Ian McHarg (1920 –2001), Scotsman, landscape architect, and educator, is without a doubt, though he never used the term, one of the principal founders of geodesign. His 1969 book Design With Nature not only expresses the value of designing with nature (primarily as related to the fields of landscape architecture and regional planning) but also sets forth a geo-based technique for viewing and overlaying thematic layers of geographic information to assess the best, and worst, locations for a particular land use (McHarg 1969). McHarg’s overlay technique was probably influenced by Manning’s work.
McHarg was also one of the first to advocate a multidisciplinary approach to environmental planning, which until that time had been dominated by narrow views and singular values. Supported by a series of grants while leading the landscape architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, he was able to assemble a team of scientists and experts from a wide variety of disciplines in the physical, biological, and social sciences (McHarg 1996).
While McHarg’s technique was completely graphical (non-digital), his book gave birth to a whole new way of thinking about regional planning and design. It not only laid out a clear procedure for assessing the geographic context of a site or region but also presented that procedure with a clarity that quickly led to the digital representation of geographic information (as thematic layers) and assessment strategies (e.g., using weighted overlay techniques), which, in time, contributed to the conceptual development of GIS.