Matriz DAFO

The initial impetus to the geographical expedition

“movement”—if it’s possible to call it that—rested of course in the turbulent social and political atmos-phere of the 1960s: protests against the imperialist war in Vietnam, the May 1968 insurrection in Paris, and the proliferation of civil right demonstrations and large-scale rioting on the part of oppressed and impoverished urban populations in the United States.

These widescale and cataclysmic events provided a Zeitgeist in which many geographers were compelled to reconsider the conceptual and practical basis of their discipline (see Harvey and Smith, 1984). For those most radicalized by such a state of affairs, this was to be a heart-wrenching process of reevaluation which prompted a necessity for greater social relevancy in their geography, as well as a concomitant rejection of an erstwhile “nice” or status quo geography (Harvey, 1973: chap. 4). This was to involve a deep conviction to an intellectual and political project intent on changing society and fashioning a critique of dominant values, ideology, and scholarly practices. These concerns were at odds with the inherently capitalistic and imperialistic geographical establishment, and many radical geographers, like Bunge, were forced out

of their jobs, marginalized and ostracized from academic geographical circles (see Horvath, 1971).

(Bunge, from his Quebec “exile,” continues to remain something of a geographical persona non grata today.) At the time, the pursuit of intellectual and societal transformation was no place for the career-orientated.⁴ Hitherto, Bunge’s research was, like that of many who later turned toward radical reinterpretations of spatial and social phenomena (notably Harvey), rooted in the positivistic tradition. His Theoretical Geography (1962) (which he dedicated to Walter Christaller) employed mathematical modeling and mapping techniques to attack, inter alia, Hartshorne’s insistence on locational uniqueness. This commitment to mapping, it should be noted, remained a dominant motif of Bunge’s radical geography. But what had changed was the target and scale of Bunge’s focus. In

“Perspective on theoretical geography” (1979a: 170), for example, he passionately describes the way in which a stay in a black ghetto hotel in Chicago for the 1966 Martin Luther King demonstrations taught him

“how you have to ‘get ready to kill the world’ to walk across the street to get a corned beef sandwich; that is, I could make it on ‘the mean streets’—an indispensable skill for urban exploration in antagonistic systems.” In Detroit, moreover, a young black woman, Gwendolyn Warren (who became Director of the Detroit Geographical Expedition), taught Bunge a further lesson on urban reality: children were starving to death and being killed by automobiles in front of their own homes. For the neophyte Bunge, this experience had a powerful effect on his geography; and as he recounts (1979a: 170), Warren and other ghetto dwellers were

“furiously interpreting the world all around me that I could not see because my life had been spent buried in books . . . [This] caused me to reverse my scale and I wrote a book about one square mile in the middle of black industrial Detroit.”

Yet, the said book, Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (Bunge, 1971), didn’t start out as a geography text. Nevertheless, the collection of highly charged maps and evocative photographs—in a large, atlas-size format—emphasized the usefulness of academic geography while convincing Bunge of the urgent political necessity to “bring global problems down to earth, to the scale of people’s normal lives”

(1979a: 170).⁵That, for Bunge, had to be a geographer’s raison d’être: in blunt terms, one had to work at being useful. Unsurprisingly, this fundamental insistence necessitated a categoric rejection of contented

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“campus geography” which, according to Bunge, tends to sever theory from practice and prioritizes citing as opposed to sighting.⁶Crucial here was the practice of exploration: the construction of a critical vantage point that wasn’t an exotic quest of geographical plundering or escapism, but rather a “contributive” expedition.

Indeed, Bunge (n.d.: 48–49) claimed that the seven mile journey from rich suburban Detroit to its poor inner city is a trip half-way around the world in terms of infant mortality rates. And as he deduces, “If half-way around the world is compressed into just seven miles, only a micro-mapping of it could show even the massive features of its geography.”

Such a geography tended “to shock because it includes the full range of human experience on the earth’s surface; not just the recreation land, but the blighted land; not just the affluent, but the poor; not just the beautiful, but the ugly. In America, since most of the humans live in cities, it implies the exploration of these cities” (Bunge, 1977a: 35). Geographers, Bunge insisted, had to take their geographical knowledge to the poor, and local people were to be incorporated in expeditions as both students and professors. Ironically, Bunge retained the label “expedition” in an attempt to subvert the exploration practices of the nineteenth century. Now, an expedition was to realize its full potential by helping—rather than destroying—the human species, and hence ensure the collective survival of humankind in a machine age which Bunge saw as intent on threatening itself with annihilation.

For Bunge, survival became the fragile thread binding logic, ethics, and politics (Bunge, 1973a, 1973b). And he did not pull any punches about where his own political loyalties lay: they were and remain virulently anti-capitalist and anti-racist. Thus, Bunge’s geography was informed by a deep commitment to socialism:

It is an illustration of the nature of the mental labor called geography. Geography has been the overwhelming force in leading me to such a deep

‘political’ position. Having lived and struggled in this neighborhood of Detroit called Fitzgerald, from which I write, how could I avoid directing my attention to this region? And in the dialectics of work, the commerce between the labor and the worker, how else could my work not help shape what I think—and, therefore, as a geographer, shape me?

(Bunge, 1973a: 320)

There is a certain affinity here with the situated, partial, located and responsible standpoint that Haraway asserts as a means of gaining “objective knowledge” of the world. To be sure, much of Bunge’s (1973a) essay on “Ethics and logic in geography”

anticipates and cuts an epistemological swath for Haraway’s more recent radical conviction within the history of science “to see faithfully from the stand-point of the subjugated.” From such a situated and responsible perspective, the expedition would strive to be a democratic rather than an élitist pursuit.

