The management and the safeguard of existing buildings and infrastructures are actual tasks for structural engineering. Non-invasive structural monitoring techniques can provide useful information for supporting the management process and the safety evaluation, reducing at once the impact of disturbances on the structure’s functionality. This paper focuses on the exploitation of advanced multi-temporal differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR) products for the structural monitoring of buildings and infrastructures, subjected to different external actions. In this framework, a methodological approach is proposed, based on the integration of DInSAR measurements with historical sources, accurate 3D modelling and consistent positioning of the reflecting targets in the GIS environment. Documentary sources can prove particularly helpful in collecting technical information, to reconstruct an accurate 3D geometry of the building under monitoring, limiting in-situ surveys. The analysis of DInSAR-based displacements time series and mean deformation velocity values allows the identification of possible critical situations for buildings to be monitored. The paper presents different approaches, with increasing accuracy levels, to study the active deformative processes of the examined buildings and the related damage assessment. An insight into these interpretative approaches is given through the application of the proposed procedure to two case studies in the city of Rome (Italy), the residential building named Torri Stellari in Valco San Paolo (1951–1953) and the housing complex referred to as Corviale (1967–1983), by exploiting the whole COSMO-SkyMed data archive (both ascending and descending acquisitions), collected during the 2011–2019 time interval. Pros and cons of the various approaches are deeply discussed, together with an estimation of the required computational effort.

Structural health monitoring is a crucial issue in areas with different hazard sources, such as Italy. Among non-invasive monitoring techniques, remote sensing provides useful information in supporting the management process and safety evaluations, reducing the impact of disturbances on the functionality of construction systems. The ground displacement time-series based on the analysis of Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) measurements, as well as the information about the geology of the area and the geometry of the construction under monitoring, provides useful data for the built environment’s structural assessment. This paper focuses on the structural monitoring and damage assessment of constructions based on the GIS integration of DInSAR measurements, geological investigation, historical surveys and 3D modeling. The methodology is applied to the residential area of Valco San Paolo in the city of Rome (Italy). Once the geological interpretation has confirmed the results of the DInSAR measurements, a quick damage assessment that considers all the possible conditions of the pre-existing damage at the time zero of the monitoring is shown for a damaged manufact in the area. The presented results highlight how the strategy to correlate the DInSAR-monitored ground settlements with the damage scales allows potentially to monitor continuous construction systems.

The out-of-plane behaviour of the walls as a consequence of an earthquake is the main vulnerability of existing masonry structures. In the case of rigid in compression not tensile resistant material, incremental dynamic analyses may be employed to evaluate the effective strength of a rocking element. When the seismic capacity of the wall is inadequate, retrofit interventions are required to assure an acceptable safety level. Conventional seismic retrofitting techniques on masonry walls influence the seismic performance of the element, which typically is modified in an out-of-plane bending behaviour. In this paper, analytical investigations are presented to investigate the possibility of a seismic retrofitting intervention able to increase the seismic strength of the wall without modifying its seismic behaviour. The analysed retrofitting technique consists in the application of composite vertical bars either in the middle section of the wall or at its external surfaces. The seismic behaviour of the retrofitted masonry wall is analytically evaluated by means of a parametric incremental dynamic analysis, carried out with an ad hoc in-house software. The effectiveness of the intervention is analysed in terms of level of seismic improvement, defined as the ratio between the seismic capacity of the reinforced and unreinforced walls.