The present report is the Norwegian contribution to the comparative project about urban living ’Loges et gardiens’, based in Paris. The point of departure is the functions of the French concierge (now often called gardien). The report is divided into three parts. The first part is a general discussion of the changing relationship between people and space in urban Norwegian neighborhoods. The general tendency in the Western world is that local moral communities of significant others are not lost within modernization and globalization; rather, they assume more voluntaristic forms, sometimes with a wider territorial basis than the small neighborhood had, and with less time-depth for the creation of common norms and mutual knowledge. I regard the neighborhood as a moral community functioning as a buffer between the household on the one hand, and the state and the market on the other, and I argue that this role is changing in the present stage of modernity. Citizens increasingly rely on technological solutions, state agencies, and the market to conduct some of the surveillance, the practical tasks, and the care work they no longer have the means and, most crucially, the time to undertake. The line between public and private life is a diffuse, historically and situationally changing, and constantly renegotiated moral boundary. The parameters within which these negotiations occur have changed dramatically over the past three decades. Part of this development is due to the changing relations between women and men. Since the 1970s, women and children have left the neighborhood during the day. At the same time, the division of both paid and unpaid work is still largely gender divided. In the second part of the article, I change perspective, in order to present empirical material about the vaktmester – an institutionalized work role in Norway that is not identical to the concierge/gardien in France, but that can fruitfully be brought into the comparison of tasks and teams. The vaktmester’s work role is presented from the point of view of the vaktmesters themselves. As noted, the vaktmester’s job is focused on technical maintenance and repairs. Over the years there has been a change in this work role in the direction of greater professionalization, which results in regulated work hours, specified task descriptions, and less personal relationships with the residents. Thus the vaktmester has changed from a kind of servant to a provider of specified services. In the third and last part of the article I again change perspective and level of analysis in order to focus on how the whole range of tasks connected to the space between the apartments and the street is organized in one building in an upper-middle-class area. The organization of tasks is now seen from the point of view of the residents.