Urban mining. Scoping resources for circular construction

Abstract

Operating with an abundance mindset – rather than from a place of “scarcity” – is a new paradigm, relevant to the practices of design and construction, which expands the definition of “resources” as well as where resources, both raw and non-raw materials, can be found and “mined”.Within three scales of design and planning, the current research – developed at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) – examines the applications of computational technologies and life cycle assessment with the goal of setting up protocols for enhancing processes of urban mining and material reuse in future circular construction. In the material scale (i), selected projects experiment with up-cycled waste for the creation of new engineered composites for construction. In the building scale (ii), robotic technologies and computer vision are used to scan and sort the materials from existing buildings or demolition sites. Finally, in the urban scale (iii), google images, satellite data and ML are used to index the existing material stock in building façades in cities.The research calls for agents involved in design, planning and construction to shift their focus to the anthroposphere as a source of, rather than just a destination for, processed goods. The concept of “urban mining” is revisited to manage the material stock in urban systems and the use of anthropogenic resources in new production cycles.Through a multi-scalar approach, the outcome challenges the foundation of our material practices, presenting the potential to disrupt linear patterns of design and making in the built environment.

Synthetic Data Meets Architectural Typology: An Exploratory Computational Workflow with a Carbon Footprint Inference Case Study

“…A critical precedent for this research is the work of Areti Markopoulou and Oana Taut, who propose reading the city as a circular material resource, facilitated through machine vision and the creation of a database of existing building stock. 14 Building on this, the study segmets a generated database of approximately 150,000 images of residential buildings across 5,600 cities worldwide each with over 100,000 inhabitants to draw insights on material usage and their embodied carbon. The research involves several steps: first, compiling a list of appropriate cities and building typologies; second, generating a dataset of building images; third, segmenting each image into labeled object masks; fourth, aggregating segment features into data sheets; fifth, formulating compositional measures to visualize the data; and finally, conducting a case study to derive insights on environmental factors, such as carbon footprint, from prevalent features of a city's building types.…”

“…In the initial research phase, a list of cities was compiled from the open-source World Cities Database by Simplemaps, which sources data from authoritative agencies like NGIA, USGS, Census Bureau, and NASA. 14 The selection criteria included every city with a population over 100,000. The focus was on generating images of buildings that represented prevalent housing and residential structures in each location.…”

Heteromorph

“…Our proposal attempts to limit the use of complex technologies that are typically prohibitive in cost and accessibility. Instead, it relies on a participatory approach: using activities such as urban mining (Markopoulou and Taut 2023) where users of the system contribute not only to the erection of shelters but more importantly, upstream by collecting the materials.…”

“…It is critical that these construction by-products stop being considered as waste and instead be considered as a potential resource. Following a similar thinking framework presented in other research (Baerlecken, Reitz and Duncan, 2012;Fivet and Brütting, 2020;Markopoulou and Taut, 2023), our proposal attempts to invert the typical constructive sequence of designing first, without consideration of the available materials. Moreover, our solution attempts to carry on with the paradigm presented as "Form follows availability" (Brütting, Senatore, and Fivet 2019), where the availability of a material resource serves as a design input and directly impacts the form of an object.…”