Lack of standardized sustainable habitat design guidelines for low-income housing plays an important role in determining the poor quality of life in these settlements, particularly in the slums. My work investigates process-driven pathways for developing and delivering sustainable habitat design guidelines using socio-technical frameworks. I employ mixed-mode research methods to understand low-income habitat from the perspective of people, places and practices. I combine urban experimentation with robust simulation techniques to derive practical solutions for improving the quality of life (QoL) of the urban poor. Urban experimentation includes data acquisition through in-situ environmental sensing of the low-income habitations, modelling of the houses, calibration of the sensed data, and its urban scale building energy calculations using state-of-the-art building energy simulation techniques. I integrate the socio-cultural stochastics in the building simulation framework to derive empirical evidence of the urban QoL in these settlements. There are three cohorts of my research: 1) Investigation of building performance; 2) Spatial analytics for urban sustainability and policy analysis; 3) Data-driven simulation and modelling techniques for derivation of low-income sustainability heuristics.