Geographic Thinking Concepts

• Spatial Significance – focuses on understanding location and what makes it important.
• Patterns and Trends – focuses on how the characteristics of a location change over space or time.
• Interrelationships – focuses on making connections between the events or factors that give a location its characteristics.
• Geographic Perspectives – focuses on exploring what a place means to different people and how it impacts them.

Spatial significance is all about how you:

• identify where places are located on the earth’s surface based on natural and/or human characteristics (What is Where?).
• determine the unique characteristics of places (Why There?).
• analyse the importance of spatial distribution of people, plants, animals, resources and earth’s physical processes (Why Care?).

Geographic Perspective is about determining what makes a place noteworthy. As far as tourism is concerned, every attraction has something that makes it special. This could be a:

• natural feature (e.g., the Rocky mountains),
• historical event (e.g., the Plains of Abraham),
• cultural importance (e.g., Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump), or
• man-made creation (e.g., Canada’s Wonderland).

Patterns and trends are all about how you:

• identify characteristics that are similar and repeated within and between places or regions (What is Where?).
• determine if these characteristics repeat over time (What is Where?).
• analyse why characteristics are similar and/or repetitive (Why There?).
• determine the importance of why the characteristics are similar and/or repetitive (Why Care?).

In more simple terms, patterns and trends are about what changes and what stays the same. Specifically, patterns deal with changes over space at a moment in time, and trends deal with changes over time at a place or in a region.

Interrelationships help geographers to:

• identify the natural or human features that may exist between or within each other (What is Where?).
• determine how the connections interact to form an interrelationship (Why There?).
• analyse the importance of this interrelationship as it relates to natural processes or human activities (Why Care?).

Essentially, this concept of thinking is about understanding how two things are connected or how they impact each other. Nothing exists in isolation, and using the idea of interrelationships helps us to understand the complexities of the connections.