Mapping Digital Spatiality: The Online Debate over Italy’s National Radioactive Waste Repository

Abstract

This study examines how the controversy over Italy’s proposed National Radioactive Waste Repository unfolds in hybrid digital environments, and what this implies for territorial planning and governance. Radioactive waste poses distinctive temporal and spatial challenges, and siting disputes exemplify wicked problems in which ecological sustainability, spatial planning, economic change, and social equity intersect and require continuous negotiation.

Building on Issue Spatiality, the article analyse how online actors construct spatial imaginaries by mobilising proximity, scale, territorial identity to legitimise or contest competing narratives. The methodology adopts a digital methods approach integrating Social Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing and qualitative content analysis.

Findings show a territorially segmented digital public sphere dominated by activists, local media, and regional voices, with limited cross-regional bridging. Within these segmented arenas, visibility is largely captured by oppositional mobilisation, while institutional framings are less prominent and frequently challenged through legitimacy and procedural-justice claims. The study identified regionally scaled resistance dynamics consistent with NIMYR (“Not In My Region”) positions, linking territorial belonging to multi-level governance tensions.

By relating digitally produced geographies of contestation to the institutional spatial rationality embedded in the CNAPI map, the article highlights the need for scale-sensitive and more coordinated communication strategies.