Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the sustainability of Malaysian cities according to Malaysian Urban Indicators.
There are eight dimensions with 21 themes that are further subdivided into 36
urban indicators and are used as overall sustainability indicators of a city. These
indicators can be re-grouped into three categories, namely non-spatial, spatial, and
mixed indicators.
3 Determination of Spatial Indicators
The selection of spatial indicators is based on several criteria including their
reliability and effectiveness in providing sufficient information. These criteria must
include three pillars of sustainability, namely economy, environment, and social
(see Fig.
1
). As mentioned earlier, the indicators must be ''SMART''. However, in
this study, these indicators are filtered by selecting only those that contain spatial
elements and mapable data.
There were nine spatial indicators selected to be used in this study. The first
three indicators are selected from the economic sustainability dimension. The first
indicator represents public transportation terminals and stations. The second
indicator represents attraction areas and recreational centres and the last indicator
from this dimension represents grade 'A' business. All the indicators are repre-
sented as points.
Environmental sustainability is the next dimension in assessing urban devel-
opment sustainability and it is made up of three indicators. All of these indicators
are represented in polygons where the first indicator represents flood prone areas.
The second indicator represents provision of public open spaces and the last
indicator represents residential areas getting centralized sewerage services.
The last dimension is social sustainability whose first indicator is accessibility
to community facilities represented in points and polygons. The next indicator is
happiness index that indicates population's satisfaction about their daily life and
surroundings. The last indicator is related to demography, in particular, the total
population of each zone.
3.1 The Scoring System
The urban sustainability assessment scoring system is extracted the MurniNet
system itself. The system uses various weightage scores for each dimension and
theme according to the predetermined specification. The spatial indicators scoring
system shown in Table
1
is adopted in this study to determine the sustainability of
the JBCC's planning blocks.
