边缘人与核心贡献:威廉·邦奇与美国地理学的创造空间

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

Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · 2017
被引 24
ABS 3

中文导读

借鉴阿瑟·库斯勒的创造力理论,通过分析美国地理学家威廉·邦奇的两部截然不同但同样具有创造性的著作,探讨地理学中的创造力如何产生,并强调边缘空间对创新的催化作用。

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.

地理学创造力研究科学史城市地理学激进地理学