This paper sets out to define how the population lives based on answers to the question, «What, briefly, does your neighbourhood represent for you?» Six types of residents are found. The «well-off» are concerned with the leisure activities available in town centres. These are privileged workers living in affluent neighbourhoods. The «locals» are highly sociable and have a very close relationship with where they live without the neighbourhood's characteristics really entering into their judgement. The inhabitants who say that they are «satisfied in general» are in the majority and are not as easy to typify. The «cut-off» have problems with interpersonal contact and complain of relational and spatial isolation and a lack of activity. The «indifferent» express a lack of attachment to the neighbourhood, stay at home most of the time or live outside the neighbourhood. Lastly, the «insecure» complain about noise and feeling unsafe, and live mainly in low rental public housing in poor, urban working-class neighbourhoods. The type of dwelling, amenities and facilities, the building's surrounding qualities and the problems said to be worrying in the neighbourhood show no systematic correlation with these six different types of residents since a wide range of individual experiences and logics coexist. Moreover, for given local and socio-economic characteristics, the residents' assessments differ in other aspects that cannot all, or at least not as clearly, be interpreted in terms of social hierarchy. Nevertheless, it is definitely the lowest-income inhabitants who accumulate socioprofessional disadvantages with residential disadvantages.