For British researchers, this term of residuation is used to unite two concomitant phenomena in the field of housing:
- The decline of the public rental sector (the privatization of the social housing sector);
- The impoverishment of the socio-economic profile of tenants residing in social housing.
This term therefore suggests that we analyse these two phenomena in an integrated way, considering the links that unite them, and even the possible solutions to these two phenomena.
This term comes from the basis of mathematics, algebra in particular. It means a mechanism for the logical integration of functions (Michaël Hanus of the Max Planck Institute of informatics). In other words, the objective is to make it possible to unify reasoning concerning a priori very diverse variables.