Consequently, the points of view of local people themselves were given a relative priority. Professional geographers worked in unison with “folk geographers:”

practically informed lay persons such as members of residents’ associations, community activists, socially-responsible citizens of all stripes, as well as taxi drivers who, says Bunge, possess an invaluable and sensitive knowledge of urban environments that should be tapped.⁷An important proviso, however, was that the

“power of the expedition itself, who hires and fires, who writes checks and so forth must be in the hands of the people being explored, risky as that sounds to academics” (Bunge, 1977a: 39).

The prototypical Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (D.G.E.I.), established in the summer of 1969, incorporated these prerequisites and went on to implement a program of community research and education for the black residents of Detroit. Horvath (1971: 73–74) writes that the main purpose of D.G.E.I.

is to “find a way in which geographers could make available educational and planning services to inner city Blacks; it represents an attempt by the black community and some professional geographers to build an institution that would link the university to the needs of the disadvantaged Blacks in the city of Detroit.” The interconnection between research and education was therefore fundamental to the operation of the expedition. In terms of the educational component, professional geographers (explorers) set up free university extension/outreach programs on cartography and geographical aspects of urban planning (in conjunction with the University of Michigan) with the aim that any black person could walk off the street and take 45 hours of university credit courses, and if they attained a C grade or better could transfer with sophomore status to any Michigan university (Horvath, 1971: 73–74). All campus teachers were volunteers, the use of practical case studies was the major teaching mode, and the local community

participated in any decisions over structure and content of the courses. Such circumstances enabled a productive commerce between campus explorers and local people: “[b]eyond learning the technical skills of the academics, these folk geographers learn to generalize their experiences to a larger world. In return, the campus explorers gain valuable knowledge and insights into the community” (Stephenson, 1974: 99).

Field research was equally crucial to the expedition concept. Each participant in the expedition was involved in research around issues such as political districting, interregional money flows, transportation problems, cartographic skills, and the geography of child death (see Antipodean Staff Reporters, 1969).

This information gave considerable grist to the local community’s mill insofar as it enabled them to organize themselves around the issues investigated. In 1971, for example, the D.G.E.I. was active in lobbying against the encroachment of Wayne State University into the Trumbull community (particularly into Mattaei Playfield; see Field Notes (4), 1972). Field work data gave sustenance to any political program because it could be presented to city politicians/planners and reports made political lobbying much more effective (Stephenson, 1974). The D.G.E.I. produced A Report to the Parents of Detroit on School Decentralization (see Field Notes II, 1970) that highlighted the very real difficulties low-income blacks faced just showing up for free classes: some would come hungry and others couldn’t afford bus fares. Geographers and local community participants responded with a series of maps indicat-ing a more suitable and socially just geographical allocation of educational resources, which gave black community leaders a technical study so effective that Detroit Board of Education was compelled to respond (see Horvath, 1971).

Elsewhere, field work investigated the relationship between children and machines in the context of inner city community spaces (or lack of them) allocated for children’s play. Expedition research emphasized how low-income high-rise environments, with their dearth of play space, force children onto the streets where they are vulnerable to speeding traffic. Understanding the complex issue of machine versus human space—

especially how it varied between rich suburban kids and their impoverished downtown counterparts—

became a pivotal concern of the expedition program, as did the antagonism between community and non-community land use. General environmental quality of urban landscapes was also brought under intense

scrutiny: hidden landscapes, private landscapes, landscapes of the powerless, toyless landscapes, rat-bitten baby landscapes were all explored with considerable élan.

Many innovative and imaginative ideas were later deepened and sharpened when Bunge moved from Detroit to Toronto, where he helped establish the Canadian–American Geographical Expedition (CAGE) in October 1972 (the results of which were published in The Canadian Alternative (Bunge and Bordessa, 1975;

see, too, Stephenson, 1974). Here, five geographical scales were charted: (1) One square mile of Toronto (the base camp neighborhood of Christie Pits); (2) Toronto itself; (3) Canada; (4) North America; and (5) the world. Exploration focused on the way in which each scale impinged upon three different types of spaces: human-kind, machine-kind, and nature. These five different “scales of survival” in their mutual interaction reveal the relationship between the unique and the general, especially as it unfolds, concretizes, and impacts upon the daily life of low-income urban populations.

So in both Detroit and Toronto theory and practice were galvanized, and expedition “manuals” and field data reports (like the Field Notes series) were compiled to promote community activism and enhance local empowerment (see Colenutt, 1971). Expedition teams in both cities spent time in local people’s homes and professional geographers were taught lessons seldom discussed on university campuses. Many of the ideas propounded by Bunge went beyond the received geographical literature of the time. Impoverished black people brought their desperate and often lurid experiences to the campus classroom, where academic geographers would listen, attempt to understand, and henceforward incorporate these insights into intel-lectual and political endeavor.

Researchers grappled to gain trust and respect in the base camp community (Bunge, 1977a: 39). The geographer studied the area from the point of view of the people that live there, investigating in the process

“what is geographically out of whack” (1977a: 37). They did so, Bunge says, by “getting a ‘feel’ of the region. By talking, listening, arguing, befriending, and by making enemies of the humans in the region.” The geog-raphers’ fate was the fate of the locals. Accordingly, geographers could be held responsible and account-able simply because they were “expected to live with the mess they help create.” Such situatedness and positionality meant that the geographer was able to be

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called into account. This excursion beyond the cloisters of the academy was the route whereby geographers became both rigorous and useful in their inexorable quest for knowledge. But it meant, too, a redefinition of the research problematic and intellectual commitment of the researcher away from a smug campus career to one incorporating a dedicated community perspective which pivots around what Howe (1954) in another context called a “spirit of iconoclasm.”

RESITUATING GEOGRAPHICAL