In France, some peripheral and deprived neighborhoods suffer from objectively degraded urban and social environments. A specific public policy (known as Politique de la Ville ) aims at reducing social and urban disparities at the national level, and improving people’s quality of living in these neighborhoods. Many studies have demonstrated the limits of current analytical approaches in defining these deprived areas and the ways to renovate them. They also suggest new approaches should consider the territories as well as renovation projects from a dynamic and sociological perspective, starting from a human and social viewpoint. In this research, we attempt to explore and characterize the living conditions of people in such deprived areas, starting from their own experience of place, using ethnographic approaches to collect narratives of people living in these neighborhoods. We provide insights on the kind of data we were able to collect, and show the discrepancies between the way people actually experience their neighborhood, and the projected vision of these territories conveyed by experts (urban planners, Politique de la Ville analysts, public health engineers…) or decision-makers. We point at undertheorized aspects in current policies focusing on urban renovation that do not address properly affective, relational, and symbolic dimensions attached to the experience of living somewhere. We argue that collecting local residents’ (historicized) experiences, while avoiding pre-established analytical categories, raises deep epistemological questions between naturalistic and anthropological approaches, and we suggest that this could open perspectives for urban planning and renovation, and research opportunities on citizen participation and the meaning we give to it.