Spatial Modelling of Migration Decision-Selectivity in the Klang Valley Region, Malaysia

Introduction

The study on human mobility, especially internal migration, is very important according to its relevance to development policy (Obudho, 1994; Willis, 2010; Mohd Fadzil and Ishak, 2011; Mohd Fadzil and Ishak, 2014). This is because migration is one of the key drivers of urban growth and economic developments. In recent years, migration trends and patterns have become increasingly important as a result of urbanization dynamics and socioeconomic changes (Greenwood, 1997; Kloos et al., 2010). Therefore, many developing countries in the world are facing uncontrolled migration streams. In Malaysia, for example, the patterns of urban-urban and urban-rural movement have been relatively popular compared to rural-urban, manifesting in the implementation of regional development policies and strategies, e.g. corridor economic regions, rural transformation policy in the country. The similar scenario happened in Brazil, where there was an increase of migration flow to medium-sized towns and heavier rates of return migration (Kloos et al., 2010). As a consequence, migration increases the issues of urban sprawl, reclamation of agricultural land, environmental degradation as well as potentially to bring unmoral or unhealthy lifestyles to the destination’s society such as drug addiction, snatch thefts, free sex, obesity, etc. In addition to this, many studies have shown that migration also increases exposure to disease infections, transmissions and spreading (Kloos et al., 2010). These negative impacts are actually added to the strain of a shortage of housing, urban facilities, social services, traffic congestion, jobs or labor market, particularly in urban areas, and therefore, has indicated the importance of migration studies in the development planning context - especially in projecting migration concentration flows as spatially-strategic information to formulate intervention strategies and future urban development policies. In Malaysia, only a few researchers have focused on this and thus made this shortfall unsolved (Mohd Fadzil, 2010).

This inevitable spatial phenomenon is directly influenced by spatial-social and spatial-economic factors (Mohd Fadzil, 2018a; Mohd Fadzil, 2018b) that bring a higher volume of people to cities to pursue great opportunities, social well-being, and satisfaction in life (UNDP, 2009). Moreover, migration is a dynamic behavior, but the available data is quite limited (Plane and Rogerson, 1994; Skeldon, 1998; Caglar, 2014), especially for urban planning purposes. As expressed earlier, this situation leads to difficulties in planning and managing urban growth, especially to fulfil what migrants want and the same time to intervene in what they have created. At this point, urban sectors -particularly planners - are obligated to understand and estimate the migration behavior (or its distribution), even though it is a very complex task (Mohd Fadzil and Ishak, 2011; Plane and Rogerson, 1994; Mohd Fadzil, 2018a).

Dealing with this issue, Mohd Fadzil (2018a) has developed a migration potential model, the so-called MGP model. This model incorporated migration decision-selectivity factors to identify the migration decision-selectivity (destination choices) within cities. Further, it is an alternative approach for generating useful information about migration behavior that relies on urban planning purposes. Hence, this paper attempts to demonstrate the capability of the MGP model for spatial modelling the distribution of migration in the Klang Valley, Malaysia.