The natural progression of the life of a piece of land is normally originally forest. Then, when man first steps into it, it becomes agricultural land, from vegetable planting to rubber and palm oil.
Then, after a while, that land is likely to be converted into housing and industrial. Subang Jaya was once an estate, now a thriving township.
But why halt the conversion of land from agriculture to residential and commercial purposes?
1. Land is limited. We have seen KL spread out to PJ years ago, then to Subang Jaya, now onwards to Kemuning, Bkt Jelutong, Setia Alam, Rawang shows that the trend of development is to build low, and spread out. If this continues, eventually we'll run out of forrest.
2. Preservation of water catchment areas. Selangor is running out of water. We are now building a multibillion pipeline from Pahang to meet out water needs. The further back we push our forest, the worse this scenario is going to be.
3. Inefficiency of land use. There are many old, worn out housing and industrial areas that need to be rejuvenated. However the task of doing so is made difficult economically if we keep opening up more land for low cost terrace housing.
4. Increased cost in providing public service. If we build townships spread out, cost of providing services such as roads, drainage, garbage collection, etc.
5. Massive traffic jams that we see today throughtout the Klang Valley that we today is partially a result of this. When the township is spread out, its hard to provide efficient public transport, and everyone uses cars.
6. Redevelopment to fix previous town planning mistakes. A lot of existing townships were not properly planned. As a result of that, there is lack of proper open spaces, recreational opportunities, places of worships, public services such as government hospitials, fire stations, etc. Redeveloping townships can bring corrections to this mistakes and improvements to our quality of life.
As with point #3, redevelopment is more expensive than building on agriculture land. By freezing the conversion of agriculture land, developers will be encourage to redevelop existing townships, under the leadership and guidance of the state authority.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment