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William W. Bunge (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution

Article  in  Progress in Human Geography · September 2011

DOI: 10.1177/030913251103500502

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Classics in human geography revisited
William W. Bunge (1971)
Fitzgerald: Geography of a
Revolution. Cambridge, MA:
Schenkman Publishing Co.
Commentary 1
That Bill Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of a
Revolution has gone unrecognized as a classic
in Progress in Human Geography’s roster of
‘classics in human geography’ struck us as a
problem in need of remedy; an ill in need of cure.
Hence, we invited Andy Merrifield and Alison
Mountz to join us in a celebratory remediation.
The University of Georgia Press is in the process
of republishing Bunge’s book nearly 40 years
after it was first issued. We expect, maybe even
insist, that geographers who have not yet read
the book because either they ‘missed it’ the first
time around (and which would now include the
majority of the working profession, even the
‘senior’ co-author of this paper), or they could
not find a copy at the time, to order the new
edition (Bunge, 2011).
If you do, you will own a classic. It was not an
instant classic, though. Pierce Lewis (1973: 131)
in his review for the Annals of the Association of
American Geographers called Fitzgerald a
‘bitter disappointment’. The work was ‘egre-
giously awful’, ‘grossly disorganized’, ‘a shoddy
undisciplined book’ (Lewis, 1973: 131–132).
Bunge (1974: 485) replied, ending his rejoinder
with the hope that Fitzgerald ‘will . . . age into
respectability’. It has not. But that is why it is now
a classic and is being reissued. Fitzgerald is a
tortured book, controversial, angry, partial,
withering, and hyperbolic. It is at the polar
end of traditional academic scholarship defined
by objectivity, measured judgment, balance,
Progress in Human Geography
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transparent logic, and painstaking documenta-
tion. But it is precisely these former qualities, not
the latter, that account for the book’s creative and
political brilliance. Forty years after its publica-
tion, Fitzgerald remains fresh, energetic, compel-
ling, and relevant. One of Bunge’s purposes in
Fitzgerald was to do human geography differ-
ently. He pushed the discipline in a new direction,
helping to transform it into something else. If we
see Fitzgerald differently now compared to when
it was written, it is because the discipline in which
we have become socialized has significantly
altered. Fitzgerald helped to change it. We all
contain, perhaps more than we would like to
think, perhaps more than we would like to know,
a little bit of Bunge, a little bit of Fitzgerald.
The road to Fitzgerald was paved with
universal intentions. Bill Bunge was one of Bill
‘Garrison’s Raiders’ at the University of
Washington Geography Department in the late
1950s (Bunge, 1988: ix–xxviii). His PhD thesis,
‘Theoretical geography’ (originally titled
‘Fundamental geography’), showed that all
geographical phenomena ineluctably succumbed
to the universal scientific explanatory principles
of Bunge’s favorite kind of mathematics, geome-
try. In a 1959 letter, he wagged his finger at
Richard Hartshorne: ‘We are achieving univers-
ality at the theoretical level . . . We are theoreti-
cal or fundamental geographers’1 (emphasis in
the original). With assistance from his father,
Bill Senior, and Torsten Hägerstand, who had
2 Progress in Human Geography
visited the University of Washington in 1959,
Bunge published in 1962 Theoretical Geography
with Gleerup Press in Lund. Thirty-nine years
later, it was Bunge’s first ‘classic in human
geography’ (Cox, 2001).
The same year Theoretical geography was
published, Bunge became an Assistant Professor
of Geography at Wayne State University,
Detroit. He ‘moved to the edge of the ghetto
redline of Detroit, the Fitzgerald community,
a Martin Luther King neighborhood’ (Bunge,
1988: xvii). At first, the particularities of
Fitzgerald took a back seat to the universal
as Bunge talked Greek letters and the axioms
of Euclid with former, now diasporic, ‘Raiders’
in the back room of a New Brighton, MI,
tavern, the once-a-month home of the Michigan
Interuniversity Community of Mathematical
Geographers (MICMOG). But as the 1960s
American maelstrom gathered force, universals
more and more lost their grip on Bunge’s geo-
graphical imagination. Even as a ‘Raider’ Bunge
was political, buying a special suit and tie for
graduate student picketing (Tobler, 1998).
