Framework for Recreational Park Suitability Sites

Despite the recreational parks in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), many students are still facing difficulties in accessing these recreational parks within the campus because their locations and distances are not favorable for the students to access them from their on campus residential areas. Moreover, despite the enactment of the Malaysian Guidelines for Recreational Parks Development, there is still inadequate planning guidance about the suitable sites to locate the existing recreational parks in the study area, which in turn made the students to abandon the existing facilities present in the parks. This paper is part of an on going research aimed at developing a suitable recreational park’s site(s) framework for recreational park development in the study area (UTM). The proposed conceptual framework will provide a holistic guidance on how the criteria for the location of the suitable recreational park in the study area can be generated through extensive literature review and field survey. More so, it will as well depict how GIS and Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) can be integrated in creating the required datasets and attaining at a better decision based on the criterions evaluation. This will enable the university’s planning department to acquire the GIS data which is currently lacking; all the available data are in hard-copy not in GIS soft-copy format. It will further enable the planning department in understanding the student’s problems in relation to the existing recreational parks in the study area and to further understand how to obtain those criterions for the location of a suitable recreational park in the area. As this paper is part of an on going research; the base-map of the study area is currently obtained from the Department of Works, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, which was scanned and transferred into a GIS software and digitized which enable the researchers in obtaining the required spatial data layers of the area for criterions evaluation and assignment of weightings based on the criterions obtained from literature review and those to be obtained through field survey (questionnaires). Therefore, this paper presented how a suitable recreational park sites framework for recreational park development in the study area (UTM) was developed.
Index Terms— Geographic Information System, Multi-criteria Decision Making, Recreational Park, Suitable Site(s)