Chapter 9 The Walkability Planning Support System: An Evidence-Based Tool to Design Healthy Communities Claire Boulange, Chris Pettit and Billie Giles-Corti Abstract A major challenge for all cities is to reconcile growth with cultural, social and environmental considerations, along with connecting urban design with oppor- tunities for health and wellbeing. Planning Support Systems (PSSs) can facilitate future planning and foster collaboration between researchers and urban planners in promoting healthy built environments. The Walkability PSS was developed specially for that purpose. This chapter presents an evaluation of the Walkability PSS, a PSS for building planning scenarios and assessing their impacts on walking behaviours. The evaluation was conducted in collaboration with a group of local urban planners. The study results show that the Walkability PSS could support planners in several situa- tions including testing and comparing planning scenarios for greenfield and brown- field areas, conducting consultation and/or workshops with various stakeholders and making decisions about the provision of new infrastructure. Keywords Planning Support System Á Walkability Á Healthy cities Á Participatory planning Á Co-design 1 Introduction Today, non-communicable diseases and conditions, such as heart disease or dia- betes, are a significant problem in urban centres (World Health Organization 2010). Most of this heightened risk can be traced back to changes in physical activity C. Boulange (&) Á B. Giles-Corti Centre for Urban Research, Healthy Liveable Cities Research Group, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: claire.boulange@rmit.edu.au B. Giles-Corti e-mail: billie.giles-corti@rmit.edu.au C. Pettit City Futures Research Centre, UNSW, Sydney, Australia e-mail: c.pettit@unsw.edu.au © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 S. Geertman et al. (eds.), Planning Support Science for Smarter Urban Futures, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57819-4_9 153