Research has identified cities as potential urban mines for recovering secondary construction materials. Studies typically focus on stocks or flows of bulk materials on high abstraction levels. To enable a shift of focus toward higher levels of circular economy, such as waste minimization, there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the dynamics that contribute to the waste flows, building replacement in particular. This paper examines the characteristics and location of the stocks and flows of buildings, both residential and non-residential, in the city of Tampere, Finland, over the last 20 years. Statistical and geographical analyses are performed on the building stock, new construction, and demolition in Tampere to unveil patterns pertaining to stock change and building replacement. The study shows that these patterns vary significantly between buildings of different function. Spatially confined redevelopment areas within the city structure, that is, brownfields and grayfields, whose industrial and commercial functions yield to housing and mixed residential-commercial use, make up major arenas for replacement. Policy-making should acknowledge that urban planning stirs these waste flows and incorporate their conscious prevention and management on its agenda. K E Y W O R D Sbuildings, cities, industrial ecology, material flow analysis (MFA), urban metabolism, urban planning INTRODUCTIONSocieties are growing more interested in the circularity of production and consumption for sustainability reasons. Construction is one of the sectors to consume the most virgin raw materials (Bourguignon & Orenius, 2018) and to produce the most waste (European Commission, 2019). Consequently, building stocks are attracting attention as potential deposits for secondary resources, typically understood as secondary raw materials.Extraction from these "urban mines" is considered to be more environmentally friendly than the extraction of virgin resources.Most of the urban mining research focuses on bulk materials (Lanau et al., 2019), but the secondary resources embedded in building stocks can in fact take up many forms and scales. Huuhka and Vestergaard (2019) have conceptualized them against the hierarchy of circular economy (CE), echoing the EU waste hierarchy (European Union, 2008). As these hierarchies prioritize life-cycle extension and waste prevention, the first andThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Anthropogenic stocks are increasingly seen as potential reserves for secondary resources, which has led to a rapid development in research of urban metabolic systems. With regard to buildings and their associated material stocks and flows, one of the most critical shortcomings in the state-of-the-art is the knowledge gap for drivers, dynamics, patterns and linkages that affect the urban metabolism. This paper is premised on the idea that urban planning stirs up these material flows, so it should also adopt their sustainable management on its agenda. It presents an approach that highlights the intertwined nature of changing urban morphology and building material stocks and flows in space and time. An analytical framework, based on the principles of material flow analysis, is provided for an integrated, spatiotemporal study of urban morphology and urban metabolism of buildings, using building and plot data as the input and identifying internal processes of the urban metabolism as the output. The identified processes include greenfield development, infill construction, building replacement and shrinkage, each of which can be expected to have tangible yet very different material and environmental consequences in the form of embodied materials and CO2. The use of the framework is demonstrated with a case study in the Finnish city of Vantaa in 2000–2018. The case study shows patterns pertaining to a growing city unrestricted by geographic or historic factors, manifested as vast greenfield developments and replacement of a notably young building stock. As sustainability may soon call into question both these strategies, uncovering the material consequences of a city’s past urban (re)development strategies lay the foundation for using the presented approach proactively in planning support, in pursuit of more circular economy-based and low carbon cities.
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