Distributed green stormwater management infrastructure is increasingly applied worldwide to counter the negative impacts of urbanisation and climate change, while providing a range of benefits related to ecosystem services. They are known as Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) in Australia, Nature Based Solutions (NBS) in Europe, Low Impact Development (LID) in the USA, and Sponge City systems in China. Urban planning for WSUD has been ad-hoc, lacking strategy and resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. The purpose of this study is to help improve strategic WSUD planning and placement through the development of a Planning Support System. This paper presents the development of Spatial Suitability ANalysis TOol (SSANTO), a rapid GIS-based Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis tool using a flexible mix of techniques to map suitability for WSUD assets across urban areas. SSANTO applies a novel WSUD suitability framework, which conceptualises spatial suitability for WSUD implementation from two perspectives: 'Needs' and 'Opportunities' for WSUD. It combines biophysical as well as socio-economic, planning and governance criteria ('Opportunities') with criteria relating to ecosystem services ('Needs'). Testing SSANTO through comparing its results to work done by a WSUD consultancy successfully verified its algorithms and demonstrated its capability to reflect and potentially enhance the outcomes of planning processes. Manual GIS based suitability analysis is time and resource intensive. Through its rapid suitability analysis, SSANTO facilitates iterative spatial analysis for exploration of scenarios and stakeholder preferences. It thus facilitates collaborative planning and deeper understanding of the relationship between diverse and complex urban contexts and urban planning outcomes for WSUD.

Green spaces and nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly considered by land-use planning policies to respond to the multiple challenges related to sustainable development. The multiple benefits brought by NBS make the use of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) essential to optimally balance their use. MCDA offers a catalog of methods allowing to structure problems with multiple objectives and to help adopt the optimal solution. However, NBS planning is a recent discipline and research is still ongoing to make this practice more common. We carried out a critical literature review on MCDA-NBS tools and practices, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) method on the Web of Science database. We selected 124 papers on the subject between 2000 and 2022. We present a state-of-the-art MCDA approach for NBS and green space planning by looking at where these practices are applied, why and how this process is conducted, and who is involved in it. We found that studies are usually conducted in the global North on a single case study with the help of experts involved in the criteria weighting phase and the help of GIS MCDA tools often integrating a direct ranking method or the AHP method.