Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution by: Bunge, William, Foreword: Heynen, Nik, Foreword: Barnes, Trevor
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Schenkman Publishing Company, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, oblong format, black cloth with white lettering on spine. 247 pages, b&w photographic illustrations, color folding map tipped-in at front pastedown, rear pictorial endpaper. This on-the-ground study of one square mile in Detroit was written in collaboration with neighborhood residents, many of whom were involved with the famous Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute. This work, at its core, is dedicated to understanding global phenomena through the intensive study of a small, local place. Beginning with an 1816 encounter between the Ojibwa population and the neighborhood's first surveyor, William Bunge examines the racialized imposition of local landscapes over the course of European American settlement. By 1967 the neighborhood was mostly African American; Black Power was ascendant; and Detroit would experience a major riot. Immersed in the daily life of the area, Bunge encouraged residents to tell their stories and to think about local politics in spatial terms. His desire to undertake a different sort of geography led him to create a work that was nothing like a typical work of social science. The jumble of text, maps, and images makes it a particularly urgent book and a major theoretical contribution to urban geography that is also a startling evocation of street-level Detroit during a turbulent era. Clean copy, no dust jacket.