M. Rafee Majid

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia | UTM · Department of Urban and Regional Planning

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, obesity is already a pandemic illness on its own. It has been a public health priority in developing countries especially Malaysia where the obesity rate in the country is one of the highest in South East Asia. Early studies have concurred that the presence of COVID-19 makes anatomising the obesity pandemic even more...

Malaysian campuses house rich species biodiversity that has the potential to become a tourist attraction. However, no Malaysian campuses capitalise on this opportunity to encourage ecotourism and increase the environmental awareness among students. In this context, this research aims to create a systematic framework for mobile application developme...

Following the development of built-up areas in Bandung predominantly for housing purposes, the land surface temperature (LST) in the region has increased significantly. In urban planning, particularly in housing, environmental aspects related to LST have yet to be widely considered. The aim of this study is to identify the relationship between hous...

Understanding the complex links between socioeconomic variables and carbon emissions can reveal household spending and lifestyle patterns. This study oversees those issues and examines consumption patterns and their related variables such as climate change understanding, attitudes, and knowledge, in order to better comprehend the complicated linkag...

Obesity in Malaysia has become increasingly worrying. Besides health behaviours, perceived food and built environments have also been identified as influential factors on obesity. As such, this study aims to explain the obesity phenomenon through perceived environmental factors, health behaviours and the Body Mass Index (BMI). A conceptual model th...

Recently, research on sprawl was increasing due to its impacts on the economy, society, and environment. Several studies have focused on the application of containment strategies to curb urban sprawl. Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) were among the containment policies adopted to tackle the issue of sprawling cities. This paper set out to undertake a...

Recently, research on sprawl was increasing due to its impacts on the economy, society, and environment. Several studies have focused on the application of containment strategies to curb urban sprawl. Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) were among the containment policies adopted to tackle the issue of sprawling cities. This paper set out to undertake a...

This paper aims to make a methodological contribution to the systematic review method for business and social science research and to implement the proposed procedure in the field of digital transformation. In this article, we reviewed the systematic reviews found in the literature on bibliometric analysis and the Preferred Reporting Items for Syst...

Enriching visitors' experiences at religious, historical sites (RHS) is getting more attention than before. This research aims to identify and investigate the influential factors enriching the visitors' experience at such a site, using Al-Khandaq battle site as the case study. Forty-two respondents were interviewed at the site and NVivo 12 pro soft...

Public participation plays a vital role for the developer and local government as this ensures the acceptance of the general public to the proposed project. However, the general public participation rate in the planning process in Malaysia is still at a low level. Hence, this study was conducted to study the use of augmented reality (AR) as a tool...

Urban livability indicators have tremendous influence on policies and growth trajectories of cities or metropolises to the benefit of their communities. Livability is a threshold for measuring the social dimension of people wrought by exogenous factors like infrastructure, environment, social cohesion, transportation, health and education, among ot...

Street network is a city crucial element. The current guidelines of road design generally include road width, cross-sections and street hierarchy which are to be taken into consideration during the design phase of the network. Research have shown that road orientation affects the quality of a housing subdivision. However, there are limited studies...

Poverty is one of the most common problems throughout the world. For this reason, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number one aims at its eradication from all countries around the globe. While this is an ambitious goal, it has reinforced the commitment of many countries, including Malaysia, towards increased poverty alleviation eff...

Various literature expresses a diverse opinion concerning the concept of land fragmentation and its implications on rural sustainability. This review examines the issues of Land fragmentation as it affects rural sustainability in Nigeria. This paper reviewed different journal articles and many governments and non-governmental reports on land fragme...

Various studies aimed at unravelling the practice of open defecation, the world over, establish lack of toilets as being the major factor responsible for open defecation. However, the reality in most countries like Nigeria where open defecation is still in practice is the fact that people who have toilets in their homes are not precluded from the t...

Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is now becoming a common method for modelling the earth surface for various purposes. It is becoming more so with the widespread use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for data capture. With a similar purpose to the use of UAV, TanDEM-X satellite images are also able to capture the information about the earth surface. It...

The aim of the study was to examine the mediating effects of perceived neighbourhood food environment variables (PNFE) towards neighbourhood socioeconomic status (NSES) and BMI status, while controlling for socio-demographic variables • Once PNFE variables were introduced to the regression model, the result suggests that BMI status was almost wholl...

