Taking Stock of Built Environment Stock Studies: Progress and Prospects

Abstract

Built environment stocks (buildings and infrastructures) play multiple roles in our socio-economic metabolism: they serve as the backbone of modern societies and human well-being, drive the material cycles throughout the economy, entail temporal and spatial lock-ins on energy use and emissions, and represent an extensive reservoir of secondary materials. This review aims at providing a comprehensive and critical review of the state of the art, progress, and prospects of built environment stocks research which has boomed in the past decades. We include 249 publications published from 1985 to 2018, conducted a bibliometric analysis, and assessed the studies by key characteristics including typology of stocks (status of stock and end-use category), type of measurement (object and unit), spatial boundary and level of resolution, and temporal scope. We also highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of different estimation approaches. A comparability analysis of existing studies shows a clearly higher level of stocks per capita and per area in developed countries and cities, confirming the role of urbanization and industrialization in built environment stock growth. However, more spatially refined case studies (e.g., on developing cities and non-residential buildings) and standardization and improvement of methodology (e.g., with geographic information system and architectural knowledge) and data (e.g., on material intensity and lifetime) would be urgently needed to reveal more robust conclusions on the patterns, drivers, and implications of built environment stocks. Such advanced knowledge on built environment stocks could foster societal and policy agendas such as urban sustainability, circular economy, climate change, and United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Urban development and sustainability challenges chronicled by a century of construction material flows and stocks in Tiexi, China

“…Construction materials, including steel, cement, aggregate, and timber, are second only to water as the largest material flows into urban areas by mass (Krausmann et al., 2017). The mining, production, and use of virgin construction materials are considerable forces of global environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions (Hertwich, 2019), altering landscapes and geographical features, land use change, and generation of massive tailings, overburdens, and toxic byproducts (Augiseau & Barles, 2017; Lanau et al., 2019; Moriguchi & Hashimoto, 2016). China is currently the single most influential driver of the global growth in demand for construction materials (Marinova, Deetman, van der Voet, & Daioglou, 2020).…”

Material stock development of the transport sector in the city of Vienna

“…All in all, existing material studies on transport infrastructure either focused on only one transport mode (e.g., roads), or were solely dedicated to material stocks and stock dynamics of the infrastructure, thereby neglecting the generation of CDW, which is crucial from a circular economy perspective (Augiseau & Barles, 2017; Lanau et al., 2019). Although numerous studies describing the anthropogenic metabolism of Vienna are available, making it one of the most well‐investigated urban areas in this respective field, they either focus on buildings (Kleemann, Lederer, Rechberger, & Fellner, 2017; Lederer et al., 2020), following a top‐down approach (Obernosterer et al., 1998), or investigate a subsystem of the transport modes, such as the subway infrastructure (Lederer, Kleemann, Ossberger, Rechberger, & Fellner, 2016).…”

Resource‐saving in buildings through material substitution: A preliminary study of structural dependencies

“…So-called bottom-up approaches give a detailed picture of the material composition of the building stock broken down into building types, reflecting the specific use and form of construction. [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] The basic principle of MFA is to define indicators that describe characteristic material compositions of typical buildings as well as indicators to estimate the physical size of the building stock in relation to a certain reference quantity (practical measures of building size such as m 2 floor space): for example, see References 19 and 27. In the literature, such indicators are termed either material intensity (MI) or material composition indicators (MCI), for example, see Reference 28 They are a kind of density parameter, defined as material mass per reference value.…”