William Bunge


William Wheeler Bunge Jr. 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 USA and Canada.

Personal life

Bunge served in the American Fifth Army during the height of the Korean War, November 1950 to November 1952. He completed a Masters 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.
His first job teaching geography was at the State University of Iowa, from 1960-1961. Bunge reports he was fired from this position. He worked as an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan from 1962-1969 but became disillusioned with conservative US politics, racism, and the Vietnam War and its supporters. He was blacklisted as a communist sympathizer by the US government and thus rendered unemployable. He moved to Canada and taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1970–1971 and at York University. He resided in Quebec, and in 1998 became the "Representative of the Parti Communiste du Québec to the Federal government".
Bunge was married to 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.

Academic contributions

Bunge made major contributions to theoretical, quantitative spatial analysis earlier in his career. 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.
He did not work in an academic environment after 1973, when he was employed at York, colleagues finding him too threatening and confrontational. 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.
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. 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. Barnes 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

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