This thesis is an investigation of the gendered, classed and racialized identities associated with living a traditional family life in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia in the 1 990s. It has two entry points. The first is a focus on gendered identities that are the result of "old" ideals in a "new" cultural and geographical context: what identities result when traditional ideals of motherhood, fatherhood and homeownership are played out in a context where the ideals are being questioned,

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... he ability to live these ideals limited and the surrounding landscape does not seem to reflect these notions? I use the heuristics of "new traditionalism" and "declining fortunes" to understand this interpretation and reinscription of the "old" within the "new". The second entry point is a concern with place: how, in the 1990s, are white, middle-class familial identities gendered and experienced in and through place, and specifically suburban environments? Building upon Doreen Massey's rethinking of the notion of place, I define place as a constellation of social and cultural relations in a particular site and examine some of the ways that places and identities are articulated. The thesis is based on archival work and in-depth interviews with residents in two neighbourhoods in the Municipality of Surrey, an outer suburb of Vancouver, British Columiba. Through an analysis of the planning of Surrey I show how the construction of Surrey as suburban set the limits of possibility and impossibility for identity there, deeming some identities "natural" and others peripheral. An examination of residential location decisions demonstrates that spatially demarcated neighbourhoods were desired and reconstructed and that the meanings of places within Surrey (what I term symbolic geographies) and distancing from a familial and racial other were important in the process. By exploring the multiple linkages between gender, class and home I show how images of place, and especially the house and the neighbourhood, a [...]