Toward a Sustainable Campus: Comparison of the Physical Development Planning of Research University Campuses in Malaysia

摘要

Sustainability is a critical issue nowadays to ensure human’s continuity in these world. As the centre of research and knowledge, many universities worldwide have made the sustainability as a goal in developing their campus. This is because the physical development planning of the campus is an effective tool to create a sustainable campus. The objective of the research is to study the effectiveness of the physical development planning of research universities campus in Malaysia in creating a sustainable campus by referred to the physical elements in campus development planning. The scope of this research is limited to the physical planning of the campus.? There are four research universities has been chosen as the subjects namely Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Universiti Malaya (UM) and Universiti Putra Malaysia. Research methods used consisted of questionnaire, behavioural observation and visual study. A total of?400?respondents were?chosen?to?ensure the success of?the questionnaire and?the total?divided equally?on?each?campus. Next, data?obtained?was statistically?analyzed?and?compared?between?each campus. The results obtained by questionnaire then referred to the findings obtained from other techniques to get a detailed explanation. The research found that there are some weaknesses in the physical development planning of the campus that studied, especially in term of accessibility. In addition, the findings also indicate that the campus that planned as a compact campus lead a minor sustainability issue compared to the wide and dispersed campuses. Thus, the compact campus can lead to achieve the sustainability.