This dissertation examines how new South Asian immigrants in Surrey, British Columbia, develop a sense of belonging and identification through everyday engagement with the built and natural environments. Situated within architectural theory, urban studies, and environmental psychology, the study addresses a gap in placemaking and urban design discourse, where limited attention is given to the lived, experiential processes through which immigrants form attachments to place in transcultural urban contexts. The research is grounded in a critical realist, social constructivist paradigm and informed by phenomenological assumptions about lived experience. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is used to explore how new immigrants interpret their spatial lived experiences and how meaning, identity, and belonging are shaped through daily encounters with streets, neighbourhoods, public institutions, religious spaces, and landscapes. Qualitative data were gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews and photo-interviewing with Indian and Pakistani Punjabi immigrants living mainly in the Newton and Fleetwood neighbourhoods of Surrey. The findings indicate that belonging does not develop primarily through formal architectural expression or symbolic identification with the city. Instead, it emerges gradually through routine practices, social relationships, sensory experiences, memory, and repeated use of ordinary places. Participants formed attachments through libraries, mosques/gurdwaras, parks, streets, neighbourhood spaces, and natural landscapes, which fostered familiarity, social interaction, and continuity with past lifeworlds. Belonging was experienced as layered and shaped by simultaneous attachments to multiple places across time and geography. This dissertation’s principal contribution is the development of an Extended Model of Belonging and Place Identification for transcultural contexts. Grounded in empirical findings, the model extends existing frameworks in architectural and environmental psychology by introducing dimensions that account for the lived transcultural urban experience. These include transcultural relational belonging, elastic temporality, embodied and sensory belonging, and multilocal attachment. Together, these dimensions conceptualize belonging as relational, processual, and continually reworked through everyday spatial practices. This study contributes to architectural theory and transcultural urbanism by foregrounding experience, affect, and everyday use. It offers a grounded framework for architects and urban planners to better understand how meaningful urban belonging is formed in multicultural cities beyond representational or formal approaches to design.
Umbreen Ashraf (Thu,) studied this question.