From materials to cities: understanding cross-scale challenges affecting urban material flows

Salles, Adriana, Marchesi, Marianna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7954-1808, Buzatu, Raluca and Bragança, Luís 2026. From materials to cities: understanding cross-scale challenges affecting urban material flows. Presented at: ReSBE 2026 - ReShaping the Built Environment through Sustainability and Circularity, Thessaloniki, Greece, 20-23 October 2026. Published in: Bragança, Luís, Tsikaloudaki, Katerina, Giarma, Christina, Mateus, Ricardo, Kontoleon, Karolos, Askar, Rand, Salles, Adriana and Cervantes, Camila eds. ReShaping the Built Environment through Sustainability and Circularity. ReSBE 2026. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering , vol.1 (905) 2026: Springer, Cham, pp. 1432-1439. 10.1007/978-3-032-34930-9_167

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Abstract

By promoting a regenerative approach, the Circular Economy has been seen as a pathway to sustainable urban development. As a key component of urban circularity, urban metabolism examines the flows and stocks of resources within cities, including materials and energy. Increasingly, cities are applying this approach within a circular framework to identify opportunities to reduce resource dependence, improve efficiency, and guide more sustainable urban development. However, analyzing materials flows at the city level poses numerous challenges, including technical ones. Among the different categories of technical challenges, the lack of information/data is a relevant one. Understanding the correlations between this challenge at the urban level and challenges at the material and building scales is essential for identifying effective solutions to overcome them. This study investigates how technical challenges, at the material and building levels, influence the analysis of material flows, particularly in terms of information and data, in urban systems. Furthermore, it explores how digital technologies, namely BIM and GIS, can be enablers and drivers to overcome these challenges. To this end, a desk research approach is employed to detect and map correlations between cross-level technical challenges in the built environment and to identify how digital technologies have been used to overcome the challenges. Finally, based on findings, a conceptual framework is proposed that identifies the use of BIM and GIS at the material and building levels to overcome technical challenges and how these results can be applied to material flow analysis at the urban level.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item - published (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Architecture
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) T Technology > TH Building construction
Publisher:	Springer, Cham
ISBN:	978-3-032-34929-3
ISSN:	2366-2557
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 October 2026
Last Modified:	20 Oct 2026 09:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/190262

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