The amount of building floor space (BFS) plays a key role in the energy and material demand prediction. Unfortunately, BFS estimation has faced the challenge of ineffective and inadequate approaches, and thus reliable data concerning China's BFS is unavailable. This study proposes a new estimation method for China's BFS and then estimates historical BFS by type in China from 1996 to 2014. The results show that total Chinese BFS grew from 28.1 billion m2 in 1996 to 61.3 billion m2 in 2014, increasing more than twice, with an annual growth rate of 4.4% from 1996 to 2014. During 1996-2014, urban residential BFS witnessed the highest annual increase rate (9.3%), while the growth rate for commercial and rural residential BFS was lower: 4.4% and 1.6%, respectively. By comparing with available statistics data, this study finds the model deviations are well below 5%, which indicates the reliability of the proposed method and robustness of the results. The proposed method not only can address the deficiencies of statistic yearbook and overcome the shortages of previous estimation approaches but also can derive more accurate and reliable data. This study lays a sound basis for the following study on building stock and building energy efficiency work.
Keywords: China; building stock; commercial building; energy consumption in the building sector; residential building.