Belonging in Practice

When I moved to Surrey, I didn't expect it to become a place that meant much to me. Like many others, I came here because it was what I could afford. Surrey faces the same challenges as other towns across Canada: housing, homelessness, infrastructure, and affordability. And suburban Surrey couldn't be more different from my hometowns on Vancouver Island. I moved here prepared to simply live here, not to connect to it.

But something shifted over time. Through the uncertainty of 2020 and everything that followed, Surrey began to show its uniqueness in the everyday routines of the city. Slowly, it stopped being the place I moved to out of necessity and became a place I recognized as home.

Surrey as a Place That Holds Space

Surrey is known as "the City of Parks," and it earns that name with more than 800 parks across the city. Soon after moving, each weekend became a ritual: what new park are we going to explore today?

Learning the land brought a slow build of familiarity. Surrey gives you room to breathe, and the abundance of green space is grounding. These parks became the backdrop to some of my earliest moments of feeling at home: accessible, familiar, and constant.

The Language of Food

Surrey’s food scene is unmatched, seriously. You can find incredible regional cuisines here — North and South Indian, Afghan, Filipino, Indo‑Chinese, Korean, Pakistani, Thai, Vietnamese, Eritrean. The restaurants are family‑owned, rooted in community, and exceptional. They survive because of their quality and because the neighborhoods are strong enough to sustain them.

For me, the food became one of the first ways I understood Surrey’s identity. It showed me where people gather, where culture is carried, and how history and migration shape a city’s everyday life.

Arts and Culture

There’s always something going on in Surrey, big events, small events, hyper‑local events. The arts and culture scene is built by parents, aunties, uncles, youth, small orgs, and community groups who show up because they care.

Most weekends, I find something to do. A spring fair at a school in Clayton. A Christmas craft market run by parents in North Surrey. A halal festival in Surrey Central. Charcoal art classes at the Surrey Art Gallery. Japanese classes at the rec centre. Walking clubs at the mall.

In a city I didn’t expect to connect with, these small cultural pockets became the places where I felt myself settling in without even noticing.

Representation as a Lived Experience

Surrey is diverse. In fact, it's one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country. But its diversity goes beyond the statistic. Cultural communities run deep across the city, woven into neighbourhoods, family businesses, and everyday routines.

For me, that depth created a sense of place, identity, and safety. As a First Nations woman, representation isn’t theoretical, it shapes how I feel, how I show up, and how much of myself I bring into a space.

It gave me a sense of belonging I didn’t expect to find here. It's a quiet recognition that settles in slowly, until one day you realize you’re rooted.

A City in Motion

Surrey is growing at an unprecedented pace. In some areas, it’s exploding. Its footprint is stretching and reshaping itself, pushing and pulling between suburb and metropolitan city. Neighbourhoods once defined by single‑family homes are shifting into low‑, mid‑, and high‑density buildings. Entire streets look different from one year to the next, where a gravel lot stood last winter, a mid-rise condo stands today.

It’s remarkable to witness up close, sometimes exciting, sometimes conflicting. But that tension is part of what makes Surrey compelling. At the heart of it, Surrey's ambition and resilience through this time of immense change is one of my favourite things about it.

I didn’t expect Surrey to become home, but it did. Not all at once, it happened slowly, through its communities, its food, its culture, and the way the city keeps reshaping itself. Surrey is imperfect and in motion, but it makes room for people. Somewhere in that constant becoming, I found a place where I could root myself too.