But by the mid-1960s the situation was much
worse. ‘The Crime had started’, as Bunge
(1979: 170) wrote:
Selma . . . Peace demonstrations in New York, in
Washington, Civil Rights demonstrations in
Jackson, Mississippi . . . I went to Chicago for the
Martin Luther King demonstrations in 1966.
While there I stayed in the black ghetto in a hotel
at 67th and Stony Island. I learned how you have
to ‘get ready to kill the world’ to walk across the
street to get a corned beef sandwich . . . [A] young
black woman, Gwendolyn Warren, from Fitzgerald
in Detroit . . . was filled with hatred towards me
because I did not notice the children being murdered
by automobiles in front of their homes or children
starving in front of abundant food. (Bunge, 1979:
170)
The 1967 riots in Detroit were a turning point.
During ‘the smoke of revolution . . . for six days
in July 1967, I lived in everyone’s definition of
freedom – no state . . . [It] had been driven out
. . . I was free to think freely, so I did. I wrote
a peace book, Fitzgerald’ (Bunge, 1988: xix).
Concrete particularities consequently became
as important as universal abstractions. From
inside Fitzgerald, he began studying the neigh-
bourhood intensively, an area of a square mile.
As he wrote to Hartshorne in 1968, ‘I suppose no
square mile has ever been studied as intensively’.2
Along with study went ‘Geographical Expedi-
tions’. But they were not Expeditions of Empire,
or even run-of-the-mill urban geographical field
trips. They were neither ‘a ‘‘nice’’ geography,
[n]or a status quo geography’, but a geography
that:
shocks because it includes the full range of human
experience on the earth’s surface . . . It is also dem-
ocratic as opposed to an elitist expedition. Local
people are to be incorporated as students and as
professors. They are not to be further exploited.
Their point of view is given first. (Bunge, 1969)
In that light, in 1968 Bunge with Gwendolyn
Warren inaugurated the Detroit Geographical
Expedition and Institute (DGEI). The DGEI
offered free college extension courses to Detroit
inner city residents. Sponsored by the University
of Michigan, the first course was run in the
summer of 1969 with an enrolment of 40 –
‘Geographical aspects of urban planning’
(Horvarth, 1971: 74). Michigan State subse-
quently took on the sponsorship, expanding the
geography offerings, and in 1970 listing courses
from 10 different departments with an enrolment
of over 400. In doing so, DGEI facilitated
research by the community in its own neighbor-
hood for its own ends. That is what the extension
courses were about. They were part of a larger
pedagogical project, not to indoctrinate, but to
provide pragmatic tools for Fitzgerald residents
to get things done, to change their world for the
better. Change was to come from within the
community and not outside of it.
Bunge was pioneering ‘a people’s geography’,
participating in grassroots campaigns to recover
the inner city for its residents. He was also
Classics in human geography revisited
becoming a public intellectual. In The Crisis and
The New York Times, he informed readers about
historical problems of racism, and the promise
of geography for improving people’s lives
(Bunge, 1965a, 1965b). In The Crisis, he begged
for the chance for geographers to use their science
for the benefit of society. Fitzgerald was part of
that same effort at a public appeal, and explaining
its coffee-table-book-like features: its oversized
format, pull-out text boxes, big font characters,
with the writing broken up by gritty, compelling
black and white photographs, arresting figures,
and large, easy-to-read maps.
For Bunge, the discipline of geography
should be engaged in the radically democratic
project of providing pedagogical resources to
enable suppressed and exploited communities
to manage for themselves, to facilitate flourish-
ing geographical lives (Heyman, 2007). But for
that to happen geographers needed to change.
