Briefing: Plexus: Priming Laboratory Experiments on Infrastructure and Urban Systems

The UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) is, with a capital investment of £138 million from the UK government and matched funding from its 15 collaborating partner universities, creating world-class city observatory and modelling and simulation and physical laboratory facilities. This briefing aims to introduce UKCRIC’s formulation, capabilities and core thinking, before describing a programme of work that has linked the 11 laboratory facilities. Priming Laboratory Experiments on Infrastructure and Urban Systems (Plexus) has focused on three important technical challenges – intense physical interdependency of urban infrastructure systems, harvesting energy from buried infrastructure systems and accelerated deterioration of infrastructure materials due to extreme loading – as well as a study of how the large, multidisciplinary research team progressed towards transdisciplinary working. The background context of UKCRIC, its approach to collaborative research and how this has shaped the Plexus research programme provides the starting point to this narrative. Thereafter the underpinning thinking and justification for the four strands of Plexus’s research are described. Finally, the briefing draws these strands together into a proposition for the research, development and implementation of a new generation of transport bridges building on the research reported in this special issue.