Rendering by McCarthy/HITT
A rendering of Next NGA West
When elected officials and members of the intelligence community gathered in North St. Louis to break ground at the site of the new Next NGA West facility last November, it was a historic moment. With a $1.75 billion price tag, the new National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency campus will be St. Louis’ biggest federal investment project. Slated to open in 2025, it will encompass 97 acres of the St. Louis Place neighborhood. The largest NGA headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., the new building—along with the GeoSaurus geospatial innovation resource center at T-REX and the city’s geospatial startup community—is a strong visual indication that St. Louis is ready to take the lead in the geospatial sector.
But important work is also being done behind the scenes. GeoFutures, a group of 29 business, civic, and academic leaders is creating a unified plan for making St. Louis the destination for geospatial technology. It plans to release its findings in March, in conjunction with Saint Louis University’s Geo-Resolution 2020 conference. The biggest challenge? Creating a pool of talent. To do that, GeoFutures is looking close to home: to the children who live near the new NGA campus, and at the tools and skills they’ll need in order to work there if they choose to.
A cluster initiative, GeoFutures isn’t without a roadmap. It’s looking at how St. Louis previously grew, starting in the 1990s, into a leader in agricultural technology through such organizations as the Danforth Plant Science Center. And it’s tapped former NGA director Letitia “Tish” Long to serve on its advisory committee.
“You say ‘geospatial intelligence,’ and people go, ‘Huh?’” says Long, who began her career building acoustic intelligence collection systems for the Navy. “But you say, ‘Develop apps for your smartphone that are location-based,’ and they go, ‘Oh, OK, I get that.’” NGA already partners with educators in programs on geography-based learning. Now it’s seeking to scale them up and make them widely known and available to the Saint Louis Public Schools because the pipeline is not there, Long says. “It’s one of the biggest concerns that current industry, let alone future industry, has in St. Louis.”
The first step, Long says, is to focus on economic inequality and racial disparities in St. Louis: “Tied to that pipeline, the talent, and the workforce, we want to take advantage of all sectors of the population. One of the things we learned is that African-Americans make up 16 percent of the workforce in St. Louis, but they only make up 9 percent of the geospatial workforce.” Geospatial intelligence reaches across all types of industries—from precision agriculture to e-commerce to financial services. It’ll be crucial in the development of autonomous transportation. “It’s also a high-tech industry,” Long says, “so we need to be working with the students in K-12 when they’re making choices on their classes so that they’re getting the requisite math and science classes.” Regardless of demographics, she notes, children often aren’t prepared. GeoFutures will be developing specific initiatives to engage local kids; for example, programs to help them catch up in math and English.
The federal investment is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for St. Louis, Long says: “For the kids, for the future workforce, for the community—every aspect of it, university education and research or the public schools or the entrepreneurs—it’s so exciting to see everyone getting behind this initiative.”
FYI: Saint Louis University will host the 2020 Geo-Resolution conference on March 25. Students will present research on geospatial techniques—and first place comes with $750.
Mapping Growth
Geospatial intelligence’s impact on St. Louis
$439 billion
Global market for geospatial location data
$5 billion
Geospatial industry’s regional economic impact
$1.75 billion
Cost to build Next NGA West
27,053
St. Louis jobs in the geospatial industry
5,000
Jobs at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency West headquarters
350
St. Louis companies and organizations involved in the geospatial industry
29
Partners included in GeoFutures
1.55 jobs
Created in the region for every one geospatial job
