Penilaian Makna Kualiti Hidup dan Aplikasinya dalam Bidang Pengurusan Persekitaran di Malaysia

Reassessing the meaning of urban quality of life in Malaysia is part of the contribution to the environmental management discipline. Most operational definitions for quality of life are based on number of facilities or infrastructures avalaible in urban areas. These assume that increasing the number of facilities will increase the quality of life. This article argues that quality of life do not have a static definition, even for the same environment. The meaning of quality of life is argued to be defined by experiences of the people and their environment. This resulted in a negotiated meaning for quality of life. An empirical study was conducted in Seremban to evaluate the quality of life of urban dwellers based on three main components; public readiness, urban environment and urban accessibility. A total of 550 respondents were, selected based on types of houses; high cost, medium cost and low cost residential, village houses and squatter areas that represent the diversity of social economic status in Seremban. From these quality of life aspects, the research shows that the strength of Seremban lies in its people based on the high score in the self- readiness component compared to the urban environment and urban accessibility components. Quality of life among urban dwellers is found to be homogeneous even for different socio-economic backgrounds. The negotiated meaning of urban quality of life in this research is then applied to environmental management needs for urban development in Malaysia.