Fitzgerald showed how. They must go into the
field, be involved, and actively connect with the
communities they study. Needless to say,
Bunge’s position was not well received. He was
fired from Wayne State in 1969. He went to
Canada, driving a taxi in Toronto for many
years. He reckoned this was where a true geogra-
phical education could be had: ‘You will know
more, if you have driven a cab, than a man sitting
there with a factorial ecology printout’, he said
in an interview (Dow, 1976: 4).
While the discipline may not have yet come
around to believing that all geographers should
be cabbies, since Fitzgerald was first published
it has increasingly come around to believing that
geographers should actively participate and
interact with the communities they study. It has
come around to the view that there is no God’s
eye view of the kind that mathematical univer-
sals promise. Instead, we are altogether at
ground level. Research is not some specialized
pure activity, the preserve of a few elite experts.
But it needs to be carried out collectively, in the
interests of everyone. This was yet another kind
revolution that Bunge’s book provoked, allowing
3
us, 40 years on, to recognize that Fitzgerald is a
classic.
Trevor Barnes
University of British Colombia, Canada
Nik Heynen
University of Georgia, USA
Notes
1. W. Bunge to R. Hartshorne, 1 June 1959, American
Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, Papers of Richard Hartshorne, ‘Correspon-
dence William Bunge’, File F, Box 194.
2. W. Bunge to R. Hartshorne, 15 October 1968, American
Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, Papers of Richard Hartshorne, ‘Correspon-
dence William Bunge’, File F, Box 194.
References
Bunge WW (1962) Theoretical Geography. Lund: C.W.K.
Gleerup.
Bunge WW (1965a) Racism in geography. The Crisis
October: 494–497.
Bunge WW (1965b) When to organize. The New York
Times 27 June.
Bunge WW (1969) The First Years of the Detroit Geogra-
phical Expedition: A Personal Report. Detroit: Society
for Human Exploration.
Bunge WW (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolu-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co.
Bunge WW (1974) Fitzgerald from a distance. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 64: 485–489.
Bunge WW (1979) Perspective on Theoretical Geography.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
69: 169–174.
Bunge WW (1988) Nuclear War Atlas. New York: Basil
Blackwell.
Bunge WW (2011) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolu-
tion. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Cox KR (2001) Classics in human geography: Bunge, W.
1962: Theoretical Geography. Lund Studies in Geogra-
phy, Series C1. Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup (second edition
published in 1966). Progress in Human Geography
25: 71–77.
Dow MW (1976) William Bunge interviewed by Donald
Janelle. Geographers on Film Transcription 3 November:
1–7.
4 Progress in Human Geography
Heyman R (2007) ‘Who’s going to man the factories and
be the sexual slaves if we all get PhDs?’ Democratizing
knowledge production, pedagogy, and the Detroit
Geographical Expedition and Institute. Antipode 39:
99–120.
Commentary 2: Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Bunge’s own Fitzgerald home, where Bill, a burly
Geography of Revolution as white guy, waspy-looking with a goatee beard, is
geography classic? surrounded by black faces, by female black faces,
Fitzgerald, Bunge’s great book on inner city
Detroit, stirs any reader at a number of different
levels. Its raw, uncompromising style, its blatant
radicalism, its engaged scholarship, hits at the
gut level, makes you angry, perhaps even
provokes you to act. Yet the text stirs other
emotions, too, more delicate, tender emotions,
because Fitzgerald is equally a loving hue and
cry for humanity, for urban life, especially for
black urban life. In a strange sense, it is a book
that might make any reader, 40 years down the
line, nostalgic. Nostalgic, because then there was
still hope, then there was still radical activism,
geographical activism, scholarly engagement.
Back then, urban communities had not been
entirely decimated by blockbusting and white-
flight, by drugs and deindustrialization, by
bitterness and bad faith. And there was a role for
geographers in the heat of the action, allying
themselves with ordinary people, making con-
nections, putting themselves on the line, outside
the academy, beyond the hallowed ramparts of
university life. (Rereading Bunge reminds us
how the University Inc., as a gentrifying prop-
erty machine, was already in motion even in the
late 1960s. Soon it would learn how to commo-
dify knowledge and knowledge producers.)
