Fitzgerald: A Return to the Neighborhood and Its Contemporary Structural and Geographical Contexts

William Bunge's Fitzgerald: Portrait of a Revolution, initially published in 1971, is an enthralling verbal and visual account of the historical and geographical development of a one-square-mile neighborhood in Detroit. The original analysis of the Fitzgerald neighborhood was based on intensive field-based research conducted in a theoretical context of race and racism. The research reported here maintains that context but updates Fitzgerald's account of the neighborhood's built environment through a spatial analysis that uses parcel-by-parcel data generated in Google Earth and Google Street View instead of data collected in the field. Current spatial patterns of deterioration in the built environment are similar to those described in Fitzgerald, but positive sites are also apparent and often colocated with negative ones.