An analysis of regional building stocks for material flow assessment

This study develops a GIS-based framework to create a high-resolution building inventory for Wallonia, Belgium, addressing a critical data gap for regional material flow assessment. Key methodological innovations include the use of LiDAR to estimate building volume, a jointness analysis to supplement missing building typologies, and a spatial matching technique to identify demolished structures, collectively addressing common data scarcity issues. The resulting inventory identified 1.43 million residential buildings. The detected
trend in demolition activity aligns with official statistics, validating the methodology’s ability to capture meaningful stock dynamics at a regional scale. This work demonstrates that a spatially explicit inventory is a foundational and transferable tool for quantifying material stocks and determining construction and demolition volume, providing a critical evidence base for regional circular economy strategies.