The importance of contractors' performance appraisal system for biophilic city development in Malaysia

Abstract

Biophilic city is a new term of sustainable cities that connects human to nature by lessening the barrier between them. With a few additional elements from the sustainable city approach, the biophilic city brings human to nature instead of nature to cities or human as adopted by the former concept. Since biophilic city is a new approach not just in Malaysia but worldwide in general, no guideline has been published including the appraisal system on the contractors undertaking biophilic city projects. Many problems occur in the construction industry, and it persists across different projects. Problems related to performance, safety and environment amongst all need to be controlled by both the government agencies and private bodies such as developer and consultant. Even so, the contractor's appraisal system should also be implemented to ensure the above problems can be reduced or eventually avoided. If regular development facing those problems, a new approach of cities development will face even worst. Hence, this paper, via literature review, aims to investigate the importance of contractors' performance appraisal system for a biophilic cities development project in Malaysia. This found that: (1) since biophilic city is alient to many, appraisal system for contractor's performance is important; (2) the current contractor's appraisal system should be improvised by adding the biophilic elements and; (3) contractors need to mutually understand the appraisal system and the concepts of biophilic cities approach. Since there is a significant need to implement the contractor's performance appraisal in biophilic city development in Malaysia, this paper suggests that a deeper study in terms of the critical success factors of current contractor's performance appraisal system should be conducted as to ensure their best performance in reducing or avoiding future problems in biophilic city development in Malaysia.