Spatial organization refers to the arrangement of physical and human objects on the Earth's surface. Points, lines, areas and volumes are the four geometric features with which spatial organization can be easily described. For example a school can be thought of as a point, connected by roads (which are lines) leading to nearby parks and neighborhoods (which are areas because they have length and breadth or some irregular measurable shape), whereas a lake in a park can be thought of as a volume (because it has an area and depth).

The descriptive process of spatial organization uses concepts such as location, distance, direction, density, and arrangement (linear, grid-like) to capture spatial relationships. The U.S. interstate highway system can be described as lines connecting points over an area. The arrangement of the U.S. interstate highway system is partly grid-like (with north-south and east-west routes) and partly radial or star-shaped (as in the highways around Atlanta). The U.S. interstate highway system has a higher density in the eastern U.S. than in the western U.S.