How Agent-based modeling can help to foster sustainability projects

[Abstract] The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations require relevant social changes that sometimes involve the development of innovative projects that cause rejection and confrontation. Agent-Based Models (ABM) are powerful tools to represent the behavior of systems, and they have become valuable for the social sciences as they can simulate the behavior of a society under different conditions. Superblocks are innovative city projects that reorganize urban space and minimize private motorized transport. In this paper, we present an ABM that simulates the implantation of superblocks in two Spanish cities: Vitoria-Gasteiz and Barcelona. The interest of this model is to provide policymakers with relevant scientific information that can be used to support their planning and decision-making processes by running possible alternative policy scenarios. This paper presents the details of the designed model and the simulation of different policy scenarios to increase the acceptability rates of citizens about the project, demonstrating how the model takes into account local differences and its usefulness for those political leaders from other cities interested in implementing this type of project.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C2018/34Xunta de Galicia; ED431G2019/01The work on this document has been supported by Horizon 2020 of the European Commission SMARTEES project (grant agreement no. 7639). We also wish to acknowledge the funding received from the Xunta de Galicia, together with the ERDF funds of the European Union, through its grants to research groups (Grant no. ED431C 2018/34) and CITIC, as a Research Center of the University System of Galicia (Grant no. ED431G 2019/01