FREE ENTRY / National Geographic - Spatial Thinking: Inspiring Action through Place-Based Solutions

Understanding our world starts with place and space — everything happens somewhere. Spatial thinking involves visualizing, interpreting, and reasoning information using location, patterns, scale, relationships, movement, and change over time in order to understand our world and develop impactful solutions relevant to a place and its unique conditions for those who live there. It is much more than the ability to create, use and understand maps. We continue to face big, complex, and rapidly changing challenges such as climate adaptation and mitigation, water scarcity, biodiversity conservation, and preserving and better understanding cultural knowledge and human stories. Spatial thinking is a powerful tool for understanding and telling stories of the past and present of a place and its inhabitants. It can help us understand a place’s unique conditions, how people and our planet relate to those conditions, and create and implement solutions needed to address challenges of a place.