Analysis of fragmented green spaces in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Abstract

Issues concerning urban resilience have now become a great challenge to the world as a result of rapid urbanisation. Malaysia is ranked among East Asia's most urbanised countries and its urban population has continued to increase rapidly from 27 % in 1970 to 74 % in 2014. To cope with the issue of sustainability, urban planning has emerged at creating and managing network of green spaces. The establishment of green corridor has accelerated as a response to global concern about issues regarding the fragmentation, climate changes and loss of landscape connectivity resulted from the urbanisation. To ensure that network of green spaces can be established, the fragmented of green spaces must be first identified and located. An analysis of fragmented green spaces has been conducted by using Object Oriented procedure to the high-resolution satellite image of SPOT-6 dated June 2016. Results showed that big and small fragmented green spaces existed with the total area of 84 km 2 out of 243 km 2 total areas of Kuala Lumpur. The highest total area of green spaces was recorded to be in the Damansara Penchala zone which is 26 km 2 and the lowest record is in the Kuala Lumpur City Center area which is only 5 km 2 in area. It was concluded that urban green spaces are more fragmented where there are more built-up areas. In this paper, city center has the least ratio of area of green to the urban area compared to the other five zones because the green space in the area was smaller and fragmented.