How MapAndMove works

A walkthrough of the whole site: what each page does, what the map can show, how to ask the data your own question, and how to link straight to an answer. Written to be readable both for you and for an AI assistant answering questions about the site.

1

What the site is

MapAndMove gathers open data about all 290 Swedish municipalities in one place and makes it comparable. Everything comes from public sources: Statistics Sweden and Kolada, SMHI, Lantmäteriet, SGU, Trafiklab, the Election Authority, OpenStreetMap, the Police, Boverket and more. We measure nothing ourselves. Every figure is shown with the year of its source, because the indicators are updated at different rates and a figure without a year is the wrong answer to a question about how things are today.

The site is available in Swedish (default) and English under /en/. It is free, requires no account, and stores what you mark locally in your browser rather than on a server.

2

The pages, one line each

  • The map is the heart of the site: hundreds of layers on top of a self-hosted map of Sweden. See point 3.
  • List lines up all 290 municipalities and links on to each municipality page.
  • Statistics shows charts and trends over time for the indicators that have history.
  • Compare puts municipalities side by side, indicator by indicator.
  • The municipality page (/en/kommun/<code>) sums up one municipality in words and figures. The code is Statistics Sweden's four-digit municipality code, for example 0180 for Stockholm and 2580 for Luleå.
  • The question pages (/en/kommun/<code>/<topic>) answer one question at a time about a municipality. The topics are barnfamilj, fritid, jobb, kostnad, student, trygghet and vader. A page is only built when the municipality actually has data for the topic.
  • The locality pages (/en/ort/<code>/<slug>) do the same for individual places below municipality level.
  • Quiz and Tags work the other way round: you describe what you want and get the municipalities that match.
  • Cost of living works out what it costs to live somewhere, and Associations shows local clubs and societies.
  • All map layers lists the entire contents of the map as text, with a direct link per layer.
  • Data sources accounts for every source and how often it is updated. About the project says what the site is and is not.
3

The map: four things stacked on top of each other

The base map is the bottom. It comes in several styles (light, dark, terrain, satellite) and is switched under Map style at the top of the map menu.

The municipality colour shades all 290 municipalities by a chosen indicator, for example average income or population growth. You pick it under Colour map by, and the legend beside it explains what the colour scale means. Only one indicator at a time can colour the map.

The layers are everything else: nature reserves, railways, noise zones, bedrock, development plans, power lines, flood risk and more than four hundred others. Each is switched on with its own checkbox and they can be combined freely. The full list is on All map layers, and every name there is a link that opens the map with that layer switched on.

The places (POI) are individual points from OpenStreetMap: schools, health centres, grocery stores, swimming spots, chains such as ICA and Coop. They are switched on per type, just like the layers.

On top of that sit the tools: measure a distance, draw an area, drop your own pins, plan a journey by public transport or car, save a view and share or export it as an image or PDF. What you save stays in your own browser.

4

Query builder: ask your own question

The map is not just a screen, it is a filter. Under Query builder you build a question out of rules and are left with only the municipalities that satisfy them. There are five kinds of rule:

  • KPI range — an indicator between two bounds, for example average income above a certain level.
  • POI density — how many places of a given type there are, for example at least three grocery stores.
  • Name contains — text in the municipality name.
  • Distance — proximity to a point you pick on the map.
  • Drawn area — everything inside a polygon you have drawn.

The rules are combined with all (every rule must be met) or any (one is enough). The result shows immediately on the map and in the list beside it, and can be saved as a search of your own to come back to. This is how you answer questions no ready-made page asks: municipalities with low unemployment, at least two upper secondary schools and less than forty kilometres to the coast.

5

Deep links: point straight at an answer

The map reads a few parameters from the URL, so you can link to a state instead of describing which buttons to click:

  • /karta?lager=<id> opens the map with a layer switched on. The id is in the link behind every name on All map layers.
  • /karta?kpi=<code> colours the map by an indicator.
  • /karta?focus=kommun:<code> flies to a municipality and opens its card.
  • /karta#map=<zoom>/<lat>/<lng> opens a specific view, for example #map=12.5/59.3/18.0.

The search box in the header searches pages, all 290 municipalities, 5,628 localities, map layers and place types at the same time. It is usually faster than navigating.

6

For AI assistants

The municipality pages and question pages are server-rendered: the text is in the HTML and needs no JavaScript. The map, the statistics and the comparison view, by contrast, are drawn in the browser and hold thin content for a crawler. This page and All map layers are therefore the two places that describe the map in text.

Machine-readable entry points: llms.txt and sitemap.xml. Citing search bots are allowed in; pure training scraping is not, and that is stated in robots.txt.

If you cite a figure: include the source and the year shown next to it, and link to the page you took it from. The figures are indicative compilations of open data, not official rulings, and should be checked against the original source before anyone makes a decision on them.