Managing the Growing Kuala Lumpur Mega Urban Region for Livable City: The Sustainable Development Goals as Guiding Frame

Abstract

In the last three decades, Malaysia has witnessed fast urban growth and spatial spread at a rate never experienced before, in response to overlapping industrial, social, economic and policy drivers. The paper will analyse the urban spatial spread from the productive towns and cities in the country, in particular, taking the Kuala Lumpur mega urban region as focus to demonstrate the spread of urbanization surfaces and the dimension of modernity among the urban people associated with urban life. The approach taken is the framework of the sustainability science, specifying issues and then taking a transdisciplinary stance to those issues. Data were then gathered from published sources supported by our own field observations of urban land use spread in parts of the Kuala Lumpur mega urban region. Despite the increasingly glittering showcasing of the state of the art development in infrastructures, housing and economic diversity there are challenges that the Kuala Lumpur mega urban region has to pay attention to, to make the city livable. Looking beyond the physical achievements to date there remains to develop what has been discussed lately about grooming the soul of the city, to instil the urbanites with globally accepted values related to what we believe should be the essence of a livable city, such that the urbanites will take responsibility to be with the authority to ensure, for example, cleanliness, safety and making the city more vibrant and attractive.