The generation of biogas from faecal wastes currently offers limited economic and environmental benefits to low-income households. The production of biochar from faecal waste is a sustainable alternative to firewood to replace charcoal that is widely utilised for cooking in households in Nigeria. Similarly, biochar production from faecal wastes pre...

Ecological footprint is an innovative concept to present the consumption of natural resources and generation of waste in terms of the Earth biological carrying capacity in a standardized format. The Earth overall sustainability can also be measured with the idea of ecological footprint and bio-capacity. The aim of this paper is to analyse the inter...

The tourism industry is one of the leading sectors for revenue earning in Malaysia. The natural beauties attract tourists all over the world. The rural areas hold one of the largest portions of tourism hubs alongside major urban tourist destinations. Rural tourism is mostly concerned with livelihood of rural people and inclusive rural tourism and e...

Although there is an attention growth in perception-based food environment, there has not been a systematic review evaluating the estimation of its association behavioural outcomes. Thus, the current study attempts to present the evidence of this relationship from current literatures, focusing on the causal relationship between food environment, di...

This paper presents statistical evidence that Digital Elevation Model (DEM) derived from Google Earth is commendable and has a good correlation with ASTER (Advanced Space-borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) and SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) elevation data. The accuracy of DEM elevation points extracted from Google Earth was...

Among the adverse side effects of rapid urbanization is the significant increase in the amount of impervious surface leading to higher stormwater runoff volume and peak flows. In moving away from the traditional 'rapid disposal' approach to stormwater management, development professionals are beginning to pay close attention to the emerging eco-fri...

Land use planning plays a crucial role in creating a balance between the needs of the society, physical development and the ecosystem. However, more often poor planning and displacement of land uses particularly in urban areas contributes to social ills such as drug abuse and criminal activities. This paper explains spatial relationship of drug abu...

Agricultural activities have been known to contribute significant impact on hydrological responses. Some of these impacts are manifested in the magnitude and frequency of flood. The watershed of the Muar river in Malaysia for instance were largely forested before and there were hardly any floods until some of the forests were converted into rubber,...

The lingering problem of poverty prompted many countries to adopt community-based strategies for improving Quality of Life (QoL) of poor communities. Numerous studies have focused on identifying but ignored to establish the contribution of the factors that influence improvement in QoL by community-based projects. This paper measures, using Structur...

Iskandar Malaysia has been emerging as a centre of economic growth in the southern corridor of Malaysia. While the present spatial policy has emboldened the growth centre that inspires the urban development in the region to flourish, the spatial development has brought a substantial environmental consequence to urban areas. With the support of trav...

This study analyses the spatial pattern of Kaduna City in Sub-Saharan region and its vicinity to ascertain its influence on urban interaction and implications towards carbon emission. It employed a questionnaire-based research for the collection of socio-economic, traffic and spatial data. Meanwhile, spatial data was derived in secondary form from...

Iskandar Malaysia has been emerging as a centre of economic growth in the southern corridor of Malaysia. While the present spatial policy has emboldened the growth centre that inspires the urban development in the region to flourish, the spatial development has brought a substantial environmental consequence to urban areas. With the support of trav...

This study analyses the spatial pattern of Kaduna City in Sub-Saharan region and its vicinity to ascertain its influence on urban interaction and implications towards carbon emission. It employed a questionnaire-based research for the collection of socio-economic, traffic and spatial data. Meanwhile, spatial data was derived in secondary form from...

Parallel to the main agenda of the Conference of Parties 21 (COP21) in Paris in 2015, Malaysia has committed itself to reduce carbon emission targeting to limit the temperature rise by 2 o Celsius or lower. In spite of all the efforts to promote sustainable development in Malaysia, however, limited research has been carried out about the sustainabi...

Despite the growing recognition of the PPP model, its application has come with mixed results. However, while numerous studies have either focused on identifying the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of PPP projects, there seems to be no comprehensive understanding of the underlying predictors that contribute to the success of PPP projects particular...

