Evaluating Walkability through a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Approach: A Lisbon Case Study

Abstract

New strategies to improve the quality of urban pedestrian environments are becoming increasingly important in sustainable city planning. This trend has been driven by the advantages that active mobility provides in terms of health, social, and environmental aspects. Our work explores the idea of walkability. This concept refers to the friendliness of the urban environment to pedestrian traffic. We propose a framework based on the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methodology to rank streets in terms of walkability levels. The city of Lisbon (Portugal) is the location of the streets under examination. Findings confirmed the framework’s replicability and suggested the possibility of this strategy being used as a support tool for designing urban policies.