The idea started with a pun. The pun is better in Swedish, so let me explain it first.
The pun
Medborgarplatsen is a square in the Södermalm district of Stockholm. The name means roughly “Citizen’s Square” — med (with), borgar (citizens), platsen (the square). It’s a busy area: cafes, cultural centers, an ice rink in winter, a lot of foot traffic.
The pun: swap “borgar” for “burger.”
Medborgarplatsen → Medburgarplatsen.
The Swedish word for “burger” is “burgare” (or more colloquially “burger”), so “medburgar” sounds almost exactly like “medborgar” in fast speech. If you say it out loud to a Swedish speaker, they’ll catch it immediately and either groan or laugh. Usually both.
The name also happens to describe something real: Södermalm has a good density of burger places, and many of them are within reasonable walking distance of Medborgarplatsen. So the joke contains an actual geographic observation.
The map
Medburgarplatsen is a map. It shows burger restaurants on Södermalm, starting from Medborgarplatsen and expanding outward. Each spot gets a short note — nothing elaborate, just enough context to decide if it’s worth the walk.
The design is deliberately minimal. No ratings, no rankings, no sponsored placements. Just a map with honest notes about places I’ve actually been to.
Why two domains
Both medburgarplatsen.se and medburgarplatsen.com point to the same site.
The .se domain is the natural choice for a Swedish pun about a Swedish place. The .com exists because someone might search for it with .com out of habit, and it seemed annoying to let them land on nothing.
This is the entire rationale. There is no grand strategy here.
What it actually is
Medburgarplatsen started as a test of a mapping stack. I wanted to try a particular approach to embedding maps in a static site, and I needed a dataset with enough local knowledge to be worth mapping.
The pun happened early. Once the pun existed, the project had a name, and a project with a name is harder to abandon than a nameless experiment. So it shipped.
The result is a small, honest, slightly silly site about burgers on Södermalm. It solves a real problem — “I’m near Medborgarplatsen, where do I get a burger?” — in a way that happens to be based on a wordplay.
I think that’s fine. Some projects are serious. Some are jokes that turned out to be useful. Medburgarplatsen is the second kind.
The site
It’s live at medburgarplatsen.se (and medburgarplatsen.com — same thing). If you’re in Stockholm and want a burger, start there.