This PhD is a new exploration of the sense of place in the urban context of the contemporary Israeli society. The multi-facetted study of Florentin – a southern neighborhood of the cosmopolitan and high-tech hub Tel Aviv – is a fresh look on the sense of place, articulating different scales of local and global analysis in one defined and well identified place. The Florentin neighborhood, standing in-between the ancient Arab Jaffa and Tel Aviv, built at the beginning of the 20th century as the first Jewish city in modern Palestine and since 2003 one of the World Wide Heritage sites, is today a trendy neighborhood. The specific atmosphere of the place, both seen as “cool” and “exotic” in the general discourse, defines the place as one of the last “authentic” places of Tel Aviv. After years of decay and mixed industrial uses, leaving the space to its poorest oriental population, it is nowadays inhabited by a wide range of Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, and by foreign workers coming from Africa, as well as from Asia and Europe. Through interviews over four years (2005-2008) of inhabitants and public officers, street-observations, pictures taken and deep examination of the municipal archives, it is the whole history of the construction of the city and its most contemporary developments which can be read and tell. This work then proposes the analysis of this specific neighborhood as a prism through which to observe the place, the city and some fast transformations of the Israeli society itself.