City Compactness: Assessing the Influence of the Growth of Residential Land Use

ABSTRACT

In the urban sprawl paradigm, residential land use exhibits a more significant growth than other categories. Consequently, large proportions of the natural environment are converted to residential areas, particularly in tropical countries. Compact urban development is one of the most sustainable urban forms with environmental perspectives, such as rural development containment and natural environment preservation. However, no proper investigation of the relationship and influence of residential growth and city compactness is available. This study evaluated and forecasted the residential development of Kajang City in Malaysia based on compact development. First, the relationship between residential land use change and city compactness was evaluated. Second, residential growth was projected by utilizing the land transformation model (LTM) and the statistical-based weight of evidence (WoE) using various spatial parameters. Both models were evaluated with respect to observed land use and compactness maps. Results indicated that most of the newly developed residential areas were in zones where the degrees of compactness increase during certain periods. In addition, LTM performed better and provided a more accurate modeling of residential growth than the WoE. However, WoE provided clearer and more informative results than LTM in terms of functional relationships between dependent and independent variables related to city compactness.

KEYWORDS:

• Compact city
• residential land use growth
• artificial neural networks
• weight of evidence
• GIS
• remote sensing

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Selangor Town and Country Planning Department (JPBD) in Kajang City for providing various thematic and social information on Kajang area.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Saleh Abdullahi is a senior lecturer on the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at Islamic Azad University, Qazvin Branch, Iran.

Hossein Mojaddadi is a research scholar in the Department of Civil Engineering at University Putra Malaysia.

Biswajeet Pradhan is distinguished professor on the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney. Part of the research for this article was completed while he was a visiting professor in the Department of Energy and Mineral Resources at Sejong University, Seoul and while he was a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Universiti Putra Malaysia.

ORCID

Biswajeet Pradhan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9863-2054

Additional information

Funding

The first author wishes to thank the Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia for the financial support of this research.