Outward and Upward Construction: A 3D Analysis of the Global Building Stock

The developing world has built structures on an unprecedented scale to accommodate population growth, demographic change, and urbanisation. The horizontal and vertical structuring of the building stock resulting from this "megatrend construction" strongly influences urban and rural poverty, sustainability, resilience, and quality of life. However, due to data constraints, little is known about how and why 3D building patterns vary globally, and in the developing world in particular. This study uncovers novel facts on global 3D building patterns as a result of outward and upward preferences in construction and investigates their relation to the development process. To this end, novel ground-breaking high-resolution data on the area, height, and volume of the global building stock is combined with a unique series of analyses undertaken at different spatial domains. The results show that building stocks per capita increase convexly with income, but that income only explains two-thirds of international volume differences. Additionally, while building upwards systematically drives international volume differences, low-rise buildings, not high-rise buildings, still dominate construction patterns. Also, megatrend construction is not just a phenomenon of megacities, as small settlements account for the largest share of global building volume. Finally, the presented analyses on construction preferences help assess construction needs by providing crowding measures and forecasting volume requirements in major developing economies.