SOUL: Sustainable Optimised Urban Living Urbanisation, climate change and demographical and psychographic changes have created enormous pressures on our complex and interdependent social, economic and technical urban infrastructure systems. The UK social housing sector is undergoing significant changes due to these and other issues such as housing shortage, changes to regulatory and welfare frameworks, the unreachability of affordable land, more demanding costumers, the difficulties with providing lifetime performance and financial pressures. SOUL (Sustainable Optimised Urban Living) takes a transformational approach to designing and delivering sustainable urban social housing by holistically integrating environmental, societal and economic solutions in a unique replicable development that is not only cost and carbon neutral but also citizen centric. Cost neutral means whole life cost, including the value of natural capital (health & wellbeing etc). Various attempts to address each of these challenges have been explored in other sustainable housing projects by consortia partners and others. One example is the Nottingham HOUSE (Home with Optimised Use of Solar Energy) an exemplar sustainable dwelling developed by the University of Nottingham (UoN) and Saint Gobain (SG). However, no existing solution could address all challenges together in a cost neutral manner. Consequently, SOUL’s purpose is the development of an innovative business model that enables the provision of integrated systems approach to urban living. The project builds on a strong partnership of academia and UK based companies with international reputations. It takes the learnings of the successful Nottingham HOUSE and replicates this at scale on a difficult site, adhering to the cost and design requirements of social housing providers Nottingham City Homes (NCH) to deliver a one of a kind low carbon homes development in one of the most disadvantaged communities in Nottingham. SOUL further integrates social and environmental systems through the provision of allotments and community food growing /sales models that enable residents to grow produce at low cost whilst encouraging healthy eating and lifestyle change. Throughout the build, there is commitment to train local residents in the offsite construction techniques that will be used to build the homes and in crop growth in order to upskill the local area. NCH has considerable expertise in resident involvement; however this project goes beyond the day-to-day, and this is where additional experience is required in order to realise success. In the short term, SOUL enables end customer NCH to develop a difficult urban site in a way that is beneficial to residents and flexible to evolving urban pressures. In the long term this will lead to the development of an at scale business model for housing developers, SMEs and social enterprises to work with social housing providers across different authorities and geographies to deliver integrated solutions in a commercially attractive manner.