Criteria and indicators for Malaysian garden city of Putrajaya

It is the aspiration of the Malaysian Government to transform the country into a beautiful garden nation by the year 2020. It is envisaged that the image of garden nation will be materialized when all cities in the country also portray the garden image in their design and visual. However, there are no criteria and indicators used in developing these garden cities. In this regard, a study was conducted to develop a reliable set of criteria and indicators for an ideal, Malaysian Garden city. Delphi method was used in this study to solicit the opinion from 30 experts through a series of questionnaire. As a result, this study has been successful in generating and identifying 8 criteria and 42 indicators for an ideal Malaysian garden city. The top three criteria selected were safe healthy and beautiful living working environment, functional integrated landscape and physical master plan and network of high quality plants, open spaces, parks and green areas throughout the city. Stakeholders’ perceptions on the importance of the selected criteria for the Malaysian garden city were assessed through Importance Performance Analysis and compared to the one obtained from the expert panels. It was found that there were consensus in opinions between the expert panels, internal stakeholders, domestic tourists and foreign tourists. Each group of respondents gave rating scale of very important to the eight selected criteria. Stakeholders’ perceptions on the performance of Putrajaya as one of Malaysian garden city were also assessed by using Importance Performance Analysis. Safe healthy beautiful living working environment was found to be consistently located in quadrant two for all groups of respondents which means ‘To Keep up the Good Work’. Meanwhile, enough funding to support garden city program was consistently placed in quadrant III by the respondents which shows low performance level. Here, the management should not be too worried since the attribute in this cell is not perceived to be very important, this indicated that it may be due to the status of Putrajaya as the administrative center for Malaysian government, thus public funding will be automatically allocated in supporting any garden city activities. There was no attribute that consistently located in quadrant I and IV. The study also revealed that beautiful landscapes, gardens, parks and nature are the most important types of attraction in Putrajaya. Visitors placed garden attraction more important than other attractions in their decision to visit Putrajaya. This indicated that garden and park are the brand of Putrajaya that attract the tourists to visit the city. Hence Putrajaya could safely be considered having achieved her development objective and can be endorsed as a garden city. Hopefully the generated criteria and indicators will be used by the local authorities and city halls as a norm or condition to be met for their city to be recognized as a garden city. In conclusion, it was found that the criteria and indicators developed through this study could be used in identifying, measuring and monitoring the progress of Malaysian garden city.

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