Urban buildings material intensity in China from 1949 to 2015

•A material intensity database for china urban building with 813 samples is established.•The impacts of the building structure, function application and construction period on the material intensity is analysed.•The database is compared with the previous studies on the building material intensity. The building material intensity(MI) is one of the most common used and important indicators in buildings metabolism analysis including building material stock analysis, virgin materials extraction demand and construction & demolition (C&D) waste forecasting, as well as its recycling potential. However, in China developing with rapid urbanization and large-scale city construction, a complete building MI database is not documented well although some studies have intended to figure it out. The existing research mainly focused on the building MI for specific cities or construction material. In this study, we complied 813 buildings with different construction periods from 1949 to 2015, structures, functional applications, and their associated background information from 30 Chinese provinces by an extensive survey as the basic MI database for urban buildings. Based on this, material intensity of Chinese urban buildings for 10 kinds of construction materials and 14 categories of buildings is averaged, and its difference between categories was further described. The results indicate that the building MI exhibits specific trends related to the structural, function application, and building construction period. After comparing the MI database to the previous studies, the database established in this research is considered to have an improvement in terms of the building construction period, geographic distribution, application, structure and material categories. It is not only spanning all different combinations, but also acceptable and credible through comparison.