Sant Boi 2040: A smart vision for sustainable growth
A data-driven territorial strategy to strengthen Sant Boi de Llobregat as a sustainable, well-connected, innovation-ready metropolitan city.
Overview
Sant Boi 2040 reframes the city’s long-term development through an integrated territorial lens—bringing urban form, mobility networks, housing capacity, services, and economic ecosystems into a single evidence-based strategy. The project responds to the need for integrated planning that connects these systems and equips decision-makers with an analytical foundation to guide sustainable growth and innovation.
Within the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, Sant Boi is described as a key connector between industrial corridors, natural landscapes, and residential communities. Sant Boi 2040 builds on that role by establishing a unified baseline and comparing different scenarios—so future investments can be prioritized through measurable performance and clear trade-offs.
The Challenges
Sant Boi faces critical challenges and constraints that must be addressed to provide a sustainable and smart urban and economic growth in the coming years:
Siloed planning and fragmented data have reduced the ability to evaluate the city holistically and coordinate interventions across systems.
Future growth will raise pressure on mobility and urban continuity, requiring coordinated densification, transport performance, and service provision to maintain quality of life.
Car dependency and uneven rail accessibility, an excess of car dependency and a concentrated railway coverage around the center/east and higher reliance on buses in the south and west—creating internal disparities that future planning must reduce.
Economic transition needs stronger integration between urban development and productive clusters, so industrial areas can evolve toward more knowledge-based, innovation-linked activity.
Aretian’s Solution
Aretian applies its City Science and Innovation Pipeline frameworks to align spatial strategy with economic transformation—linking analysis directly to actionable planning.
Key components include:
Unified territorial baseline and scenario comparison, merging spatial, demographic, mobility, housing, and economic data into one comparable framework to inform decisions and reduce risk.
Human-scale, “15-minute city” planning, reinforcing equitable access to services, green space, and opportunities while preserving environmental values.
Targeted densification around mobility nodes, concentrating growth in mixed-use, transit-oriented areas to accommodate future population without dispersed expansion.
District Z as a new mixed-use centrality, combining housing with offices and commerce to strengthen urban balance and activity.
Civic axe as the city’s organizing spine, reinforcing its ends and transversal connections so it functions as an integrative corridor of services, public space, and daily life.
Mobility upgrade built around intermodality, including the planned two new train stations and bus optimization (frequency, stops, coordination), alongside improved bike and pedestrian connectivity.
Outcomes
Under the Aretian 2040 scenario, the project sets out measurable results across growth, urban sustainability, services, and innovation performance:
Housing: +7,279 new homes (with growth focused around strategic nodes).
Population: +10,621 new residents (94,200 total residents).
Services & amenities: 926 total services (up from 783), supporting a stronger proximity-based city model.
Innovation jobs: 9,000 innovative jobs, with innovation intensity reaching ~20%.
Employment growth: +8,000 new jobs overall, including +5,000 new innovative jobs.
15-minute city coverage: maintained at very high levels (96–99% across amenity types in future scenarios).
