A marginal man and his central contributions: The creative spaces of William (‘Wild Bill’) Bunge and American geography

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to develop a geographical account of creativity by drawing on Arthur Koestler’s work. For Koestler creativity is sparked by the clash of two incompatible frames of meaning, and resolved by a new act of creation. Missing from Koestler’s account is geography, however. To show how geography might be brought into Koestler’s scheme the paper works through a detailed case study within the recent history of geography: the writing and publication of two very different but equally creative books by the well-known American geographer, William Bunge (1928–2013). In the late 1950s at the University of Washington, Seattle, Bunge wrote Theoretical Geography (1962), a meticulously executed hymn to the mathematics of abstract space, and which helped transform the discipline of geography into spatial science. Then during the late 1960s in inner-city Detroit Bunge wrote Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971), and quite a different hymn. It was a paean to urban rebellion, to grassroots neighbourhood insurrection. It focussed not on abstract space, but a very concrete place: the one mile square that formed the Detroit inner city neighbourhood of Fitzgerald. In this case, Bunge’s book was a forerunner to radical geography. Catalytic to both of Bunge’s acts of creation, the paper argues, were the marginal spaces in which he wrote, marginal in the sense that they were distant from mainstream American academic geography. Incorporating them provides not only an explanation creativity within geography, but also geography’s own geography.