Dr Bunge goes to Ontario: A geographical biography

This paper fills out part of the missing story of the “second act” of the life of the maverick American-Canadian geographer, Bill Bunge. It is for the period Bunge lived in Ontario, Canada, from 1970 to 1978, first around London, and later in Toronto. During that time, he developed a Canadian version of his earlier celebrated neighbourhood study of Fitzgerald, Detroit. Carried out under the auspices of the Toronto Geographical Expedition (TGE) (1972–1974), it resulted in the 1975 volume, The Canadian Alternative: Survival, Expeditions and Urban Change , written by Bunge and Ron Bordessa, Chair of Geography at Atkinson College, York University. Drawing upon both publicly and privately held archival collections of Bunge’s papers along with long interviews with those who worked with him in Ontario, the paper uses a geographical biographical approach to tell Bunge’s story. The paper argues that the very geographical move made by Bunge to self-exile in Canada significantly changed both the expedition within Toronto compared with Detroit and the writing that stemmed from it.