Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution

FOREWORD TO THE 2011 EDITION

FOREWORD TO THE 2011 EDITION Fitzgerald Then and Now Nik Heynen and Trevor Barnes There are few classic books in human geography, but Bill Bunge has written two of them: Theoretical Geography ([1962] 1966) and the one that you are holding in your hands, Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution ([1971] 2011). At times it seemed unlikely that either would see the light of publication . When they finally did, Theoretical Geography was initially ignored, while Fitzgerald was treated to some shockingly bad reviews. The flagship journal of the Association of American Geographers, the Annals, took the unusual step of devoting two separate reviews to Fitzgerald. Neither wascomplimentary . In his review, David Ley said that the "text lapses into unabashed polemic, self-righteous rhetoric," and insofar as "thestudy is judged by the criteria of scientific method its failings are not difficult to discern" (1973, 133). The other reviewer, Peirce Lewis, was even more damning.Compared to Bunge's now "minor classic" Theoretical Geography, Lewis wrote, Fitzgerald was a "bitter disappointment." The work was "egregiously awful," "grossly disorganized," "a shoddy undisciplined book' (1973, 131-32). In a spirited reply, Bunge countered, ending with the hope that in spite of this rocky beginning Fitzgerald "like Theoretical Geography... will also age into respectability" (1974,485). Those words seem most prescient now more than thirty-five years after they were written. But"age into respectability" doesn't really capture thesubsequent changing disciplinary fortune of Fitzgerald. The book remains defiantly unrespectable. Fitzgeraldis a tortured book, controversial, angry, partial, withering, hyperbolic, with non sequiturs and unsubstantiated claims. It is at the opposite polar end of traditional academic scholarship defined by dispassion, measured judgment, comprehensiveness , balance, precision, transparent logic, and the painstaking documentation of sources. But it is precisely these former qualities and not the latter that account for the book's creative and political brilliance.1 Forty years after its publication, Fitzgeraldremains fresh, energetic, compelling, and relevant. One of Bunge's ends in Fitzgerald was to practice geography differently. 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 are now socialized has significantly altered. Fitzgerald helped to change it. We all now contain, perhaps more than we would like to think, a little bit of Bunge, a little bit of Fitzgerald. Bill Bunge—physically in stature and intellectually within the field of geography—is a towering figure, the focus of much disciplinary commentary and interpretation (Barnes 1996; Cox 2001; Goodchild 2008; Heyman 2007; Horvath 1971; Merrifield 1995; Mitchell and Heynen 2009; Peet 1977). He even has his own longish Wikipedia entry.2 In introducing Bunge and his book, we divide this essay into two parts. First, we trace the arc of his intellectual development up through the early 1970s, when Fitzgerald was published. Bunge begins life as an arch spatial scientist. A member of the late 1950s University of Washington "space cadets" or "the Garrison Raiders," as Bunge prefers, he was fervid in his belief that geography should be a mathematical , law-seeking science, aspiring to the universal, derogating the unique. But sometime during the mid-1960s he was knocked off course, diverted by a series of turbulent political and social events. Centered around war, race, and poverty, these events increasingly skewered America, bringing overt and sometimes violent division and conflict. Mathematical abstractions and appeal to universals didn't help. But being there, literally walking around trying to make sense of the concrete features of his own particular neighborhood, Fitzgerald in inner-city Detroit, did help. Fitzgerald was where the turbulence came down to earth and for Bunge was made visible and comprehensible. Second, we frame Fitzgerald against the subdiscipline of urban geography and its study of the inner city. Until Bunge's work, the inner city was generally ignored by urban geographers. If it was considered at all, the inner city was treated (following the Chicago School) as the "zone of assimilation." Immigrants entered the inner city, socialized and acculturated, and then moved out. While that model might hold for European immigrants, it clearly did not apply in the 1960s to the large numbers of African Americans who had been flooding into northern industrial cities like Detroit since the 1940s. Unlike the immigrants portrayed by the Chicago School, African Americans already had been in America for several generations. But having moved into inner cities, like Detroit's Fitzgerald, they were unable...