this was will mihkelson’s phd project of which i was one of the supervisors. the primary supervisor of the project was danielle densley tingley and was funded through a epsrc studentship. will’s work focused on a systematic understanding of the material requirements to improve human living standards.
the growth of cities simultaneously increases demand for construction material and results in strong inequalities of development. there may be tensions in achieving global sustainable development goals within our urban areas, exacerbated by the rate of urbanization particularly in developing nations. additions to housing and transport infrastructure in these nations will contribute to the already significant share of global anthropogenic carbon emissions attributed to the use of construction material. an important step in understanding such pathways is to quantify the relationship between development levels and the resource consumption required for housing. the project so far has tried to address this by combining methods to understand the size and distribution of housing material stocks and the scale and heterogeneity of development across geographical scales using india as a case study to test the approach and provide insights for other developing nation.
References
papers
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Built Environment Stocks in the Context of a Master Planned City: A Case Study of Chandigarh, India
Journal of Industrial Ecology, Jul 2023
Construction materials accumulate in the built environment forming material stocks of buildings and infrastructure, providing various services to society that result in a nexus of human development and environmental impact. Meanwhile, unprecedented urbanization in the Global South is set to put significant demand on the resources required to ensure adequate standards of living in new and existing urban areas. This is particularly important within India, however no study has yet explored material stocks within cities in India or within master planned urban areas designed to accommodate urbanization and a high standard of living. The present study begins to fill these gaps and aims to investigate patterns of built environment material stock accumulation in Chandigarh, an exceptionally quickly developed city master planned to ensure universally high standards of living through a unique urban form. We adopt a bottom-up approach to quantify the residential building and road material stocks at the city and sub-city scale. The results reveal that the master plan, while enabling high standards of living, has resulted in a relative accumulation of road to building stock that is significantly larger than in other cities. This is shown to be environmentally detrimental as future urban development is limited and promotes demolition of existing stocks, whose composition severely limits their potential as secondary resources. The study therefore provides empirical evidence to support the integration of material stock assessments into urban planning and development to ensure resource efficient provisioning of key services.