Although there is an attention growth in perception-based food environment, there has not been a systematic review evaluating the estimation of its association with diet and food shopping behaviours. Thus, the current study attempts to present the evidence of this relationship from current literature through a framework adapted from perceived food...

The Northern Region of Nigeria, which is located south of Africa biggest desert - the Sahara, is highly vulnerable to adverse impacts of climate change for some reasons. This paper attempts to review the variance between urban greenery, urban development and the quest for environmental sustainability. A critical review of relevant materials related...

Urban livability indicators have tremendous influence on policies and growth trajectories of cities or metropolises to the benefit of their communities. Livability is a threshold for measuring social dimension of people wrought by exogenous factors like infrastructure, environment, social cohesion, transportation, health and education, among others...

Air pollution has always been a concern with increasing urbanization and poor land use planning adding to the problem. This study sets out to investigate the relationship between land use composition of an area and its ambient concentration of 10-μm-or-less particulate matter (PM10). For this study, Iskandar Malaysia has been chosen as the study ar...

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is a freely accessible hydrological modeling tool designed to simulate the impact of land-cover changes on hydrological processes over a continuous period. To test its performance in tropical climate conditions, the hydrological processes of the upper Muar watershed (UMW), Malaysia was modeled for land cove...

In September 2000 The Millennium Summit adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, committing nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty with a deadline of 2015. Eight Millennium Development Goals were formulated of which the eradication of poverty given top priority. However, Malaysia’s participation with the UN in dealing with pove...

Malaysia is currently experiencing issues of local as well as transboundary air pollution. The issues are especially felt in areas that record high economic growth and rapid urbanization such as Iskandar Malaysia, a fast evolving economic-growth corridor in Southeast Asia. This has led to increased rate of particulate matter emissions, which furthe...

This paper discusses the relationship between land use composition and the degree of air pollution, specifically PM10, in Iskandar Malaysia. Aspiring to be a low carbon region and a smart city, Iskandar Malaysia has to meet the social and economic needs of its growing population while taking care of all the environmental challenges that come with r...

In September 2000 The Millennium Summit adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, committing nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty with a deadline of 2015. Eight Millennium Development Goals were formulated of which the eradication of poverty given top priority. However, Malaysia's participation with the UN in dealing with pove...

This paper discusses the relationship between land use composition and the degree of air pollution, specifically PM10, in Iskandar Malaysia. Aspiring to be a low carbon region and a smart city, Iskandar Malaysia has to meet the social and economic needs of its growing population while taking care of all the environmental challenges that come with r...

Malaysia is currently experiencing issues of local as well as transboundary air pollution. The issues are especially felt in areas that record high economic growth and rapid urbanization such as Iskandar Malaysia, a fast evolving economic-growth corridor in Southeast Asia. This has led to increased rate of particulate matter emissions, which furthe...

Due to the lingering problem of poverty, many countries have adopted community-based development strategy towards improving the Quality of Life (QoL) of their citizens. Numerous studies have focused on assessing QoL by measuring the manifested variables and ignored the significant contribution of some "latent" factors. Using Structural Equation Mod...

Meteorological data are key variables for hydrologists to simulate the rainfall-runoff process using hydrological models. The collection of meteorological variables is sophisticated, especially in arid and semi-arid climates where observed time series are often scarce. Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) Data have been used to validate and ev...

At the Conference of Parties 15 (COP15) in Copenhagen, Malaysia has proposed a voluntary carbon emission reduction of 40 percent in terms of emissions intensity of GDP (gross domestic product) by the year 2020 compared to the 2005 level. In spite of all the efforts to promote sustainable development in Malaysia, limited research has been carried ou...

Nigeria like other countries has experienced rapid increase in number and sizes of protected areas in the last century. As a result, a number of policies, agencies and departments were established to ensure proper protection and management of these areas. To ensure management effectiveness, frequent evaluation is necessary. This paper is a review o...

This paper reviewed the operation of the Small Scale Commercial Water Providers (SSCWP) in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, North Central Nigeria. It provide an insight into their contributions, pattern of expenditure on commercial water supply, their operational constraints and possible solutions; and implications of all these issues for sustai...

