The list of Parliament seats in Malaysia by urban development category can be found here.

For further reading on the methodology please read this blog post.

The categories are:

  • Rural = villages (kampungs) / small towns / farmland distributed within the seat. Rural seats tend to be physically large with a low population.
  • Semi-urban = larger towns and/or numerous small towns, may include villages as well
  • Urban = cities where a majority of the seat is covered by some form of urban development

This classification was done by us based on Google Maps satellite imagery and SPR maps. This is not the same as SPR’s own internal classification of seats. You can find our reference maps here (link).

We have obtained a gridded map of Malaysia that defines persons per square kilometre, based on a grid cell size of 19 square kilometres. This population estimate is based on an extrapolation of the 2000 National Census. This map will enable us to :

  • Estimate the size of the constituency
  • Estimate the min, max and average population density
  • Define a range of rural, semi-urban and urban categories, instead of just three
  • Perform seat classification at the State Assembly Seat (DUN) level

However this is time consuming and will likely take months to prepare. A sample of the Peninsular Malaysia map is shown below, rendered as a heatmap ranging from Green (low population density) -> Yellow -> Orange -> Red -> Purple (highest population density). The SPR maps are overlaid over it, and by toggling visibility we can identify which cells belong to which constituency. For area calculation we can subdivide the 19 square kilometre grid into 4.75 or 1.1875 square kilometre grids, depending on how small the related constituency is.

GriddedMsia_SPR1

Published On: May 30th, 2013 / Categories: Statistics / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , /