Published in 1969, Ian McHarg's Design with Nature argued that the natural environment should be the primary basis for land-use decisions and that development should work with rather than against ecological processes. McHarg and his students at the University of Pennsylvania developed the 'layer cake' overlay method, combining transparent maps of features such as soils, slope, hydrology and habitat to identify intrinsically suitable locations for different uses. The technique anticipated the analytical logic of geographic information systems. The book became one of the most influential works in landscape architecture and ecological planning.
It founded modern ecological planning and the map-overlay method, shaping environmentally driven site analysis and later GIS practice.
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