Effectiveness of Urban Farming Program in Providing Multiple Benefits to the Urban Community in Malaysia

Residents have chosen to be living in urban regions in recent years largely due to the accessibility of job opportunities and public services. These led to a fast increase in the amount of people live in urban regions and cities. As a result, a large amount of the property used for agricultural activities was transformed into factories, housing units, and highways. This also resulted in a decrease in food production, growth in food prices and food import bills as the country now relies on food imports especially rice, fruits and vegetables, that can prevent the fostering of urban farming activities and then provide beneficial information essential to form it into a more consumer friendly program. Moreover, studies on urban farming are somewhat few in Malaysia and this study can become helpful for future research. The study focused on small-scale agriculture projects, such as community gardens, and community-level programs such as community supported agriculture and farmers markets. The study found that how urban agriculture enhances community resilience and wellbeing. This is the necessity for the Malaysian urban authorities to give more appropriate identification and support to city dwellers and promote them to develop the practice of urban farming

Inter-Organizational Conflict (IOC) in Building Refurbishment Projects; an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) approach

Over the past years, there has been an expanding intrigued in building refurbishment projects because of the alter in financial conditions and the accentuation on sustainable development. Increasing demand for building refurbishment projects will lead to an increase in organizational interactions in the construction works as building refurbishment works involve interactions among many different organizations and it can cause Inter-Organizational conflict (IOC) among organizations involved in projects. This paper adopted an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) approach to analyses IOC in building refurbishment projects. For this study, a five-point Likert Scale was adopted to ensure the instruments of the study are reliable. The researcher ultimately sent questionnaires as a web-link and email invitation to 1050 construction firms and 733 architectural firms.  The questionnaire sent to managers and professionals from construction and architectural firms in Malaysia. Finally, one-hundred-seventy-nine (179) refurbishment projects formed a database for this paper. The finding of this paper shows the IOC factors that contribute to the improve the performance of building refurbishment project can be conflict during the construction stage, conflict between the client and the consultant, task expectations, basic responsibilities, final duration, project’s goals, conflict between the client and the contractor, final cost, final quality, standards of behaviors, conflict between the contractor and the consultant, interference and conflict during the design stage