Metro Johor is one of the fast emerging metropolitan urban centers where its current progress and spatial transformation have made it a key player in the economic growth of Malaysia. The recent creation of the Iskandar Malaysia, an economic strategy which aims to be a global player as potential destination for high-value investments, has certainly...

Graphical abstract Abstract Nigeria like other countries has experienced rapid increase in number and sizes of protected areas in the last century. As a result, a number of policies, agencies and departments were established to ensure proper protection and management of these areas. To ensure management effectiveness, frequent evaluation is necessa...

Figures 2 and 3 show the declining diversity of land uses in planned residential subdivisions throughout the period regardless Shannon's or Simpson's diversity index was used in calculating the index. There are neighborhoods with index value of 0.0 since they contain only one type of land uses such as residential. Outlying values are associated wit...

Historical data and several ambient air quality studies indicate that several large cities in Malaysia (including Johor Bahru; part of Iskandar Malaysia) are facing high concentration of air pollutants that are not always at acceptable levels (DOE, 2008). Among the major pollutants are particulate matter (PM10) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO 2) which are...

ARE THE NEIGHBORHOOD COMMERCIAL AREAS OF ISKANDAR MALAYSIA CENTRALLY LOCATED FOR LOW CARBON TRAVEL?

The first priority of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is poverty reduction. All member states of the United Nations were saddled with the mandate of implementing sound policies that will halve absolute poverty by the year 2015. Several studies show that the application of the community-driven development (CDD) model will help developing cou...

In recent years, Malaysia is experiencing issues of continuous air pollution and transboundary air pollution. The issues are especially felt in areas that record high economic growth and rapid urbanization such as Iskandar Malaysia, a developing economic-growth corridor in Southeast Asia. This has led to increased rate of Particulate Matter emissio...

The Philippines have suffered continuing setbacks to provide a steady stream of supply of housing needs to the homeless urban poor. The reformist policy through the balanced housing principle of the Urban Development and Housing Act, has augured well as a strategy to cope with the socialized housing demand brought by rapid urbanization. This paper...

To achieve a sustainable development, all related levels and sectors of policy making need to be in line with environmental considerations. Iskandar Malaysia, the second significant regional economic project of Malaysia, in an effort to be recognized as an international standing sustainable development, has formulated its policies in the form of 32...

The values of wetlands are generally classified into use values and non-use values. The use values are straightforward andmeasurable values but the non-use values are not so. Hence they are most often neglected and not incorporated in wetlands assessment and conversion to other uses by policy makers. Although the wetlands under review are obviously...

This paper discusses the relationship between urbanization and air quality, particularly PM10, in Iskandar Malaysia. As a model for future urban development in Malaysia, Iskandar Malaysia has to meet the social and economic needs of its growing population while taking care of all the environmental challenges that come with rapid urbanization. The o...

Diversity in the context of land use planning refers to as the variety of uses in land use and in land use planning, the success of diversity can be achieved through mixed use development. Although mixed land uses are popularly practised in mixed use development for the past decades, current land use practices have moved towards the separation of r...

Demand for housing in Malaysia grew noticeably in 1960s and expanded rapidly in the late 1980s and beyond as a result of rapid urbanization. The same scenario repeats itself in Iskandar Malaysia, a southern development corridor located in Johor, Malaysia where close to three hundred housing developments have been launched from pre-1980s to 2000s. T...

In spite of the importance of wetlands to the environment and most especially to the host communities, wetlands are constantly under pressure for conversion to other forms of use by policy makers. The reason for undervaluing the significance of wetlands is possibly due to lack of data on its values for it is not easily measured like other environme...

Spatial statistics have been widely used in epidemiology studies in order to investigate and monitor the outbreak in endemic area. However, there is less application of spatial statistics in the study on built environment and diseases outbreak. It is significant to conduct such a study since non-communicable diseases have been rising over past four...

There is a worldwide concern about increasing non-communicable diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma and depression related to obesity in urban population. The built environment has an important role to support human health. Characteristics of the built environment can be modified to influence and facilitate or hinder public heal...

Open Source Geographic Information System (OSGIS) has brought a tremendous change to the traditional approaches in digital mapping which has led to the new age of collaboration and provides benefits to the users in term of low cost and tailored made, particularly for those who are in great demand for enhanced decision making support tools. This pap...