Fitzgerald

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If we see Fitzgerald differently now compared to when it was written, it is because the .... because Fitzgerald is equally a loving hue and .... I still believe that.
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 ‘egregiously 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,

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transparent logic, and painstaking documentation. But it is precisely these former qualities, not the latter, that account for the book’s creative and political brilliance. Forty years after its publication, Fitzgerald remains fresh, energetic, compelling, and relevant. One of Bunge’s purposes in Fitzgerald was to do human 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 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, geometry. In a 1959 letter, he wagged his finger at Richard Hartshorne: ‘We are achieving universality at the theoretical level . . . We are theoretical or fundamental geographers’1 (emphasis in the original). With assistance from his father, Bill Senior, and Torsten Ha¨gerstand, who had

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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 geographical 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 neighbourhood 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 Expeditions’. 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 democratic 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 subsequently 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 neighborhood 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 flourishing 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 geographical 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 universals 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

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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, ‘Correspondence 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, ‘Correspondence 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 Geographical Expedition: A Personal Report. Detroit: Society for Human Exploration. Bunge WW (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution. 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 Revolution. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Cox KR (2001) Classics in human geography: Bunge, W. 1962: Theoretical Geography. Lund Studies in Geography, 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 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.

Progress in Human Geography 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.

Commentary 2: Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Bunge’s own Fitzgerald home, where Bill, a burly white guy, waspy-looking with a goatee beard, is Geography of Revolution as surrounded by black faces, by female black faces, geography classic? 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 whiteflight, 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 connections, 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 property machine, was already in motion even in the late 1960s. Soon it would learn how to commodify knowledge and knowledge producers.) That deep sense of nostalgia is most vivid in the assorted black and white photos, documentarystyle photos animating Fitzgerald, some of bright-faced, smiling black kids, dancing kids, hopeful kids. Another is of a block meeting at

young women sitting calmly, reservedly, dignified in their rage. It is amazing how much of Bunge’s text is brought alive by black AfricanAmerican women, by young neighborhood organizers 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 political 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 produced, 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 perpetrate, 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 problems 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 rejection 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 ‘objectivity’ but a geography that fiercely interprets data, calls a spade a spade. Bunge puts cartography through its political paces: the simplicity of descriptive maps makes for better propaganda, he says, for better agitation, for better ammunition 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 scheduled to hack through part of Fitzgerald; Marygrove College’s campus was encroaching, and so was Bunge’s employer’s, Wayne State’s; walls were going up, bisecting and dividing people 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,

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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 compulsive 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 factory, 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 wonderful 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 potential 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 Fitzcarraldo.) 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 committed 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

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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 geographers, 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 geographers 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 disciplinary ‘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

Progress in Human Geography

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 discipline 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 Revolution. 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 exploration: reflections on Bunge’s ‘Geographical Expeditions’. Antipode 27(1): 49–70.

Commentary 3: Reflections on Bill members and histories are not only centered anaBunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of a lytically but embodied, their struggles revealed and reveled in. Revolution What drew me to William (Bill) Bunge’s classic urban text Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution 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 dedication and acknowledgements of the book’s opening to its concluding pages, community

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 theories 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 straightforward ways – the racialized and classed geographies 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 revolution, as academics competed for the most appropriate and most popular theories to explain social polarization, hypersegregation, and economic 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 playground. Part archaeologist and part folk geographer, Bunge had me enthralled at first perusal of the pages. Fitzgerald is accessible. Even those who cannot 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 collaboration, shared knowledge and accessibility. This simple premise proves deceptively challenging in its execution. It is also depressing to contemplate in retrospect as we have not collectively 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 geography. 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 thousand words, a few images from Fitzgerald bring to life in mere moments any theoretical accounts

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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 discipline 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 destabilize 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 practices of feminist scholars and contemporary

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social scientists at large, particularly after the cultural turn. Essentializing identities and interpretations 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 complex realities they reflect for contemporary urban researchers serve not to hinder us on the path to social justice, but rather fuel the conviction 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 ourselves 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, racialized 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 exaltations of radical possibilities in American cities.

Progress in Human Geography

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 collaboration 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 creatively 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, geographic 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 Barnes T (2001) Lives lived and lives told: Biographies of geography’s quantitative revolution. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19(4): 409–429.

Classics in human geography revisited Brown M and Knopp L (2008) Queering the map: The productive tensions of colliding epistemologies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98: 40–58. Bunge WW (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co. Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.

9 Merrifield A (1995) Situated knowledge through exploration: reflections on Bunge’s ‘Geographical Expeditions’. Antipode 27(1): 49–70. Mountz A and Tweedy A (2010) Queering Syracuse: Remember when? Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning and Community Literacy 9(2). Mountz A, Moore E, and Brown L (2008) Participatory action research as pedagogy: Boundaries in Syracuse. ACME 7(2): 214–238.