Building-based infrastructure, encompassing social, economic, and environmental components, forms the cornerstone of sustainable cities and communities. However, the current targets and indicators of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) focus on individual infrastructure types, leaving a knowledge gap regarding the interlinkage between the diversity of infrastructure types and SDG 11. Here, we integrate crowdsourced data from OpenStreetMap and machine learning via AutoGluon to measure building-based infrastructure diversity across scales, from community grids (1-km grid) to city levels, and assess inequality across 482 global cities (2017–2025). Our result reveals that the advantage of diversity in the Global North relative to the Global South is more pronounced at the community scale (31.07% higher) than at the city scale (17.91% higher) through 2025. Temporally, while global diversity rises, inequality decreases by 1.15% in the Global North but increases by 14.96% in the Global South. This divergence is associated with a scale-dependent decoupling, in which the Global South prioritizes aggregate infrastructure growth over equitable distribution. Our findings underscore the importance of balanced development in urban policies and regional planning across continents, highlighting the pivotal role of infrastructure diversity as a bridge connecting various SDGs to basic urban services.
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.