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of points, lines, and polygons. The AHP is used to determine the ranking of
sustainability of urban areas. This study selects Johor Bahru City Council (JBCC)
administrative area as a case. The result shows that spatial indicators can con-
tribute to a better visualisation of sustainability via the production of sustainability
map.
1 Introduction
Urban development can be defined as the expansion of urban areas into natural and
rural areas such as deserts, swamps, and forests (Black et al. 2002 ). As population
grows, socioeconomic needs arise. In particular, population growth in major cities
requires city boundary's expansion while developers look into the neighbouring
areas to build more housing, recreational, and other facilities. Consequently, demand
for a variety of natural and man-made resources for urban communities increases.
The process of urban expansion requires that planners work closely with other
parties to ensure environmental protection. In this context, sustainable develop-
ment seeks to establish a balance between human needs and environmental
preservation. Therefore, urban planners need to consider maintaining sustainable
development while expanding and renovating urban areas. Especially important,
much care needs to be taken to integrate the wilderness with the developing city
when an urban area expands into wildlife regions (Litman 2007 ). Besides, sus-
tainable urban development should function to curtail city pollution, to increase
the availability of recycling facilities, and to encourage efficient use of alternative
sources of energy.
Urban sustainability needs to be considered from ecological viewpoint and,
thus, it needs to adopt the concepts of footprint, emissions, and energy (Broekhof
and van Marwijk 2012 ). Further, to achieve a sustainable city, there are several
elements to be considered (Fig. 1 ).
Figure 1 shows that urban sustainability should be considered from environ-
mental, economic, and social dimensions. Since they are very complex and have
different degrees of importance, an approach is needed to rank them accordingly
before
they
can
be
used
as
indicators for
urban
development sustainability
assessment (Fig. 1 ).
In 2004, the Malaysian government has taken an initiative, based on the Eight
Malaysia Plan, to develop a set of indicators that can be used to measure sus-
tainable urban development, called Malaysian Urban Indicators Network (Murn-
iNet) (Marzukhi et al. 2011 ). However, these indicators, extracted from several
planning sectors, are non-spatial indicators although they can be used for evalu-
ating urban development. We propose the use of spatial indicators for the same
purpose. Spatial indicators with sufficient spatial information and geographic
visualisation can be useful for local sustainable planning, supporting decision-
making
in
the
planning
process,
and
helping
policy
makers
to
identify
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