Indicators and Data in Spain for an Overview of the General Characteristics of the National Building Stock

A country or a city is largely characterized by its architecture and urbanism. A robust understanding of the characteristics of the existing building stock provides a more solid basis for the development of European or national policies. In this chapter, we propose indicators to measure the general characteristics of the buildings at the national and regional levels, using as case studies Spain and two of its regions, Aragon and the Basque Country. Given there is no official definition of what the general characteristics of a building are, in this chapter we propose the general characteristics of a building whose knowledge can allow to lay the foundations for its improvement. We also studied the sources of information available in Spain and in the two mentioned regions for the development of these indicators and developed them when there were available data. Out of the fourteen proposed indicators, five could be fully developed, eight were partially developed, and one could not be developed due to lack of data.