MINNEAPOLIS — Target Corp. this month announced plans for its fourth small-format store in the Greater Boston area, the latest development in the retailer’s plan to reconfigure its real estate footprint via the addition of hundreds of “flexible format” stores in the coming years.

Target is planning to put a 48,000-square-foot store in a shopping center in Stoneham, Mass., less than 10 miles north of downtown Boston. The store is scheduled to open in July. Also under construction in the Boston area is a flexible-format store in the Central Square district in Cambridge, Mass., that is set to open in March. Target opened a flexible-format store near Boston University last summer, and it opened a three-level, 160,000-square-foot store in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood in 2015.

Target has announced plans for 27 flexible-format stores over the next three years. It now has 30 flexible-format stores, after the addition this year of stores including a two-story, 45,000-square-foot outlet in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood and a 28,000-square-foot store in State College, Pa., near Penn State University.

“As we enter very competitive markets like New York we’re going to learn a lot from Tribeca, and we’ll take that to other locations. As we do more and more business adjacent to college campuses, we’ll understand more and more about the needs of the college student,” Target president and chief executive officer Brian Cornell said last month during the company’s fiscal third quarter conference call. “But we really think right now we’ve got a unique opportunity to leverage this new footprint as a future growth element in our strategy.”

The Cambridge store opening next spring will cater to students at Harvard University and MIT. Other flexible-format stores Target plans to open in 2017 are near college campuses in Southern California, Florida and North Carolina.

“We are really excited about the strong performance of our new flexible-format stores. These new locations allow us to reach new neighborhoods in dense urban and suburban markets,” Cornell said. Based on their performance, he said, Target is increasingly confident that it can “profitably operate hundreds of urban and flexible-format stores over time, reaching new neighborhoods where consumers have a strong affinity for our brand.”

Walmart is also focusing on smaller-format Neighborhood Markets as a way to diversify its footprint and enter new markets. But the Bentonville, Ark.-based company recently shut down its smallest format, Walmart Express, after touting the concept as ideally suited to compete with dollar stores and discount supermarkets such as Aldi. Analysts said the small stores were an ill fit for a supply chain system optimized for supercenters.