Towards a Design Support System for Urban Walkability

In the paper we present an urban design support tool centered on pedestrian accessibility and walkability of places. Differently from standard decision support systems developed for the purpose of evaluating given pre-defined urban projects and designs, we address the inverse problem of having the software system itself generate hypotheses of projects and designs, given some (user-provided) objectives and constraints. Taking as a starting point a model for evaluating walkability, we adapt the NSGA-II multi-objective genetic algorithm to produce the front of non-dominated design alternatives to satisfy certain predefined constraints. By way of example, we briefly present an application of the system to a real urban area.