Citizen e-Participation in Urban Planning: Achievements and Future Challenges in a Mediterranean City

In recent years, new smart technologies have given citizens' movements and informal groups unprecedented possibilities of communication that allow them to achieve a wider audience, mobilise new activists and negotiate with local institutional actors. Even in the planning field, an extraordinary range of new strategies and practices of participatory e-democracy has been recently emerging, which has been affecting local planning and city governance. Thus, this paper aims at exploring potentialities and critical aspects of citizen's web based movements claiming for a more participatory and sustainable urban planning, trough a critical examination of selected case studies in a Mediterranean city, Catania (Italy). The inter(net)connections between urban planning and citizen's e-activism, and consequently between the virtual sphere and public urban spaces, are scrutinized through the analysis of their discourses and narratives in the online documentation as well as interviews with activists.