Planning for rural service centres in West Malaysia

Talib, Rosmin B. (1988) Planning for rural service centres in West Malaysia. MPhil(R) thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

In 1985, it was estimated that 4.25 million people in Malaysia lived in 6,000 scattered traditional villages. These villages when compared with other types of rural settlement receive very minimum level of developmental planning input and therefore suffer from many physical and socio-economic problems. In the Mid-Term Review of the Fourth Malaysia Plan, the Malaysian Government initiated a new direction of rural development for the country. This is in conjunction with the Prime Minister's suggestion that the present "conventional" approach of rural development should be replaced with an "Integrated Rural Development (IRD) approach". The strategies outlined in this new direction of rural development are to diversify the rural economy; to restructure the land holdings; and to rearticulate the existing traditional villages so as to enable the establishment of "rural growth centres". This is to ensure that the ultimate goal of rural development i.e. "to improve the economic and social wellbeing of the rural population and to redress the economic imbalance between urban and rural area" stated in the Development Plan could be realized. Within the new framework of rural development approach, this study attempts to design a suitable means to restructure the existing traditional villages so as to enable the establishment of rural growth centres and ultimately to implement the other two strategies mentioned above. Based on some theoretical justifications of the growth centre concept and lessons derived from the case studies of key settlement policy in the United Kingdom, growth area policy in Tanzania, and India, the writer come forward with the notion of "service centres". The writer has also outlined the planning process by which the "service centres" could be implemented. Four "design models" which are called "expanded-village", "new-village", "small town-based", and "population-transfer" have also been put forward to Illustrate the framework of the "service centres", This new concept and design models of rural centre then have been tested in the District of Johor Bharu, one of the rural areas in the Johor State. Assesment which has been made shows that this new concept of rural centres will bring about a lot of physical and socio-economic benefits to the rural people particularly to those who are living in the traditional villages. The implementation of this new concept of rural centres will be faced with only one big problem, vis inadequate of administration and legal set-up to excute the plans. If suggestions outlined in this study are adopted, the proposed concept could be implemented successfully and the overall rural development objective could be realized.

• Item Type: Thesis (MPhil(R))
• Qualification Level: Masters
• Keywords: Area planning and development, Southeast Asian studies.
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences
• Supervisor's Name: Forbes, Miss Jean
• Date of Award: 1988
• Depositing User: Enlighten Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:1988-74109
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 23 Sep 2019 15:33
• Last Modified: 14 Jun 2021 09:00
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.74109
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/74109