That deep sense of nostalgia is most vivid in the
assorted black and white photos, documentary-
style photos animating Fitzgerald, some of
bright-faced, smiling black kids, dancing kids,
hopeful kids. Another is of a block meeting at
Horvath RJ (1971) The ‘Detroit Geographical Expedition
and Institute’ experience. Antipode 3: 73–85.
Lewis PF (1973) Review. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 63: 131–132.
Tobler W (1998) Interview with Trevor Barnes, Santa
Barbara, CA, March.
young women sitting calmly, reservedly, digni-
fied in their rage. It is amazing how much of
Bunge’s text is brought alive by black African-
American women, by young neighborhood orga-
nizers like Gwen Warren, a teenage soul sister
who shone with idealism and went on to lead the
Detroit Geographical Expedition. Between the
diminutive Warren and Bunge, the giant haystack
geographer from Wayne State, an unusual politi-
cal bond developed, a complex human affinity;
they needed one another, and both knew it, just
as their respective communities knew it.
Bunge was a privileged bourgeois kid from
Milwaukee and he is not afraid to admit it, even
if it often makes for a painful read. (‘Support
your local police,’ a sixties’ saying went, ‘beat
yourself up!’) Therein lies another complex
emotion dramatizing Fitzgerald: guilt. William
Bunge Sr., Bill’s pop, was head of the fifth
largest mortgage bank in the USA and so was
complicit in much of the redlining Bill Jr.
denounces. Bunge’s divided self considers the
rich as equally schizoid: ‘Personally, the rich are
loyal to each other,’ he says (1971: 135), ‘often
kindly, truly concerned with their children and
tremendously full of humorous sense . . . But,
at the same time, these ‘‘generous’’ people
perpetuate a system that sucks the poor dry.’
‘Being raised bourgeois,’ Bunge says (1979:
172), ‘I always knew my class were thieves.
It was the explicitness of the misery this pro-
duced, not the process, which I had to discover.’
Classics in human geography revisited
He knew the rich close-up, their world of
moneymaking, the structural injustices they per-
petrate, the rules of their ‘abstract’ oppression; it
was the concreteness, the outcome, that he had to
comprehend, had to root out. Thus the urgent
political task: to bring global and national prob-
lems down to earth, way down to earth, to the
scale of people’s normal lives, there where they
can be revealed and contested, where they can be
changed. Bunge walked the talk, moved to
Fitzgerald, gained trust within black caucuses,
within the black community, initially because
of music: Bunge was a white dude who swayed
to a black groove, understood black rhythms,
played a mean, Monkesque jazz piano, and
thereby earned street cred in the ’hood.
What emerged in Fitzgerald is a stark rejec-
tion of campus geography, of cool distance, of
citing, emphasizing instead sighting, of really
seeing, of a situated knowledge; not a cowardly
empiricism that hides behind the ruse of ‘objec-
tivity’ but a geography that fiercely interprets
data, calls a spade a spade. Bunge puts cartogra-
phy through its political paces: the simplicity of
descriptive maps makes for better propaganda,
he says, for better agitation, for better ammuni-
tion to challenge City Hall. Kids were getting
knocked down by speeding cars, hit and run
accidents involving white commuters; there was
nowhere for them to play; play space meant
either beat-up sidewalks or semi-derelict lots,
strewn with broken glass and menacing jetsam
and flotsam; slum landlords were desisting from
doing repair; buildings were becoming evermore
forlorn, ripe for resale, for inflated rents, for
future value-added; an expressway was sched-
uled to hack through part of Fitzgerald; Mary-
grove College’s campus was encroaching, and
so was Bunge’s employer’s, Wayne State’s;
walls were going up, bisecting and dividing peo-
ple around class and race.
