Bunge, William(1928–)

William Bunge, American geographer, is accurately self-described as a quantitative analyst, spatial theorist, radical humanist, and Marxist geographer, and even at times as “Wild Bill.” Bunge did not operate well within the constrained modes of conventional academia, but his stellar significance in world geography is firmly based on a number of extraordinary theoretical and empirical contributions and on a fierce determination to participate in efforts to fight injustice and change society.

Bunge was born in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, of German American heritage and with possibly a 1/16th Ojibwa background. Despite his radicalism, he served in the U.S. Fifth Army during the Korean War (1950–1952), teaching atomic warfare at the Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare School. He received his MA in 1955 at the University of Wisconsin under Richard Hartshorne but shifted to the rival University of Washington for his PhD in 1960, as a prominent member of the pioneering “quantitative and scientific” geographers. His dissertation, Theoretical Geography, was published in Sweden in 1962 and is regarded as a forthright exposition that a theory for understanding the Earth's surface needed to be based on conceptions of geometric and topologic mathematics. That this great work could not find a publisher in the United States was a testament to a pattern of suppression of Bunge's philosophical and political radicalism.

He taught at the University of Iowa from 1960 to 1961 but was not retained, owing to his unconventional behavior. He taught later at Wayne State University in Detroit from 1962 to 1969 but was again fired for his incompatibility with normal academic rules. Subsequently, Bunge had a few visiting positions but mainly became an independent scholar. In 1970, he left the United States and has since lived in Canada, mainly in Quebec.

He founded the Detroit Geographical Expedition in 1968, an intense and astounding exercise in urban fieldwork. Out of this 2-year effort came perhaps Bunge's greatest personal and intellectual contribution, Fitzgerald: The Geography of a Revolution in 1971, detailing the operations of racism in a Detroit community; this was a new and provocative regional geography. The work is based on interviews, visual representations (photos, maps, and charts) combined with Bunge's intellectual and radical conceptions. The very idea of mapping variables never shown before—such as rat bites or hit-and-run deaths—was revolutionary. The fieldwork reinforced Bunge's intense concern for the health and survival of children. In The Geography of Human Survival of 1973, Bunge turns more broadly geographical and political, stressing on the inhumanity of dependence on machines, including those of war. The Nuclear War Atlas, published in 1988, also received significant acclaim and again ingeniously combines maps, graphs, and text.