Indera Syahrul Mat Radzuan

Incentives for the conservation of traditional settlements: residents' perception in Ainokura and Kawagoe, Japan

This study emerged from the author(s)’ experience in conducting a survey with the residents in Ainokura Village at the Toyama Prefecture and the Kawagoe in the Saitama Prefecture, Japan. With the comprehensive legislations bound into the cultural heritages sophisticated systems, Japan is often regarded as one of the leading countries in promoting cultural heritage protection despite the tendency for westernization and modernization influences prevalent after World War II. At present, the establishment of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in Japan has increased public awareness for the conservation of the cultural heritage including tangible and intangible heritage. This research intends to look at the perceptions of the residents on the implementation of the cultural heritage conservation and incentives programme in those two traditional settlements. By using questionnaires and interviews involving the residents in the two areas, this study has employed the quantitative and qualitative approach in order to gather factual data. This research is conducted in order to address the overarching question of whether the incentive programmes that have been created for the community have been found to be suitable for the fulfilment of their aspirations and real needs.

Influence of location on home buyers’ purchase decision

Owning a home at a bad location is detrimental to its market value. Besides, demographic forces have influenced the demand for housing over the past decades. This study identifies the type of location attributes and demographic characteristics’ influences on housing purchase decisions of home buyers in Iskandar Malaysia. This research intends to collect data through questionnaire. The respondents are the house owners of Taman Nusa Sentral. The data is then analysed with correlation to study the relationship between demographic and location variables. Most of the demographic characteristics, except Gender and Income, have significant influences on location facilities and services when it comes to house purchase decision.Owning a home at a bad location is detrimental to its market value. Besides, demographic forces have influenced the demand for housing over the past decades. This study identifies the type of location attributes and demographic characteristics’ influences on housing purchase decisions of home buyers in Iskandar Malaysia. This research intends to collect data through questionnaire. The respondents are the house owners of Taman Nusa Sentral. The data is then analysed with correlation to study the relationship between demographic and location variables. Most of the demographic characteristics, except Gender and Income, have significant influences on location facilities and services when it comes to house purchase decision.

Exploring Training Factors as Incentive Tools in Safeguarding Cultural Heritage of Malaysian Traditional Settlements

Training and education has become one of the key aspects in improving incentives programme, thus leading to improved cultural heritage preservation within heritage sites. The study investigated the relationship between the importance of training as a tool on incentivizing cultural heritage in selected traditional settlements in Malaysia. Data were collected through a survey from a total of 63 respondents in both Morten and Chitty Village situated at Melaka Historic City and was analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics 23.0 by means of running an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The 10 indicator items studied for tangible heritage training have satisfactory factor loadings ranging from 0.59 to 0.77 and distribute across 2 extracted factors having satisfactory cumulative variance of 58.36 per cent. Furthermore, the themes of the distributed indicator items enabled the labelling of the 2 extracted factors to being ‘soft skills’ and ‘hard skills’ for tangible heritage training. Similarly, the 9 indicator items studied for intangible heritage training have satisfactory factor loadings ranging from 0.41 to 0.90 and distribute across 2 extracted factors having a satisfactory cumulative variance of 64.42 per cent. Furthermore, the themes of the distributed indicator items across the 2 extracted factors enabled the labelling of the factors to being ‘intangible arts’ and ‘legislation’ for intangible heritage training. These results found that the ‘explored’ indicator items are fit to be used in further structurally modelling both tangible and intangible heritage training as non-financial incentives in sustainably preserving traditional settlements. The implication of this research is its serving as an information support tool for such intended modelling purpose.

A rethink of the incentives programme in the conservation of South Korea’s historic villages

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the overarching question, which was whether the incentives programmes formulated for the community have been found to be suitable to the aspirations and needs of the local residents. Design/methodology/approach – This study has resulted from the authors’ experience through conducting a survey with the local residents in three locations, namely the Bukchon Hanok Village located at Seoul metropolitan city; the Hahoe Village, Angdong and the Yangdong Village, Gyeongju; both the latter are located towards the west of the Korean peninsula in the Gyeongbuk-do Province. This study has hopefully tried to analyse the residents’ perception of the effectiveness of the current incentives policy by using the Bennett’s programme evaluation method. Findings – Results show that there was a divergent direction between the current incentives policy and the local aspirations between sites. In most cases, the cultural heritage conservation has been found to be a catalyst to f...