Needless to say, Bill’s guilt-trip meant he was
oftentimes too overwhelming as a personality;
anyone who knew him, who still knows him,
who still receives his periodic phone calls,
5
monologues bemoaning – usually correctly – the
state of the world – know he is a pain in the ass,
an obsessive activist (in the worse sense), a com-
pulsive talker and ultimately a self-destructive
force. (He could not have achieved what he
admirably achieved if he had not been.) Bill
never stops talking. I once spent several days
at his Arthabaska home, a converted cheese fac-
tory, in deepest Quebec winter. Snow fell for
days on end, piled up in drifts, and we could not
go outdoors. There was no place to hide from
this brilliant, loquacious man, who is also an
insomniac! (In truth, he and Donia, his saintly
Guadeloupian wife, were gracious and wonder-
ful hosts. Bill even came to meet me at the bus
station in a massive blizzard. On the journey
back home, he let half-a-dozen neighborhood
kids hitch a ride in the backseat.)
For one brief moment, for one brief sparkling
instant, Bunge’s Fitzgerald illustrated the poten-
tial of the Geographical Expedition, its potential
for radicalizing the discipline of Geography, for
radicalizing the real geography of the city. For a
while a truly revolutionary theory, as well as a
truly revolutionary Geography, was glimpsed,
felt deep in the heart. Fifteen years ago, after that
trip to see Bunge, I speculated – doubtless
naively – on the possibility of reinstigating a
similar geographical venture in our own time
(Merrifield, 1995). Could we, too, I wondered
then, plan something geographical, something
radically geographical in the sense that Bunge
conceived it? (In hindsight, Bunge’s Fitzgerald
is probably as raving mad as Herzog’s Fitzcar-
raldo.) I suggested that Bunge’s work, defects
notwithstanding, did at least show geographers
a possible way into the dilemmas that should
bother us, dilemmas about our roles as commit-
ted scholars, dilemmas about what we should do
to save life on planet urban.
I still believe that. But I know now that there
will never be anyone like Bill Bunge again in
Geography. Fitzgerald is another way of telling
stories about city life, about its horrors and
threats, its joys and possibilities. Our cities
6 Progress in Human Geography
continue to crumble, disintegrate financially and
socially, yet geographers fret about tenure
reviews and research evaluations, suddenly turn
meek and subservient when their careers are put
on the line. And so, here, another emotion
strikes, strikes low and hard: how can we, today,
we as geographers, especially we radical geogra-
phers, not feel shame reading Bunge’s great
book? In a big way, we have let him down,
maybe let ourselves down, shied away from the
book’s central thrust, accepted the easy option.
That shame should, like Bunge himself, gnaw
away inside us, prick our consciences, force us
once again to consider who we are as geogra-
phers and what we are doing, how we can make
ourselves useful (or useless).
And if anyone should ask if Fitzgerald is a
Geography classic, we can laugh in their faces.
A geographical classic, yes . . . certainly; but a
Geography classic, with an upper case disciplin-
ary ‘G’? Hardly. For that would be pure hypocrisy,
would it not, given the way Bunge got ousted
from the institution, given the way Fitzgerald
has been totally ignored by the academy until
this day. (It was ignored in its own day, too:
Schenkman was the only publisher to touch the
Commentary 3: Reflections on Bill members and histories are not only centered ana-
Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of a lytically but embodied, their struggles revealed
Revolution and reveled in.
What drew me to William (Bill) Bunge’s classic
urban text Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolu-
tion is likely what drew in so many others: its
radical and yet simple centering of humanity.
Unlike so many texts written by geographers and
other social scientists, its pages prioritize people,
portrayed in large, fearless black and white
photographs of faces, families, children, homes,
street corners, and city parks. From the dedica-
tion and acknowledgements of the book’s open-
ing to its concluding pages, community
book with a bargepole, and even then Bunge
had to cough up the dough himself to pay for
printing.) Fitzgerald is no Geography classic:
how could it be, considering the way the disci-
pline has moved in the exact opposite direction
to almost everything this book says? To
that degree, anyone interested in a career in
Geography today, a career as a professional
geographer – with tenure, citations, grants, the
whole bit – should pass up reading Fitzgerald.
