Perceptions of Malaysian Citizens towards Smart Cities Development

Show, Bee Wen (2024) Perceptions of Malaysian Citizens towards Smart Cities Development. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology.

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Abstract

In this 21st century, there are more and more people intending to migrate from rural to urban in pursuit of a higher standard of living. This phenomenon will cause the urbanisation rate to increase and lead to an unbalance in the population. Therefore, this issue will further give rise to ‘urban diseases’ such as population congestion, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, natural disasters, poverty, resource leakage, rising crime rates, etc. However, developing smart cities in urban areas is one effective policy to alleviate the problem. Even though the idea of smart cities has been around for a long time, Malaysia still perceives it as novel and fresh and this nation has not spread among the Malaysia citizens. Therefore, this research aims to provide insight by investigating the public perceptions of the smart city. A literature review and questionnaire survey are conducted to achieve the research objectives which include the appropriate characteristics, critical barriers and drivers of smart cities development in Malaysia. This research study adopted the quantitative research method, and the data was collected by distributing the questionnaires to the Malaysian citizens countrywide by using convenience and snowball sampling methods. Then, the data collected will be analysed using Relative Importance Index (RII) and descriptive analysis. The results showed that “Smart Environment”, “Smart Digital Infrastructure” and “Smart Living” are the most appropriate characteristics of smart cities. Besides, the most critical barriers are finance concerns and budget restrictions, security and privacy issues, and lack of standardisation, while the most critical drivers are infrastructure and technology readiness, encouragement of openness, transparency, accountability, and economic development stability. In a nutshell, this research study provides guidance to the government and urban policymakers in boosting and facilitating the development of smart cities in Malaysia by collecting the opinion of the general public.