These nine house façades from Google Street View were categorised using AI. | Photo: D. Raghu et al. (2026)

Material from demolished buildings ends up in landfills, even though a lot could be reused –such as cladding or bricks. “But there’s a lack of data on material availability”, says Deepika Raghu of ETH Zurich. Using Google Street View photos, she has been employing AI to map façades in cities like Zurich in order to determine their materials. She was able to do this with nearly 90 percent accuracy, as a subsequent human review confirmed. Her method also provides insights into possibilities for façade greening.

D. Raghu et al.: Urban-scale facade material mapping from street view images using vision–language models for circular construction planning. Scientific Reports (2026)

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