Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

Tag: construction speed

  • Skyscraper construction speed by city

    Brian Potter, of Construction Physics, recently tried to determine which cities build skyscrapers the fastest.

    Here’s how he went about that:

    • He started by looking up the 50 largest cities in the world on Wikipedia
    • He then pulled data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to get a list of every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was over 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area
    • The result was a list of 986 skyscrapers completed in 39 cities, most of which (~740) were completed in the US, China, Japan, and Canada
    • Finally, he calculated completed square feet per year and made some charts

    Here are the results:

    And here’s one thing he had to say about them:

    Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn’t the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s.

    For a lot more information on this topic, click here.