Increasing pressure
In Amsterdam, many bridges and tens of kilometers of quay walls are in poor condition. This problem extends beyond Amsterdam though: other municipalities also need help with the increasing pressure on their infrastructure, which is sometimes hundreds of years old and not designed for the amount and weight of today's traffic and transport. Due to this growing number of vehicles and people, it is increasingly important to ensure that the bridges and quay walls remain safe and reliable. Moreover, this provides an immediate opportunity to respond to transitions in climate adaptation, circularity, energy, and transport.
Innovative solutions
The program ‘Urban Bridge and Quay Wall Innovations’, abbreviated to Urbiquay, focuses on sustainable, innovative solutions relevant to the maintenance, repair and renewal of this civil infrastructure. The program aims to contribute to and deliver concrete knowledge for the existing ‘Bridges and Quay Walls’ program of the Municipality of Amsterdam, while at the same time contributing to the transferability of that knowledge to other contexts: other locations, circumstances, problems, or other municipalities.
Knowledge transfer
Researchers collaborate from the very beginning with the involved municipalities – besides Amsterdam, also Zwolle and The Hague – and with companies and other stakeholders in the city. They initially focus on the urgent tasks: securing, repairing, and renewing bridges and quay walls. However, the ambition is to arrive at sustainable, future-proof solutions and a shared public-private responsibility. All this against the backdrop of a livable city.
Four research projects
Urbiquay consists of four research projects: LiveQuay, STABILITY, Logiquay, and UBQ4. LiveQuay provides an integrated assessment of the safety and performance of bridges and quay walls in an interactive decision-support platform. Stability researches the required methods to maintain historic structures while reducing construction waste and emissions, preserving the cultural heritage of cities, and keeping cities accessible, attractive, and liveable. Logiquay aims to develop closed-loop logistics methods and control solutions to accelerate the speed of renovations, increase control, and improve sustainability and circularity. The fourth project, UBQ4, was granted in 2023 and works on a framework for public values, scaling aspects, and the synthesis of overlapping topics.