Confronting Inequality: Linking the impacts of large-scale land development to the quality of life of local communities in peri-urban area

The process of peri-urbanisation has, in many cases, involved large-scale developments. While these developments are expected to regenerate the regional economy, they pose significant challenges to local communities. These challenges include displacement, changes in property rights security, and a decrease in spatial quality, which may directly or indirectly affect the community's quality of life, resulting in their unsustainable livelihood. Since a holistic assessment that looks at the link between these challenges is lacking, this research aims to explore the extent to which the impact of new town development, as a specific form of large-scale development, contributes to changes in the quality of life of communities who lived or worked in the area before the development started. The research focuses on local communities in the kampungs (enclaves) around two new town development areas in Indonesia. A total of 3444 households were surveyed to provide an overview of the spatial quality of the areas, with 150 primary respondents involved to examine the relationship between large-scale development and a community's quality of life (QoL). Furthermore, PLS-SEM was applied to statistically test this relationship. The findings indicated that most of the community's QoL decreased. Statistically, the change in QoL was not significantly influenced by all variables of the main impacts of large-scale land development. Only three of the eight variables involved were proven to influence changes in QoL in both new town development areas: type of displacement, socio-economic quality, and the property rights security level. Interestingly, this research indicates that different geographical locations have shown different levels of impact due to large-scale land development, especially in influencing the increase in motivation of displacement, environmental quality, and physical quality variables in terms of QoL changes.