PROTOCOLS TO MONITOR THE PROCESSES OF DEGRADATION AT URBAN SCALE. THE VIA CARACCIOLO NEIGHBORHOOD, NAPLES.

An enlarged notion of context informs the Unesco Recommendation on Historic Urban Landscape (2011), introducing procedures for preserving the quality of urban environments. Anticipating the rise and degenerate of the degradation processes is a research field strictly involved with the Unesco approach. Monitoring the changes occurring to built spaces, can support the mitigation of those transformation processes induced by environmental pressures on specific elements[1]. An integrated vision of urban heritage, historic layering of cultural and natural values and attributes, connotes the commitment of the Laboratory LRRM established within the Architecture Department of the University Federico II, in Naples [2]. Since 2002, the Lab has been working on methods and procedures for controlling multi scale and multi temporal processes investing environments. Façade plaster detachment has been for a long time, a field of research at the LRRM, linking the issues of monitoring to those of predictive maintenance. The infrared remote sensing, long used in order to evaluate buildings’ performances is here, adopted, to bind information about the degenerative phenomena with the constructive, morphological and dimensional characters, under a contextual perspective [3]. In order to define alert thresholds for technical elements, the LRRM launches in 2002 a campaign of in situ thermography. According to the already achieved research results, several neighborhoods are selected as case studies [4]. Among them, special interest has the output of the campaigns on the nineteenth-century waterfront of Via Caracciolo (completed in 1869-80, filling the beach and constructing new buildings). Taking into account the physical and historical contiguity between buildings, their exposure to the sea and winds impact, the Lab comes to a plan of non invasive controls for façades plaster detachment, mediating between the costs of relief and the risk of degradation. A recursive approach characterizes the investigation procedure (acquisition data campaigns have been launched in 2002, 2011, 2013, 2015), based on a repetition of data acquisitions, for the detection of pathologies along the buildings life cycle, relating problems due to rainwater penetration and lowering of durability to façades’ geometric characters and materials’ emissivity properties [5]. The observation of the related iterated and superimposed effects of decay, informs the scheduling of control actions within the maintenance plan, designed at an urban scale, with the aim to prevent an overrun of critical performance thresholds for the whole built environment.