Aretian’s City Digital Twin featured in El Periódico

Housing is one of the most pressing challenges facing Barcelona, its metropolitan region, and Catalonia as a whole. In a recent interview published in El Periódico de Catalunya, our CoFounder and CEO Ramon Gras Alomà shares Aretian’s perspective on the structural roots of this issue: a persistent housing supply deficit, declining residential quality, a growing mismatch between incomes and real estate prices, and limited access to transport and essential services.

At Aretian Urban Analytics and Design, we are addressing this challenge through our City Digital Twin, developed with the support of Barcelona Global and the Torras Foundation. The Digital Twin identified:

- 29,000 parcels in the metro region of Barcelona with the capacity to for 475,000 new homes

- 50,000 parcels across Catalonia with the potential to accommodate 700,000 new homes

For each property, the platform provides strategic, asset-level insights, including:

- Housing capacity and typology

- Recommended density, height, and architectural approach

- Financial projections (rent and sale prices)

- Attractiveness and desirability index

- Access to mobility, services, and urban context quality

Addressing housing scarcity, and the resulting social and spatial inequalities, requires more than incremental change. It calls for a new, integrated approach that aligns territorial vision with high-quality local interventions: better design, improved access to public transport, proximity to jobs, and stronger connections to essential services.