(a) The urbanisation process is particularly pronounced in Asia and Africa, where too many urban residents grapple with extreme…

Contemporary urbanisation is disproportionately concentrated in the Global South, shifting global demographic weight toward Asia and Africa. In both continents, rapid demographic transitions and agrarian distress drive rural-to-urban migration, creating hyper-urbanisation and primate city dominance without commensurate industrialisation. According to UN-Habitat and World Bank reports, over 50% of Sub-Saharan Africa's urban population and over 30% of Asia's reside in informal settlements, characterised by high economic informality, tenure insecurity, and deficits in water, sanitation, and electricity. Urban poverty intersects with social exclusion along caste, ethnic, and gender lines, resulting in sharp spatial segregation and governance deficits. Mega-cities like Dhaka, Lagos, and Mumbai face compounding vulnerabilities to climate shocks—urban heat islands, flooding, and sea-level rise—alongside public health crises. However, the trajectory varies: Asian urbanisation features prominent state-led interventions—such as China’s hukou system regulating migration and India’s Smart Cities Mission and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana—whereas African urbanisation has largely unfolded amid post-structural adjustment deregulation, weak municipal planning, and uncontrolled peri-urban sprawl.

Physical View of Space and Spatial Analysis

The conceptualisation of geographical space has directly dictated the evolution of analytical paradigms. Space was traditionally viewed as absolute space—a fixed, neutral Cartesian container grounded in Newtonian physics. This physicalist perspective framed classical chorology and regional inventory. During the Quantitative Revolution, this container view enabled positivist spatial science, reducing geographical phenomena to geometric properties, isotropic planes, and distance-decay functions in gravity and spatial interaction models, which form the bedrock of modern GIScience and spatial statistics.

Critiques of this rigid physicalism prompted the adoption of relative space (Einsteinian, measured in relational time-cost metrics) and relational space (Henri Lefebvre’s produced space, Edward Soja’s thirdspace). Recognizing space as socially produced rather than a passive physical background enabled the rise of behavioural geography, which analysed cognitive mapping and perception. It also catalyzed Marxist political economy, notably David Harvey's analysis of spatial fixes in capital accumulation, as well as post-structuralist, feminist, and post-colonial geographies that scrutinize power asymmetries, spatial justice, and lived experience.

Heartland Theory in Contemporary Geopolitics

Halford Mackinder’s Heartland Theory (1904) posited that the pivot area of Eurasia, inaccessible to maritime power, formed the primary fortress of terrestrial dominance, bordered by the Inner (Rimland) and Outer Crescents. His closed heartland thesis argued that controlling Eastern Europe enabled control of the Heartland, the World-Island, and ultimately global hegemony.

In contemporary geopolitics, Mackinder's thesis remains evident in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where Moscow attempts to preserve its strategic buffer and secure access over the Eurasian gateway against NATO’s eastward expansion, which operates as an Atlanticist containment strategy. Simultaneously, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) builds continental overland transport corridors across Central Asia to consolidate Heartland integration while extending economic reach into the Rimland.

However, Mackinder's strict geographic determinism faces substantial limitations. Nicholas Spykman’s Rimland thesis demonstrated that the littoral margins, rich in resources and population, possess superior geopolitical weight. Modern technological transformations—including intercontinental air power, nuclear deterrence, cyber warfare, and space capabilities—have diminished the physical insularity of the Heartland. Furthermore, the rise of an economically dynamic Indo-Pacific and multipolar maritime alliances (such as the Quad) shifts the fulcrum of global contestation from continental Eurasia to maritime sea lanes.

Addressing these urban vulnerabilities and geopolitical frictions requires transitioning from technocratic, exclusionary spatial planning to inclusive, climate-resilient urban governance, while replacing zero-sum territorial containment with multilateral, rules-based spatial cooperation.