However, developing this
detailed understanding requires integrating a wide range of data about each building, including
its use, construction and geometry. Previous attempts to understand the Indian building stock
have focused on archetype-based approaches, which explore the stock through typical
buildings. However, these approaches can only provide crude estimates, particularly when the
definition of a typical building is based on assumptions and estimates rather than actual data.
A wide range of data sets exists for Indian cities, including municipal property tax data, which
in the case of Ahmedabad, contains building use, age, taxable floor areas and some details on
construction. Integrating this data with the geometrical data for individual buildings would
allow each building in the stock to be characterized, data-driven archetypes or typical buildings
to be extracted and detailed estimates of building stock performance to be developed.