MaterialCities: mapping building material stocks and floor area of the world’s 1.8 million settlements by structures and functions
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MaterialCities is a dataset of the gross floor area and the mass of eight construction materials of the world’s buildings in high resolution and detail. It differentiates floor area and material stocks by three building functions and five load-bearing structural types with region-specific construction archetypes using variant material intensity ranges that capture buildings materials’ inherent uncertainties and variabilities. The data is available in five spatial resolutions, from its native data-driven delineation of individual settlements, towns, and cities to two levels of subnational administrative boundaries, individual countries, and two levels of global regional aggregations. It is the first global-scale high-resolution dataset of its kind to provide floor-area derived material stock estimates for detailed building archetypes. The data are provided in the GeoPackage format for use in geographic information systems (GIS) and as comma-separated value (CSV) tables to be easily filtered and recombined for ease of use. MaterialCities has many use cases including comparative assessments of buildings’ service provisioning, material requirements, energy consumption, and environmental impacts, quantifying the urban mine of secondary materials or building stocks at risk from disasters, and as baselines for future development scenarios.
