INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE 5 : 2016

Abstract

Today, with more than half of the world population residing in urban areas, urban development has become an extremely significant global phenomenon and this trend continues. Due to the scale and speed, the urban development offers both opportunities and challenges. Through the phenomena such as the concentration of population, buildings, infrastructures, innovation and industry, cities and urban growth centres significantly produce economic growth and offer vast majority of employment opportunities, which subsequently contributes to poverty reduction. Cities are also the centres of modern living where indicators of general health and wellbeing, literacy, technological advancement, culture and social mobility are typically highest. The growth, however, has been not without challenges. Urban development brings congestion and pollution, social segregation and traffic gridlock. It also escalates the environmental and social risks. Today, cities consume 80% of the energy generated worldwide and are responsibility for around 85% of global GHG emissions. Due to this significance, for the first time, sustainable urban development becomes one of the key agendas in the newly announced SDGs (#11).

This special issue of Planning Malaysia gathers a total of thirteen articles contributed by the scholars from rich range of the Built Environment disciplines to address and shares the issues and possible solutions contributing to the sustainable development of urban future. For that, we divide them into six broad themes, which include urban environment as its core, demographic-focused studies on the elderly, sectoral research into housing and labour supply in construction industry, mobility for urban living with different groups of community, building level sustainability and conservation as part of urban development resiliency.

The urban environment theme consists of three articles with different focus. "Sustainable urban development through urban consolidation policy in Shiraz, Iran" highlights the initiatives at policy level, followed by "An initiative based assessment frame for smart city" which outlines the measurable indicators for a smart city. The authors of "Environmental psychology: The urban built environment impact on human mental health" on the other hand, explores the psychological dimensions of built environment impact.

The second theme is the demographic study with special attention given to the elderly group. "Elderly policy framework and active ageing in Malaysia" reviews the policy required for active ageing and sustainable neighbourhood design for elderly while the distribution of existing health care facilities for elderly is addressed in "Elderly and community health care facilities: A spatial analysis".

Sectoral research papers included in this special issue are "Sustainable housing affordability in East Malaysia" where the authors focus on the trade-off of building affordability housing in the case of Sabah, and "The challenge of labour shortage for sustainable construction" brings up the factors influencing the labour supply in construction industry and the possible solutions.