4th International Science, Social Science, Engineering and Energy Conference
11th-14th December, 2012, Golden Beach Cha-Am Hotel, Petchburi, Thailand
I-SEEC 2012
www.iseec2012.com
Equating the principles of abundance as competitive inputs
for sustainable peripheral city-regions
Fatimah Yusofa , Faizul Abdullahb
a&b
Department of Town & Regional Planning,
Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying,
Universiti Teknologi MARA, 40450 Shah Alam, MALAYSIA
c1
ftim02@yahoo.com, c2handai303@yahoo.com,
Abstract
Most contemporary researchers on competitive city-regions have agreed on the shifting of traditional
economic inputs and indeed, reckoned that knowledge and innovations are substitutes to the trust of
regional competitiveness inputs in the austerity of global competition. Since then, the plethora and fusion
of new interest generated until the termed learning region was conceived, which of course, reciprocate
with the new dialectical debates on city-regions’ competitiveness. Although it is justifiable for scholars to
explore the variation in approaches to the foundational construct of competitive city-regions, nonetheless,
it seems geographically biased, as it specifically emphasized to only major cities or other core
megalopolis areas. It is a quandary for most urban and regional planners and geographers alike to focus
solely on those erudite researches, when the scholarships based on the thriving literatures on competitive
city-regions, have had insufficiently merit the power of the mass that enabled to generate knowledge and
creativity subtly, – the regions’ communities. It is unfortunate since the sustaining deprived cities and
marginalized societies within the peripheral city-regions are been detached with deceiving notes, which
absolutely defeat the principal of abundance. Geographically, these biased defined peripheral cityregions at all time are been depicted as lagging, vulnerable, been insecure, unstable, conflict, complex and
uncertain and predominantly governed by the elusive shadow economy, not viable to planned and what
more to managed. Thus, the central theme to this insight is to strike a referendum conceptually by
reciprocating the scarcity principal in the peripheral cities region and converting the abundance as
resourceful competitive inputs. The concept is hedge to the acculturation of learning among the unlearn
communities, and turning it into the highly sought after capital, for nations’ wealth. It is hope, this insight
could redefine city-region’s sustainability framework by capitalizing the principles of abundance, the
communities themselves, so they are as well be creative and knowledgeable – the foundation in equating
the principles of abundance as the competitive economic inputs for a more sustainable peripheral cities
regions.
Keywords: Marginalized peripheral city-region, competitive region and learning communities.