A digital map of precast concrete systems: background report

The ReCreate project researches the possibilities for deconstructing and reusing precast concrete elements from end-of-life buildings not originally designed for disassembly. The current report describes the study and mapping of existing precast concrete systems of 11 EU-countries with an emphasis on contributing historical and technical knowledge for the reuse of concrete elements. The document is a background report underlying an aggregated European digital map of existing precast concrete systems, which can be accessed here: 

The ReCreate digital map of precast concrete systems

The study has targeted both residential and non-residential precast concrete elements (PCEs), mainly from the post-war period of 1945-1989, through extensive archival research. The information was first organised into country dossiers and then transformed into a map. The aggregated map has been compiled from the data from each country dossier and corresponding maps. It aims to locate both production (factories) and construction (primarily residential mass housing areas) locations of PCEs. The report builds upon the diagrams of the most common PCE, their corresponding building typologies (Hernández Vargas & Stenberg, 2024), and the taxonomy of PCE (Hernández Vargas et al., 2025) as studied in other parts of ReCreate. The work will feed into an element database and support other technical work conducted in ReCreate (Dervishaj & Gudmundsson, 2025; Vullings et al., 2022, 2024).

The archival research has included gathering and analysing vast amounts of primary sources such as drawings, product catalogues, and factory descriptions as well as secondary sources such as articles (scientific, professional, and popular), handbooks, and reports. There is, in general, more research and data available on residential typologies and therefore PCEs of housing systems. The material gathered for this report initiates and adds the research of PCEs of non-residential typologies to the material on housing systems. The country dossiers provide many examples of general and specific details at the system, component, and connector scales, connecting, e.g. to design-related tasks in re-use by providing both a historical narrative and a set of examples or cases to draw experience from.

The map presents the findings country by country. This report also explains how this research can contribute to new tools and methods for estimating the climate impact and environmental savings of PCEs reuse.

The report is organised as follows: Chapter 2 discusses the methodology for data gathering and describes the map and legend. Chapter 3 summarizes the results. Chapter 4 presents a digital tool for the estimation of the precast building stock that was developed during the mapping tasks. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 include references and appendices supporting the research.