Understanding Urban Stocks

Abstract

If we refer to the concept of Urban Mining (UM), the city can be regarded as an accumulation of resources, arranged and assembled together to form various buildings, roads and networks. In practice, UM studies aim to analyse the dynamic nature of the evolution of cities, including their buildings. But the idea supported by the city as a reservoir of materials implies the fact that the layers and constituent elements of a building that are removed retain and carry a certain value, allowing them to be reused or reintroduced into a new cycle. Reuse practices involve local material resources, which are ‘abundant’ and already manufactured, and whose recovery requires human resources that cannot be relocated. Given the opportunities it represents in terms of circularity, the potential is therefore clearly underestimated and under-exploited. In this sense, UM studies could help identify new opportunities and support ambitious public policies to promote reuse, including the definition of reuse targets and the monitoring of efforts and achievements in this direction (and feed statistical data)