front you can only have the words ‘Free map for young travellers, made by locals’ and the city name in English. We recently decided that we want to have a form of ‘act like a local’ in there – things you can tell travellers about local customs. It can be anything from how many kisses you give when greeting people to ‘don’t eat that because it’s for tourists’. And we want the map to be useable – if you don’t want to use your phone, you don’t have to.”
Small teams of volunteers from each city in the network decide on the places that should be included each year, as a new updated map comes out annually. These places end up as numbered points on the city’s USE-IT map with a short description of what it is and why it’s worth going to. They include places to see, eat, drink, shop, relax and more. But since no-one is allowed to pay to be in the map, the places included often don’t even know about it until afterwards, as Eva Křížová, founder of USE-IT Prague, tells me.
“After we finish the map – not before – we go to the places that are public and we tell them they are in the map and offer for them to distribute the maps in their premises.”
In addition to the spots featured in the map, the finished products are also distributed in city tourism offices, hostels, hotels, Erasmus clubs and other cities in the network. And although the maps state on the front that they are for young travelers, Jozien says that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
“We never say that the maps cannot be used by people older than 30. Before our target group was even 18-25, now it’s 18-30. This is something that I think changed in the last 20 years – people stay younger for longer. So older people can use them of course, but if you write for everybody, you write for nobody. You need to have someone in mind, so we think of people who are probably travelling by train or plane, not by car, who probably aren’t travelling with kids or dogs, probably are backpackers and probably aren’t the richest.”
One of the foci of this year’s conference was digitisation – but although they hope to re-launch a mobile app and a digital archive of previous maps, Jozien says they will always keep the iconic paper versions as well.
