He debated the direction geography should take putting forward a view that the subject needed an applied and scientific edge that harnessed the growing power of computers to make positive impacts to help us avoid and mitigate risk and cope better with disasters.
Openshaw's "Processes in urban morphology with special reference to South Shields" PhD Thesis is archived at the British Library as microfilm no.
It was compiled over several years (and for at least the latter part) whilst Openshaw worked in the Planning Department at Durham County Council.
During the same period he developed a way to estimate death or kill rates of various nuclear bombing strategies evolving computerised techniques for identifying locations with the highest concentration of something.
Openshaw strove to remove human bias from the scientific process and was a strong believer in human-competitive machine intelligence.
In 1996, as the World Wide Web began to blossom, Openshaw encouraged a growing global community of computational geographers to meet for a first international GeoComputation conference which was hosted at the University of Leeds in 1997.