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Walking accessibility planning is seen a powerful approach for moving towards sustainable mobility paradigms; however little attention is paid to determining which factors influence this accessibility and why. This paper addresses this gap between the theory and the practice, and evaluates how far variations in walking accessibility are related to four specific walking needs: attractiveness, comfort, safety, and ease-to-walk. Taking the ‘Centro’ district in Madrid (Spain) as a case study, exploratory scenarios are simulated by altering certain urban design factors for each walking need. Walking accessibility levels are calculated and compared across the exploratory scenarios to gain an insight into how each urban design factor affects walking accessibility. The results show a similar spatial pattern of accessibility for the four walking needs, with higher accessibility values in the north than in the south due to the greater …