Supporting the design of the Italian Network of Special Purpose Monitoring Stations, a comprehensive study on spatial representativeness of air quality monitoring sites is presented, to be used in model validation and population exposure studies. Different methodologies are being evaluated, in order to find out one or more fit-to-purpose approaches to spatial representativeness. In this work, we present preliminary results for 3 methods: one uses station measurements and land cover data, other two are based on air quality model simulations, using respectively emissions variability and concentration time series. Strengths and weaknesses of the methods are assessed and on-going developments are presented.