Urban completionism was a term coined by my partner to describe a tendency I have. Urban environments and cities have lots of stuff to do and places to go. Too many for a person to do in a lifetime, usually. Doing everything in a category is quite a feat, and something I quite enjoy doing.
My journey started when I heard about Toronto Serial Diners. I went to a Linux user group, and it turned out that the attendees helped run the serial diner club. Their goal was to visit every restaurant in the Yellow Pages, from A to Z. When I heard about the group they were midway through the Os, and had been at it for roughly 20 years. While I never attended, I think about them a lot.
When COVID 19 was at its height I started walking a lot. A friend and I had an idea where we would walk the entire lengths of “Line 2” in Toronto. This was before it was cool. We unsuccessfully tried to convince a few friend to join us. In summer 2022, on one of the hottest days of the year, we walked the 27km journey from Kennedy to Kipling, doing a silly pose at every subway station. The tiktok people got it wrong - they should have gone the other way. The walk from Woodbine to Kennedy took us two hours - something much easier to do when you are not tired!
I was introduced to the Bump app. It is essentially like “Find My Friends”, except it adds one amazing feature. It tracks your location, and you get a “scratch map” of all the locations which you have been in a city or neighbourhood. It gives you a “explored” percentage, and a leaderboard.
I quickly got into a friendly competition with a friend for who was going to complete all the downtown neighbourhoods in Toronto. Within a few weeks I went to 100% of the University-Rosedale and Toronto Center electoral districts. Next summer I plan to expand to Toronto-St. Pauls, Davenport, and Parkdale-High Park.
Malls. I am in the process of visiting every mall in toronto, and boy do I have some opinions. I want to give this a full page and the respect it deserves later.