I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.

I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.

I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.

GIS is waking up the world to the power of geography, this science of integration, and has the framework for creating a better future.

I want to have all that scientific information that we're building be used in designing the future so that people who make geographic decisions - and here it's not just land-use planners, but it's everyone: foresters, transportation engineers, people who buy a house - can analyze all of these information layers and design a future.

Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.

Something like 80 per cent of business decisions have a location element. In fact, it's probably higher than that.