The Architecture of Belonging

The start of the festival season amplifies this sense of shared space. Thanksgiving dinners on paper plates, strings of diyas flickering in common rooms, the glow of someone’s laptop streaming a movie.

A quiet, reflective space at the edge of the Ma Moosh Ka Win Valley Trail at University of Toronto Scarborough. (Photo By: Ashwini Sujeetharan // The Underground)

The Threshold 

The campus begins to molt by late October; the air smells slightly of wet earth, the kind that sticks to your shoes after walking too long on the campus valley trail. Light spills differently this time of the month; it's thinner, slower, and you start to notice the ways people are quietly building homes out of whatever they have. 

A blanket thrown across a study carrel. A candle with a name like Pumpkin Woods. A playlist that sounds like comfort, even if you can’t define why. 

Somewhere between lecture halls and residence lounges, belonging becomes an act of architecture. Everyone’s building something: a room, a ritual, or even a reason to stay. 

Belonging. 

It isn’t made of brick or drywall, it’s something that grows between shared mugs of tea. At UTSC, belonging feels like a kind of architecture that’s always under construction—a structure you inhabit even before you realize you’ve built it. 

The Communal Hall

The first walls of that architecture are often communal. They appear in the hum of residence spaces, where someone reheats leftovers in the microwave, the smell of a home-cooked meal lingering long after midnight. Or, in the chatter of study rooms that slowly turn into social ones, papers spread out, chargers tangled but conversations louder than typing. 

The start of the festival season amplifies this sense of shared space. Thanksgiving dinners on paper plates, strings of diyas flickering in common rooms, the glow of someone’s laptop streaming a movie while half the floor squeezes onto a couch—these small gatherings, no matter how unpolished and chaotic, make ordinary spaces emanate warmth. 

The festivals don’t have to be the focus, sometimes they’re just the decoration; a trim on buildings, the pattern on a rug. The real structure is what holds it together: the people, the laughter; the sense that even amidst essays and midterms, someone has carved out a room where you’re welcome to stay a while. 

When I asked Eva Tan, a student who lives at UTSC residence, what place on campus felt most like home, she said: 

“The valley trail! I’m from Vancouver, so being surrounded by nature all the time makes me feel more at home.” 

A place where Eva Tan feels like a part of home is with her at UTSC. (Photo By: Ashwini Sujeetharan // The Underground)

Her answer reminded me that belonging doesn’t always depend on other people. Sometimes it’s in quiet company, the  kind only trees and wind can give. Walking the valley in the late afternoon light with the hum of traffic fading behind you makes it easy to forget that the city is still only a few steps away, where the crunch of the leaves underfoot and the brief flash of a squirrel darting through branches all feels familiar. It’s a fragment of home carried across provinces, even countries.

But belonging isn’t exclusively to residence students. For those who commute, the architecture is built differently, stitched together through rituals between classes. One student described finding comfort on the fifth floor of the Bladen Wing, surrounded by chalkboards and quiet study corners. 

There’s something about these liminal spaces, the lounges, the benches, and the empty classrooms that make them feel personal. For commuters, “home” often exists in motion: the stretch of hallway where the sunlight feels just right, the same table at the Student Centre, the familiar bus seat at the end of a long day. These too, are structures of the architecture of belonging. 

The Balcony

Beyond the campus edge, Toronto opens up like a kind of mosaic—a thousand small celebrations happening at once. It’s the kind of city where belonging often begins on the sidewalk. Lanterns line storefronts along Gerrard Street East, string lights flickering over patios, and the air smells like ten different kitchens at once. You can walk past a Diwali celebration, a street fair, and a Halloween display in the same hour. Collages of sound and color, a balcony view of other people’s rituals. 

For students, these moments can be both comforting and bittersweet. Festivals that once filled their homes with noise and family might now pass in quieter ways. The same student from earlier wrote, 

“The Mid-Autumn festival just passed, and I couldn't find the time to buy a mooncake like my family usually does. I still wished some friends and family members a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival though.” 

There exists a kind of homesickness that isn’t sharp, but slow. It sneaks into your day between lectures or in the ping of a notification of photos your family sends you. But even then, something of the festival spirit lingers. In the candle lit in your dorm, a quick call home, or the act of sending a Happy Deepavali text to someone you haven’t spoken to in months, proof of belonging exists and doesn’t always need to be loud. Sometimes, it’s as soft as staying connected. 

The balcony view from Student Centre, capturing the quiet spaces that transform into lively chatter reflecting the stages of belonging. (Photo By: Ashwini Sujeetharan // The Underground)

From above, in this balcony view—you may begin to realize that the city itself is part of the architecture. The street corners, cafés, and bookstores become a kind of room, and the longer you live here, the more rooms you collect. Over time, the city begins to remember you back. 

The Quiet Room

And then, there’s the quiet kind of belonging. The one that happens when the noise settles. In residence, the living room is never truly silent. There’s always the hum of the fridge, someone’s kettle boiling, the crisp hiss of a can of energy drink cracking open to stay awake another night. Yet within that quiet chaos, something familiar begins to grow. 

The student as before mentioned that spending time in her dorm’s living room gave her “an odd sense of familiarity.” Maybe it’s because the living room is that middle space between private and shared, which belongs to everyone and no one at once. You can exist there without performing. You can be part of the world, but at your own volume. 

Commuter students find versions of these quiet rooms, too. I spoke to one such student, Parsa Sehhati, who mentioned the tucked-away library cubicles, the back corners of BV, and the benches by the Student Centre windows where huddled conversations take place. These are all glimpses of where they rest between classes, call home, or simply breathe. For some, that pause, that stillness between movement is where belonging takes root. 

That’s what home often becomes in university: an unfixed address, a rhythm of comfort you learn to recognize. The scent of someone else’s cooking that reminds you of your own kitchen “back home”. The echo of laughter in a hallway after midnight, or the sight of your reflection in a window, and as frost might begin to settle and the draft of icy air begins to blow, this familiarity provides to you a belonging in this architecture. 

Belonging, in the end, is not a permanent structure. It's portable and lives in gestures; these reimagined rituals.

When you walk back through campus on a November evening, lights glowing from the windows of Highland or the Science Wing, the place feels different than it did in September. Maybe it’s you who’s changed—your voice starting to echo back from the walls you helped build. 

Perhaps home isn’t where you begin, but where the walls remember your voice. 

And perhaps, belonging isn’t something we find, but something we quietly construct, piece by piece, until even the coldest spaces start to feel like they’re listening.