Emerging A Socio-Economic and Psychological Impact Assessment Model for Urban Riverfront Development in Malaysia

Abstract

Developing an urban riverfront requires an appropriate impact assessment to avoid any impairment in future. Impact assessment indicators and its parameters often be a set of guidelines in developing an expedient riverfront within urban area. Nonetheless, the impact assessment indicators and its parameters that could be used as standard pillars of local practices is currently concerned.  Therefore, this paper aims to incipient a socio-economic and psychological impact assessment model for Urban Riverfront Development (URD) in Malaysia. Melaka River, Malaysia has been chosen as a case study to measure the socio-economic and psychological indicators including its parameters suited with the local area. Partial Least Squares Structure Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to generate the model. A stratified random sampling was adopted for sample selection technique and structured questionnaires were disseminated among 500 respondents. However, after screening process, only 421 questionnaires were accepted to be analyzed. An exploratory factor analysis has been done to observe underlying constructs measuring the property building owners’ perception of socio-economic impacts of URD. There are eight (8) hypotheses by eight (8) indicators and forty-three (43) parameters have been tested using PLS-SEM. Results show that only seven (7) indicators were accepted for the model which are property market, property development, social development, demographics, economic development, neighbourhood location and environment. Whereas, government policy was rejected from the model.