William Bunge

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William Wheeler Bunge Jr. (born 1928, La Crosse, Wisconsin; died October 31, 2013, Canada) [1] [2] was an American geographer active mainly as a quantitative geographer and spatial theorist. He also became a radical geographer and anti-war activist in the US and Canada.

Contents

Personal life

Bunge served in the American Fifth Army during the height of the Korean War, November 1950 to November 1952, where he served in the Chemical, Biological and Radiological (CBRN) Wartime School at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. [3] He completed a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1955. He studied under Richard Hartshorne, the first professional geographer he had ever met. He gained a PhD in quantitative geography from the Department of Geography, University of Washington in 1960. [4] [5]

His first job teaching geography was at the State University of Iowa, from 1960 to 1961. Bunge reports he was fired from this position. He worked as an assistant professor at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan from 1962 to 1969 but became disillusioned with conservative US politics, racism, and the Vietnam War and its supporters. He was blacklisted as a communist sympathizer by the Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Internal Security Committee, who included him as one of 65 radicals. [2] [6] He moved to Canada and taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1970 to 1971 and at York University (1972–1973). He resided in Quebec, and in 1998 became the "Representative of the Parti Communiste du Québec to the Federal government".[ citation needed ]

Bunge was married to Elizabeth Carpenter (Betty), from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He met and married Donia in 1971. They met in Guadeloupe and married in Canada. He was father to Susan, Jane, Jocelyn and Carl.[ citation needed ]

Academic contributions

Bunge made major contributions to theoretical, quantitative spatial analysis earlier in his career (Bunge, 1962). Almost at the same time, he became an urban radical, supporting applied geography of social change and justice in inner city America and Canada. He formed the Detroit Geographical Expedition in partnership with Gwendolyn Warren in 1968 and the Society for Human Exploration in 1971. The Toronto Geographical Expedition ran from 1973. All of these projects turned geography "in" to the immediate surroundings and issues of the inner city, rather than "out" to exciting new discoveries in foreign climes (Bunge 1971).

He did not work in an academic environment after 1973, when he was employed at York, colleagues finding him too threatening and confrontational (Wisner nd; Goodchild 2008). In 1975 Bunge and Ronald Bordessa's book The Canadian Alternative: Survival, Expeditions and Urban Change contained a chapter entitled "Machineism versus Lifeism" in which they wrote that "Lifeism, which places man-kind's survival as central..." must defeat its opposite, Machineism, the open-ended worship of machines. [7]

Bunge himself came to dislike academic institutions. Goodchild reports "The graduate seminar he gave at the University of Western Ontario was well received by many of the students, but his openly expressed disgust with the political positions of some of his colleagues made it impossible to renew his contract. He drove taxis for a time in Toronto, and eventually settled in small-town Quebec." Nonetheless, his latest book was published in 1988, and was well received (Bunge 1988).

His legacy has been discussed in several articles and his work on "geographical expeditions" to the uncharted areas of the inner city, rather than to distant shores, was path breaking (Warren et al. 2019; Katz 1996; Merrifield 1995). It involved policy lobbying, direct support to poor households, and analysis of urban problems. He said of his Detroit Expedition "Exploring humans in a meaningful way is fraught with physical danger."

His cartographic representations of spatial patterns, particularly in theoretical geography, were also innovative, although somewhat eclipsed by later innovations in geographic information systems (Goodchild 2008). Barnes (1996) suggests he remained wedded to 'scientific' socialism, setting him apart from colleagues like David Harvey who soon rejected their roots in quantitative geography and scientific method when they took on Marxist forms of analysis. Bunge consistently argued that geometrical patterns and morphological laws express disadvantage and injustice under contemporary capitalism, and that identified patterns could be remedied by rational methods.

Publications

Discussion in the literature

Geographical Expedition and Institute. In T.J. Barnes and E. Sheppard (Eds.) Spatial Histories of Radical Geography North America and Beyond, Oxford: Wiley and Sons. pp. 59-85.

References

  1. ↑ Barnes, Trevor J. (2016). "The odd couple: Richard Hartshorn and William Bunge". The Canadian Geographer. 60 (4): 458–465. Bibcode:2016CGeog..60..458B. doi:10.1111/cag.12321.
  2. 1 2 Bergmann, Luke; Morrill, Richard (25 September 2017). "William Wheeler Bunge: Radical Geographer (1928–2013)" . Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 108 (1): 291–300. doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1366153 . Retrieved 28 September 2024.
  3. ↑ Barnes, Trevor J (May 8, 2017). "A marginal man and his central contributions: The creative spaces of William ('Wild Bill') Bunge and American geography" . Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 50 (8): 1697–1715. doi:10.1177/0308518X17707524 . Retrieved 18 March 2025.
  4. ↑ Goodchild, Michael F (2008). "2 Theoretical Geography (1962): William Bunge". In Hubbard, Phil; Kitchin, Rob; Valentine, Gill (eds.). Key Texts in Human Geography. SAGE Publications Ltd. pp. 9–16. ISBN   978-1412922616 . Retrieved 18 March 2025.
  5. ↑ "William Garrison 1925 – 2015". Memorials. American Association of Geographers. Retrieved 12 January 2024.
  6. ↑ Rosenbaum, David E. (1970). "House Panel Lists 'Radical' Speakers". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 May 2025.
  7. ↑ Bunge, William; Bordessa, Ronald (1975). The Canadian Alternative: Survival, Expeditions and Urban Change. York University. pp. 414–422. Retrieved 15 July 2025.
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