Replication Data for: Mapping urban building material stocks to understand potentials for circular construction: A case study in Germany’s Ruhr area

The building sector is responsible for the accumulation of the largest material inventories in industrialised societies. Buildings embody temporal and spatial lock-ins concerning emissions, while representing a reservoir of secondary materials. Spatial material stock analysis is an instrument for comprehending the composition of building stocks and building material distribution to facilitate transition towards sustainable cities. Several studies have presented methods for quantifying material stocks in Germany. Building on these this study applies a bottom-up approach to analyse the building and material stock by integrating spatial data with information on 35 different building typologies and age-cohorts for residential building focussing on the Ruhr area in Germany. Building foundation area and material intensity coefficients were applied to estimate the building material stock. The methodology follows a computational approach using ArcGIS Pro and Python. This data publication contains the original data, derived input data, source code and result data on which the related publication is based on. The generated spatial high-resolution datasets, which is also provided in this replication data, provides a detailed basis that inform end-of-life material recovery strategies in the context of circular construction by establishing a link between primary material resources and projected flows of secondary resources.

All data was obtained or generated in 2024.