It is not a book for you. Should you read it,
should it touch you, inspire you, prompt you
to take action, beware and be warned: BIG
TROUBLE lies ahead . . .
Andrew Merrifield
References
Bunge WW (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolu-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co.
Bunge WW (1979) Perspective on Theoretical Geography.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
69: 169–174.
Merrifield A (1995) Situated knowledge through explora-
tion: reflections on Bunge’s ‘Geographical Expedi-
tions’. Antipode 27(1): 49–70.
Why was this so exciting and why does it
remain so? Fitzgerald somehow managed to cut
through that which can be alienating, elitist, and
exclusionary about academic texts themselves.
We use unnecessarily fancy language and the-
ories to fleetingly narrate the astounding realities
in which we live. Bunge was bold and inspired to
work collaboratively to map, document, record,
narrate, and show – in inspiringly straightfor-
ward ways – the racialized and classed geogra-
phies in which we live: where certain groups
of people and ways of life are valued over others.
Classics in human geography revisited
In the lasting hangover of the quantitative revo-
lution, as academics competed for the most
appropriate and most popular theories to explain
social polarization, hypersegregation, and eco-
nomic disparities, Bunge and his team threw
themselves into the daily grind of meaningful
political struggles for social change.
As the author of the text, and according to oral
histories passed down among geographers,
Bunge himself was not afraid to take on power
structures and ‘tell it like it is’. I am not one of
those geographers who started out loving maps.
I arrived at them more slowly and tentatively.
And yet Bunge’s were the first maps for me to
love. I reveled in the simple collecting and
archiving of dangerous materials on the play-
ground. Part archaeologist and part folk geogra-
pher, Bunge had me enthralled at first perusal of
the pages.
Fitzgerald is accessible. Even those who can-
not read might follow the history of exclusion
and struggles over inclusion and social change
in Fitzgerald. Anyone who contemplates their
environment will intuitively understand the
photographs, historical narratives, and – yes! –
even the maps. Bunge’s text was not alienating
and exclusive, but in many ways inviting and
inclusive. The text delivers on the promise of
Bunge’s expeditions to cross the divide between
academics and those they studied through colla-
boration, shared knowledge and accessibility.
This simple premise proves deceptively challen-
ging in its execution. It is also depressing to
contemplate in retrospect as we have not collec-
tively delivered on its promise in the time since.
But there is still hope that we will, which fuels
my excitement for the reissuing of the text by the
University of Georgia Press.
For all of these reasons, Fitzgerald routinely
makes its way into my classes in urban geogra-
phy. Sometimes I require students to read parts
of the text, but more often I show images from
the book on the screen. If a picture shows a thou-
sand words, a few images from Fitzgerald bring
to life in mere moments any theoretical accounts
7
of geographies of exclusion I may have been
explaining during lectures. Better yet, the images
of expeditions inspire creativity in students who
are, in turn, encouraged to explore the city, to
document the boundaries around them that they
might take for granted.
It is important to ask why something so
simple as the centering of people and place was
so radical – and remains so – to an academic dis-
cipline such as geography. Of course, the answer
requires historical context and some discussion
of the nature of academe. Today, still, it appears
radical to new students of urban geography to
revisit this past, to see that with precious
few of the mapping technologies available or
theories of social justice so in vogue today,
Bunge and his teams embarked on bold political
missions and mappings in their geographical
expeditions of Detroit’s neighborhoods.
And yet in other ways we can imagine today’s
geographic practice to be full of potential that
builds on the ideals and promise of Bunge’s
work. Collaborative research models that desta-
bilize power relations and deconstruct barriers
between researchers and community members
have taken hold. These include Participatory
Action Research (PAR) and a range of feminist
principles and methodologies. As Andy Merrifield
(1995) illustrated in his reflections on Bunge’s
project, Bunge’s work in many ways implemented
some of these feminist principles, such as situated
knowledge, or Donna Haraway’s (1988) ‘view
from somewhere’. Fitzgerald was not only rooted
in, but entirely centered the importance of place to
who we are, how we live, what we value, and what
urban futures we are offering to the next
generation.
