In this paper, I will address the theme of residential environment and health. The paper will try to demonstrate how residential environments through an analysis of inadequate housing, affects the inhabitants towards the inhabiting function. The overall aim of this submission is to describe how such housing in a deprived residential environment context negatively affects the inhabiting function and in this way creates social suffering. Living in decent conditions affords access to intimacy, privacy and hospitality, avoids outside threats and creates the conditions for a social subject to interact with the social world and his environment. The notion of “inhabiting” is to be considered as a relational process between oneself and the social body, between oneself and his environment. What happens then when dwellings and residential environment do not assure those functions? What happens when the residential environment being stigmatised depreciates the inhabitants? How do the inhabitants see and understand themselves? What are the expressions of social suffering? What kind of skills and tactics do the inhabitants develop to face up and deal with this environment? Using anthropological data and ethnographical research work undertaken in the urban area of Marseille (France), in rundown suburban condominions, private housing, inadapted homes, we will describe how energy deprivation, damp, lack of running water, overcrowding, malfunctioning lifts, insalubrity have consequences on everyday life and on mental health, and how residential environment is felt to be stigmatising and depreciating for the inhabitants and affects the relation process to themselves.
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