Urban growth in last three decades in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

This paper empirically examines an integrated study of urbanization in Kuala Lumpur City, Malaysia, by using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing. The study explores a multi buffer ring method to investigate the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban growth between 1989 - 2014. We classified Landsat images from 1989, 2001 and 2014 with a Maximum Likelihood classification scheme to produce land-cover maps and find four types of land cover: Settlement, Agriculture, Forest and Water. Then, the area coverage for all the land use types at different points in time were measured and coupled with the distance from the city center. Later on urbanization density from city center to outside for every 1 km distance is derived from 1 to 50 km. When comparing the time cuts of 1989 and 2014 at the distances of 5, 8, 15, 20 and 30 km, the city density is found as being increased at very high pace. Temporally urban expansion show fast and slow growth stages with high speed growth shifting to the east side of the city. In general, the population, traffic conditions, industrialization, and policy are the major factors that influenced the urban expansion.