Bunge himself embodied the contradictions
of being as much a product as reaction to the
quantitative revolution that swept the social
sciences in the 1950s and 1960s (Barnes,
2001). Of course, Fitzgerald is also a product
of its time, and so in other ways its content lies
in stark contrast to some of the theories and prac-
tices of feminist scholars and contemporary
8 Progress in Human Geography
social scientists at large, particularly after the
cultural turn. Essentializing identities and inter-
pretations of a static black culture and, similarly,
‘things that white people think and do’ abound.
Community changes are ultimately explained
as ‘biological’, but would never be interpreted
as such today. Furthermore, I gasp when I revisit
Bunge’s text and realize how much trouble
today’s Institutional Review Boards would
cause any contemporary version of Bill Bunge
embarking on a similar text. The beautiful
photos would likely be seen as a violation of
principles of confidentiality now institutionally
enshrined and regulated. How would the funding
of enrolled community members be settled in
today’s neoliberal university?
My hope is that such questions and the com-
plex realities they reflect for contemporary
urban researchers serve not to hinder us on the
path to social justice, but rather fuel the convic-
tion required to overcome those institutional
power arrangements that make possible the
incorporation of community-engaged research
into our daily work.
Fitzgerald serves as more than inspiration or
history lesson for students. It actually challenges
those of us who teach geography and who are
ensconced in the university as much as we are
the city. Fitzgerald asks us to do something more
than what we do normally in the classroom: to
move beyond the expected in our teaching, and,
indeed, beyond the classroom itself.
The reissuing of Fitzgerald invites and incites
us to return to the past. Although the present
offers distinct challenges, we must not trick our-
selves into thinking it is any more complex than
the past. Bunge and his teams soldiered on to
overcome the countless challenges they must
have faced: institutional and social norms, racia-
lized political divides, recalcitrant institutions,
and a violent state. Forty years after its initial
publication, Fitzgerald continues to influence
geographers, and we must not lose sight of the
conviction and hope it set forth in its bold exal-
tations of radical possibilities in American cities.
Fitzgerald sat on my shelf and on my shoulder
during two community-engaged classes that
I co-taught in recent years (Mountz and Tweedy,
2010; Mountz et al., 2008). These courses built
on Bunge’s impulse for community collabora-
tion by implementing Participatory Action
Research (PAR). Collectively, we imagined
American urban futures that deconstructed the
racialized, gendered, and sexualized boundaries
at work in the daily lives of Syracuseans. These
projects at once drew inspiration and departed
from the expeditions. For example, students in
one class worked organically with Syracuseans
to design histories, archives, and mapping of
LGBT communities. Following the lead of
Brown and Knopp (2008), they worked crea-
tively to locate identities that were sometimes
fluid, sometimes hidden, always overlapping
and complicated in ways that did not map clearly
as specific identities located in specific city
neighborhoods (as was the case in Fitzgerald).
In whatever ways it works its way into the
present, Fitzgerald is still a pleasure to hold in
my hands and to share with students. It feels like
the passage of a promise that we were long ago
committed to work together, across boundaries,
toward the potential and the political projects
of a better future for American cities. Maybe
Bunge served as much prophecy as prescription
for what was to come in academia at large and
geography in particular. Current interest in public
scholarship is high, and featured in contemporary
debates about the relevance of geographers, geo-
graphic research, and our roles in contemporary
social movements. Will we pick up the threads,
maps, and expeditions that Bunge left us?
Alison Mountz
Syracuse University, USA
References
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Bunge WW (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolu-
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Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science
question in feminism and the privilege of partial
perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.
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Merrifield A (1995) Situated knowledge through explora-
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Mountz A and Tweedy A (2010) Queering Syracuse:
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