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YOUNG LOCALS FROM ALL OVER EUROPE

YOUNG LOCALS FROM
ALL OVER EUROPE

GIVING YOU HONEST TRAVEL INFO

USE-IT is tourist info for young people. The house specialty: city maps for young travellers. Where are the free concerts? If there’s one museum I have to see, which one? What bar hosts secret karaoke nights? Where can I find cheap and good food? How do I stop looking like a tourist? That’s the kind of questions that USE-IT maps answer.

USE-IT consists of young locals who love their city, that’s us! We are a network of European cities, we love the place we live in and want to share that love with you. Cities all over the continent had a map, from Nicosia to Glasgow and from Oulu all the way to Ljubljana. USE-IT maps are made by local teams, who find local money for their map, write about the places they love in their city, and create a beautifully designed map for young travellers to use.

The name USE-IT originated in 1971 in Copenhagen, in a hippy village where young people shared hot chocolat and travel tips. This grew into an actual network of city maps, which began in 2005 with the first map of Ghent (Belgium). Since then, the number of cities in the network has grown each year, with the 100th city, Viterbo, printing a map in 2023. And we plan to make many more!

In a USE-IT map, you will not find the same old hamburger chains, overpriced coffee places, lines to stand in or viewpoints to elbow your way through. Instead, we give you tips to travel sustainably, learn a bit about the place you’re visiting and get an experience like a local. What foods do you really need to try, where can you find a quiet balcony to watch the crowds go by, how do you travel on a budget? Our young locals show you the small shops to buy your souvenirs, quiet bars where you can play cards with regular visitors, or a bakery that served the best pie in town for the last 100 years.

We show cities that you might not have thought of visiting like Tilburg, Chemnitz or Calais, or show you hidden parts of the ones you know, like Prague, Paris and Rome.

HOW IS USE-IT

ORGANISED

USE-IT Europe is based in Lille, France and is run by a board of volunteers. There is one editor-in-chief who is hired by the network, to support teams in making their map and to protect the consistency and quality of our USE-IT label. Every year, the network of young teams gets together in one of the cities, where a general assembly is held, new board members are chosen and big decisions are made. On top of that, those weekends are great fun meeting each other, following workshops and strengthening the network together.

Some of the cities are working together as partners in several Erasmus+ projects. For more information on this, visit Resources page.

Jozien

Editor In Chief
USE-IT Nijmegen (NL)

NICOLAS

Co-president
USE-IT Lille (FR)

Iga

Co-president
USE-IT Olsztyn / Warsaw (PL)

EVA

Co-treasurer
USE-IT Prague (CZ)

hélène

Co-treasurer
USE-IT Nantes (FR)

Mafalda

Board member
USE-IT Viterbo

JOYCE

Board member
USE-IT Esch-sur-Alzette (LU)

FUTURE OF TOURISM

USE-IT has proudly pledged to three guiding principles of the Future of Tourism, a coalition that wants to change tourism and reduce its bad effects on the world and on local communities. The principles we have pledged to are:

PRINCIPLE 1

SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE

We want to consider all kinds of sustainable aspects and help to save local businesses. We will still encourage tourists to respect the locals' way of life but we need to adapt our contents to encourage changes at individual and systemic level. It will encourage behaviour’s changes (using local transport, promoting trains rather than planes, hints for waste reduction etc.) and will promote environment-friendly and socially respectful businesses.

PRINCIPLE 4

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

Still focusing on young travellers to promote the “young spirit” that can go with sustainability ideas. Our users are not only young in age but people that share this vision. A strategic dissemination of maps is needed according to cities' needs. Middle-size ones will need to spread maps as much as possible and encourage people to stay while bigger ones will need to distribute them to already alternative tourists and give them tips to go outside of touristic centers.

PRINCIPLE 12

PROTECT SENSE OF PLACE

Fighting the process of city touristification. Crisis encourages us to focus on outside spots. A way to (re)discover and share with tourists the city and its surroundings (neighbourhoods forgotten by mass tourism). Also, we will try to include more less known responsible projects and movements that protect the local community and its heritage, even if it means those are not the most popular among locals.