1 French-speaking Belgians and the asylum seekers Sonia Gsir (CEDEM-ULg), Fabienne Scandella (GERME-ULB), Marco Martiniello (CEDEM-ULg) and Andrea Rea (GERME-ULB). The main object of this research has been to study the social relationships which do, or do not, develop between the inhabitants of towns and villages on the one hand, and asylum seekers on the other. We have sought to identify the ways in which these interactions develop, paying particular attention to the images of the asylum seekers that the inhabitants construct for themselves. The involvement of institutional agents (local authorities, police, social welfare centres, directors of refugee centres, etc.) and associations (NGOs, sports clubs, cultural associations, etc.) has been included in the study has well. The second specificity of this study resides in the choice of the context and the method. Data have been collected in six different locations in Brussels and Wallonia, and this field work has been performed in a comparative perspective. Thus, we have chosen to compare the patterns of interaction between the locals and the asylum seekers by opposing places where facilities for asylum seekers have been set up (Fraipont, Brussels/Petit-Château, Rixensart) and neighbourhoods where no open centre exists (the Sainte-Marguerite quarter in Liège, the Bockstael quarter in Brussels, Ottignies). The aim of this comparative approach being to analyse the impact of the presence or absence of an open centre and its staff on the construction of representations about asylum and on the interaction patterns between the inhabitants and asylum seekers. In focusing on the interaction between residents and asylum seekers, both those hosted in refugee centres and those accommodated in private lodgings, this research seeks to reconstruct the processes shaping the local population’s representations of, and patters of interaction with, asylum seekers present in their actual environment, i.e. the neighbourhood where they live. Through recourse to an essentially qualitative surveying instrument, i.e. individual and collective exchanges, we have sought to highlight the different viewpoints, the patterns of argumentation, the events felt to be significant in changing one’s representation, and the practices of encounter or avoidance. Considering that numerous social relationships are established daily through the professionals actively engaged in the reception of asylum seekers, we have also talked to the employees paid by institutions and associations, as well as with volunteer workers and institutional authorities of the municipalities concerned. This has allowed us to take account of, on the one hand, the determining factor of the local context within which the interactions between inhabitants and asylum seekers develop, and on the other hand, to cover the spectrum of viewpoints (locals, inhabitants, shop-owners, police, asylum-seekers) on the relevant local and federal policies. The aim of the research is dual. On the one hand, it has sought to fill in a number of gaps in the research devoted to asylum seekers in Belgium, as today most of the scientific literature on this class of foreigners belongs to the legal domain. The social relationships between asylum seekers and the local population or instituitional agents have only rarely been approached from a scientific perspective. At best, the quality of these relationships has been dealt with in a few opinion polls limited in scope, appeared in the media coverage of opposition by local inhabitants to the installation of new facilities, or in news stories about life in open and closed refugee centres. Few research projects have ventured a systematic approach to the process through which the notion of “otherness” is constructed, and how it develops and evolves in the light of real or imagined relationships between asylum seekers and the local population. A study of interaction in relations of proximity or institutional