Despite strong political pushback, the number of people searching for protection in Europe is not decreasing. Urban spaces, especially, are the destination of many seeking a new home. Yet, arriving in a new urban environment does not automatically mean feeling at home. Students from the GEO410 Geography.Matters. course accompanied two refugees to understand how physical places shape their sense of belonging in Zürich.

In November 2025, we let Mohammad and Ahmad guide us to places in Zürich that are important to them. We wanted to understand how these places enable them to feel at home. What are the characteristis of these places that – through their lived experience – allow for a sense of belonging?

For both regufees portrayed in the blogpost, a sense of belonging is made up of very diverse experiences. Practices such as reminiscing about the past, finding joy and community, retreating to find peace or constructing and envisioning a future imbue those places with personal meaning. Public outdoor spaces serve this end particularly well, as private spaces are often inaccessible.

Specifically for refugees who are often not welcome in public spaces, this act of finding belonging through various practices can be seen as taking agency. With our post we hope to provide some insight on how urban spaces don’t only exist outside, but live a life of their own, within individuals, constantly being re-created and re-interpreted by whomever enters and inhabits the space. While we may share the same space, we often do not experience the same place.

Explore our immersive and visually led blog post that we produced in the context of the Geography. Matters. module at the Department of Geography in the fall semester of 2025.

Our Space, My Place: Exploring Refugees‘ Sense of Belonging in Zurich

(Link opens the story map in a new tab.)

About GEO410 This blog post is part of the outcome of an interdisciplinary Master’s-level course in Geography: GEO410 Geography. Matters. The course aims to bring together diverse geographic research perspectives to engage with some of the most pressing societal and environmental challenges of our time. As the only compulsory module of the Geography MSc program, the course encourages students to think across sub-disciplines of geography and to explore how geographic research can meaningfully contribute to debates around sustainability, justice, and environmental change. Beyond conducting interdisciplinary research as a team, a central aim of the course was to experiment with creative and accessible forms of science communication. Rather than producing a purely academic output, students translated their research insights into blogposts, intended for a wider, non-specialist audience. The contributions thus showcase not only rigorous scientific work by highly motivated students, but also the importance of communicating research beyond the university and engaging broader publics in conversations about geography, sustainability and the future of our shared environments. The students in the course GEO410 were supervised by Andreas Vieli, Christian Berndt and Sofia van Moorsel as lecturers and by Nikolas Klaudy as teaching assistant.