Integrating Social, Economic, and Environmental Factors to Evaluate How Competitive Urban Landscapes Are for the Development of Sustainable Cities: Penang Island in Malaysia as a Case Study

Abstract

The competitiveness of urban landscapes is a subject of growing attention as cities strive to become the best places to support enterprises, economic development, and high-quality living while preserving environmental resources. In evaluations of urban competitiveness, financial factors are frequently emphasized. In this systematic study for the future sustainable urban landscape (SUL), we use the instance of Penang Island, Malaysia, to present an integrated methodology for finding, evaluating, and validating good indicators for developing an urban landscape index that balances economic, sociocultural, and environmental factors. First, we provide a framework for developing such an index by developing a Delphi Analytical Hierarchy Process (DAHP) model that aids in choosing the most important aspects and sub criteria affecting the sustainability of urban landscapes. Then, under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), we demonstrate how to use these data to assess the competitiveness of various zones on Penang Island, namely Bayan Lepas and George Town. According to the quantitative results of the DAHP model, economic criteria, which were given a weight of 0.595 and a corresponding inconsistency (CI) of 0.04, had a greater influence on Penang Island’s urban landscape than environmental criteria, which were given a weight of 0.276 and a CI of 0.02, and social and cultural criteria, which were given a weight of 0.128 and a CI of 0.08. In terms of economic criteria, Zone 1 has a weight of 0.360, which indicates that it has less sway than Zone 2, which has a weight of 0.636. In the discussion, we highlight the essential elements of the methodology to assess the competitiveness of urban environments.

The Adoption and Adaption of CEEQUAL’s Sustainability Attributes in Assessing the Malaysian Infrastructure Projects: A Review

“…Figure 1 portrays the years of those sustainable infrastructure rating schemes have been launched. Even though the issue of sustainability in Malaysian construction context is still new, but, the Malaysian construction industry is persistently working towards a more sustainable and green architecture [20,29]. With the greater demand for "green" rated building alongside the awareness promotion to support environmentally friendly in the office premises, the needs for sustainable building rating system become more apparent [20].…”

“…Additionally, Koo et al [3] professed that diesel fuel consumption during transportation of materials, operation of the heavy construction equipment, together with the amount of construction materials are the major sources of the occurred site pollutions. Hence, the excellent sustainable infrastructure project's stakeholders always monitor and increase their control of the pollution consequences of construction activity particularly the atmospheric pollution and water pollution by limiting the production of dust, particles, and waste gases produced by site operations [16,29]. There are some of the useful techniques that can be utilized in reducing the pollution such as deliveries early in the day to avoid truck use on high ozone days, minimizing the idling of equipment, scrubbers and mufflers in equipment, limiting certain activities at night that IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1238/1/012010 7 cause noise, traffic routes pre-planned, water run-off and erosion protection, treating effluent and nonportable water and reusing it for dust suppression and landscape irrigation [35].…”

“…For instance, in creating sustainable municipal areas, instead of providing the sustainable infrastructures, the city planners must provide also the ample spaces for reforestation [13]. Moreover, the site for sustainable infrastructure project must also has an integrated land use plan incorporating of multifunctional zones and habitat restoration area which is rationale for ecosystem balancing and avoidance of isolating open space areas (i.e., greenways, green belts, green networks) either in the urban areas or in marine spatial project planning [8,29].…”

“…Dowdeswell [16] postulated that construction activity is a major user of the world's non-renewable natural resources. It is not good and should be avoided because the excessive use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) in the construction materials transportation and construction operations is not only affect the depletion of that resources but burning the fossil fuels on-site contributes also to the global production of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur oxide) [13,29,32]. As a consequence, the uncontrolled carbon emissions can cause the harmful effects both to the climate change and human health and also causing other complications like acid rain, global warming, formation of ozone, and photochemical smog [3].…”

A Study on the Viability of Adopting Battery Electric Vehicles in Bus Rapid Transit in Brazil Using the AHP Method

“…To deal with data processing and to obtain AHP results, we used Expert Choice ® v.11. Expert Choice is a user-friendly supporting software that has contributed to the success of the AHP method because it incorporates intuitive graphical user interfaces and automatic calculation of priorities and inconsistencies, and it still runs the AHP precisely as described in its original publication [64,65].…”