Maybe you need to get out more? In France new public buildings are mandated to be at least 50% wood or other bio-based renewables. Also ~5% (and increasing) of new domestic builds are timber framed.
(Concrete isn't, but plain old stone? Or bricks?)
Yes, of course, stone doesn’t really grow back on the timescales that we care about. Yes, stone not “bio” in any sense really.
But the goal of the law is not to make biology or geology points. It is to reduce the embodied carbon of new construction. I guess the determination was made that stone has some carbon cost… maybe it comes from the mining?
Or maybe they are trying to kickstart, specifically, a new industry in the field of growable construction material. Maybe they figure stone mining is already well developed tech anyway.
Lots of house in France are made of that. Not “rocks” and that is a co2 intensive process to produce concrete.
See : Lafarge
Likewise, there's nothing renewable about stone. Our primary source is digging it out of the ground.
That isn't renewable in the timeframe of humanity, but in the age of the universe it's renewable.
You can recycle them. And raw stones are not a rare thing and they do get formed new constantly inside the earth.
I wouldn't call that marginal. And vulcanoes are just the visible part of that process happening everywhere in the crust.
Some rate of formation is not enough to satisfy the commonly held definition of renewable resources. Google "is stone a renewable resource" for a jumping off point.
Sure, it doesn't fit the definition, but there is also no reason to care that it doesn't.
We have concrete buildings going back to Greek and Roman times, mostly standing.
Wooden buildings have a very finite lifespan, and, aside from earthquakes, much less so in a disaster. A wooden city and a steel/brick/concrete city react very differently to firebombing.
Especially with declining populations, it makes sense to build structures to last. The old school brick/concrete/stone/... European buildings from 1500 are largely in good shape, at least where they weren't demolished by war.
Traditional European construction is also much more friendly for heating / cooling. The thermal capacity of stone-based materials helps a lot.
To me, it feels a bit like Germany banning nuclear power plants, and switching to Russian fossil fuels instead...
That is woke bs and you know it. If it ain't 100% roman concrete, it ain't right.
It will be relatively similar to most other major European cities; solid masonry construction has historically been the norm.
You'll find some wooden houses in smaller towns and rural areas, but even there, if you head over to e.g. Poland, most things will be solid masonry. And the wooden construction is mostly relatively new; what you'll rarely find is old wooden construction.
In Sweden, around 80% of standing homes are wooden. 90% of new single-family homes use wood. Gothenburg is the exception, not the rule, thanks to 19th-century zoning laws that limited wooden buildings to two storeys.
The Netherlands is Western Europe, not Northern or Central - basic geography.
Wood dominates residential construction in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Denmark is about 50/50. Poland uses more masonry today but has a strong wooden tradition in the south.
You're making sweeping claims about places you clearly haven't spent any real time in. Maybe do some proper research before pretending to be an expert.
What is "very finite" here? Where I grew up there are wood houses/barns/structures made entirely out of wood and still standing/being used after hundreds of years. Is that not enough?
So the 5% French figures in 2025 confirm my impression. Most stuff are not made of wood in France.
Maybe it’s a language thing : when I say « made of wood » I mean that no stone are involved. There is no percentage. The whole frame is 2 by 4 from Home Depot.
The facade of a house or structure is usually tied into the framing so it doesn't fall over. Hence, brick ties are used to secure it to the wood or steel framing.