Who we are and what we are trying to build

Most big decisions in life come with someone to help. Borrowing money gets you an adviser. Changing jobs gets you recruiters, salary benchmarks and colleagues who tell you how it really is. Moving to another part of Sweden gets you a thirty line listing and a gut feeling.

That gap is why MapAndMove exists.

What we actually are

We are a small, independent project. We do not sell homes, we do not broker loans, and nobody can pay us to push one municipality ahead of another. That is deliberate: the moment someone pays for visibility, the comparison becomes worthless.

Almost everything on the site is built on open sources: Statistics Sweden, Kolada, the National Agency for Education, SMHI, the Geological Survey of Sweden, the Swedish Transport Administration, the National Council for Crime Prevention, the Land Survey and OpenStreetMap. We do not invent data. We fetch it, clean it, project it onto the map and try to make it legible to someone who simply wants to know what a place is like to live in.

We also run all of it ourselves. The map, the map tiles, the routing engine and the analytics sit on our own servers in Sweden rather than on somebody else's platform. It is more work, but it means the site does not leak your searches onwards, and nobody can pull the rug out from under us.

The goal, in one sentence

We want to make all of Sweden comparable on the things that actually decide how daily life feels.

Not just price and population, which everyone already has. Travel time to work, how much sun you get in January, how far it is to a preschool, whether it is noisy, what the air is like, whether there is somewhere to swim within cycling distance, how the schools are really doing, how much it snows, what the safety statistics look like and how close the hospital is when it is urgent.

Every one of those things sits in some government database somewhere. Nobody has put them on the same map and let you ask the question: where in Sweden does this line up with my life?

Where we are heading

Three things sit at the top of the list.

• From municipality to place. A municipality is a blunt unit. We are moving down to towns, neighbourhoods and eventually individual addresses, because that is where life is actually lived.
• From layers to answers. Seeing twenty layers is good. Getting a straight answer to "does this address work for us?" is better. Pin mode and the analysis tools are the first step there.
• From private individuals to businesses. The same evidence that helps a family pick a house helps a business pick a location. The site analysis mode is already on the map and we are building on it.

Want to be part of it?

We would like to hear from you. Especially if you are one of the following.

• A sponsor or partner. The project grows faster than a spare time budget does. If you want to support the work, or you have a product or a dataset that belongs here, get in touch and we will talk about how it can work without the comparison losing its independence.
• A municipality or region. If you want to update your information, appear among the municipalities looking for new residents, or collaborate in some other way, say so.
• A business. If you need evidence for a new location or a relocation decision, tell us what you need. We are building those products right now and would rather build them alongside someone who will actually use them.
• Press or research. We are happy to help with data and background.
• Anyone with an opinion. Missing a layer? Something wrong? A figure that misleads? Those emails have improved the site more than anything else so far.

Write to kontakt@mapandmove.se, or use the form on the contact page. We read everything.

Photo: Averater, the village of Öxnäs by the Nordre älv river outside Gothenburg, Sweden, 2013. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The image has been cropped and downscaled.