حسن کامران دستجردی

Many scholars believe that the city is a social innovation whose size, location, and internal organization are in terms of "power"; And many changes in the structure and role-playing of the city are due to the mobility of "citizens". The shape and appearance of the city, like the country, represents the pressure from the bottom up. Therefore, urban space processes have very low effects on the whole of politics, especially political development Competitiveness is one of the important issues that has been emphasized in urban literature in recent years and in this regard, different perspectives on the determinants of competitiveness have been presented. As a geographical phenomenon, the city has an effective role in power games and constitutes the most important spatial level of stress, action and competition in the present age. The present fundamental research with descriptive-analytical method express the fact that the necessary fields for their geopolitical study have been provided by creating a competitive environment and promoting the domestic and international competitiveness level of metropolises. Hence, an urban-scale geopolitics has made cities important actors in different geographical areas. The results of this study show that there is a relationship between the effectiveness of the roles of a place and the geographical area with its "power". That is, as the roles have more extensive and in other words the broader function, the power of geographic location increases, like global cities. Indeed, the phenomenon of the city is studied and investigated in various dimensions, with emphasis on the central elements of politics, power and competition.

One of the issues discussed in geopolitics is the role of international straits (canals); as such, it is of great importance to investigate their geopolitical and strategic role. It is because the straits are the places of distribution of power, where the competition of governments is very evident in using the potential of geographic space to achieve greater benefits and ultimately to gain power in international relations. Even in some cases, countries not located around the straits enter many ways in order not to lag behind other countries. That is to say, there is a kind of conflict and competition between countries over the use of straits, especially the countries bordering the strait. Therefore, the strategic straits play a decisive role in the power of nations and their fate and also in the foreign policy of the coastal states along with the balance of regional and global power, as a result, their study is essential for political geographers and geopoliticians. One of the most important straits in the world is the Malacca Strait whose investigation strategically and geographically provides important points. Using descriptive-analytical method and also based on statistics and figures for plotting diagrams in this paper, it has been tried to study the role, geopolitical features, and importance of Malacca Strait for coastal states and conditions as well as factors causing challenges and crises for the strategic role of the strait. According to the results, as one of the major international straits, the Malacca Strait has strategic potentials in the regional and global arena and coastal governments need to rely on targeted and strategic plans to combat the challenging processes in this strait<strong>.</strong>