Urbanisation in the George Town conurbation and its impact to the environment

Rapid urbanisation has brought positive social and economic impacts in term of improving public facilities and employment opportunities respectively. However, drastic increase of urban population has increased the demand for land to cater for the need of growing population. This paper aimed to monitor urban expansion in the George Town conurbation and evaluate its impact on the environment. The study used mixed methods approaches where at the first stage remote sensing (RS) technique using Erdas Imagine 2016 were utilised to monitor urban expansion from series of Landsat images and geographic information system (GIS) using ArcMap 10.3 proprietary software were used to map areas underwent land use transformation. Then, the households' survey using questionnaire was administered to investigate the perception of the community residing in the areas undergoing rapid urbanisation. The findings indicated that the respondents residing within urbanised areas where 73.44% of respondents in Bayan Lepas and 59.62% of...