High-Resolution Mapping of the Urban Built Environment Stocks in Beijing
- 10 April 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Environmental Science & Technology
- Vol. 54 (9), 5345-5355
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.9b07229
Abstract
Improving our comprehension of the weight and spatial distribution of urban built environment stocks is essential for informing urban resource, waste, and environmental management, but this is often hampered by inaccuracy and inconsistency of the typology and material composition data of buildings and infrastructure. Here, we have integrated big data mining and analytics techniques and compiled a local material composition database to address these gaps, for a detailed characterization of the quantity, quality, and spatial distribution (in 500 m X 500 m grids) of the urban built environment stocks in Beijing in 2018. We found that 3621 megatons (140 ton/cap) of construction materials were accumulated in Beijing's buildings and infrastructure, equaling to 1141 Mt of embodied greenhouse gas emissions. Buildings contribute the most (63% of total, roughly half in residential and half in nonresidential) to the total stock and the subsurface stocks account for almost half. Spatially, the belts between 3 and 7 km from city center (approximately 5 t/m(2)) and commercial grids (approximately 8 t/m(2)) became the densest. Correlation analyses between material stocks and socioeconomic factors at a high resolution reveal an inverse relationship between building and road stock densities and suggest that Beijing is sacrificing skylines for space in urban expansion. Our results demonstrate that harnessing emerging big data and analytics (e.g., point of interest data and web crawling) could help realize more spatially refined characterization of built environment stocks and highlight the role of such information and urban planning in urban resource, waste, and environmental strategies.Funding Information
- Det Frie Forskningsr?d (6111-00555B)
- China Scholarship Council (201708440214)
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (41728002, 41771425, 71991484)
This publication has 62 references indexed in Scilit:
- A BIM-based system for demolition and renovation waste estimation and planningWaste Management, 2013
- Toward a Low Carbon–Dematerialization SocietyJournal of Industrial Ecology, 2012
- Urban mining: hibernating copper stocks in local power gridsJournal of Cleaner Production, 2011
- Dynamics of urban and rural housing stocks in ChinaBuilding Research & Information, 2010
- Urban stock over time: spatial material stock analysis using 4d-GISBuilding Research & Information, 2009
- Life cycle of buildings, demolition and recycling potential: A case study in Turin, ItalyJournal of Affective Disorders, 2009
- Urban infrastructure: challenges for resource efficiency in the building stockBuilding Research & Information, 2007
- Dynamic material flow analysis for Norway's dwelling stockBuilding Research & Information, 2007
- Resource Consumption of New Urban Construction in ChinaJournal of Industrial Ecology, 2007
- The ecoinvent Database: Overview and Methodological Framework (7 pp)The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 2004