The construction sector plays a central role in global resource depletion and waste generation, with construction and demolition activities accounting for more than one-third of total waste produced in the European Union. Despite growing interest in circular construction, one of the major barriers to large-scale material reuse is the lack of reliable information on the type, quantity, location, and availability of secondary materials during the early stages of a project. The research addresses this gap between architectural design and planning decision-making by providing a replicable workflow for urban scale circular economy strategies. This study presents the application of a spatially explicit bottom-up Material Stock Analysis (MSA) to quantify and map the embedded materials within an urban district of Milan. The adopted methodology combines municipal GIS datasets, historical cartography, building archetype classification, and literature-derived material intensity coefficients. The result is the estimation of stock amounts disaggregated by material type and the creation of a secondary material cadaster, that allows us to visualize their distributions and generate material-specific spatial analyses and heat maps. Applied to the Porta Vittoria district in Milan, the workflow reveals that masonry accounts for over 66% of the total embedded mass, underscoring the need to factor the reuse of masonry and brick materials into the early design phases, from material selection to architectural concept. Ultimately, the study equips architects, urban planners, and policymakers with decision-support information to steer design and governance toward circular future cities.
Versaci et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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