Life in contemporary cities presents both challenges and opportunities, depending on the gaze of the beholder. The meanings of sustainable well-being also depend on the perspective we adopt, that reflects our complex identities, lifestyle and observing position.

In the case of Vernier's cités, large housing complexes located on the margins of Geneva City, we wonder how different perspectives on sustainable well-being shape urban space. Their history of planning and design makes it possible to understand how shifting paradigms deal with functionalism and how ways of operationalising living in densified contexts have changed over time. In particular, we focus on the planning and transformation of the cités of Lignon and Libelulles, well-known for their inhabitants' differences in socio-economic status and origins. They are urban experiments on how differences were considered in planning to improve individual and collective well-being. But besides the planning and design imaginary they represent, these two cités are also empirical cases for observing how the everyday practices of inhabitants shape urban space from below to include these same differences. In particular, through a socio-historical approach and archival research, we will present how these two perspectives on thinking well-being – the stone of the planners' and designers' perspective and the flesh of the inhabitants – are in contrast and ambivalent. Through open and hidden conflicts, their mutual influence also produces a third way in the continuous process of reshaping and reappropriating the urban space.