The UK was already facing a housing challenge before COVID19: a significant shortage of affordable homes, a North/South divide, SMEs in decline and an outdated, carbon-intensive construction industry. The pandemic has brutally amplified those issues: escalating housing need, unemployment, and the collapse of many construction SMEs. Yet we can see how all these challenges might share a common response: using the construction of circular, zero-carbon, affordable homes to reboot local economies, kickstarting a green recovery. One opportunity being recognised by many local authorities and housing associations is that of bringing forward thousands of small sites (5--15 homes) already in public ownership to develop affordable tenure homes. It is a perfect strategy, since it helps alleviate social housing needs, reduces public costs, channels £ms into local economies, and in the end, taxpayers end up with an asset. But there is a problem. Our legacy construction methods are simply not fit for the task: they are slow, wasteful, skill-intensive, carbon-intensive and require each scheme to be mostly designed from scratch. The old construction industry simply doesn't have the capacity to deliver such programmes. Recent innovation and investment in manufactured homes has focused on volumetric solutions produced by large, centralised factories, which exclude the 'long tail' market of small developments being delivered by SMEs. The WikiHouse system exemplifies a parallel approach, which could be termed 'Design for Distributed Manufacture and Assembly'. It is a circular, zero-carbon manufactured building system, but unlike other modular approaches which require a large factory (with setup costs of typically £15m--£50m) it can be manufactured by a distributed network of small, local microfactories using digital fabrication tools, which can be set up for as little as £50k. Indeed, many already exist. The modular building components can then be rapidly assembled on-site to millimetre precision, even by small teams with no traditional construction skills. The WikiHouse technology has been developed by Open Systems Lab and partners over several years, and has been used in pilot projects across the UK, Europe and beyond. There is now a growing number of Local Authorities, Housing Associations, community organisations and developers (some of whom are partners and steering members in this project proposal) seeking to use it as part of 'Local Homes' small sites programmes. However, there is still an R&D gap to develop, optimise, test and document the system and replicable house types in such a way as to make it ready to roll out at scale. At present, this R&D burden is falling across lead clients. Our proposed project would allow OSL to work with world leading timber structural engineering researchers at University of Edinburgh and energy performance experts at Leeds Beckett University to accelerate R&D by months, or even years. The result would lead to the creation of homes and local construction jobs in the Midlands and North, and to set the UK on a path to lead the world in digital, green construction for the SME construction sector.