Dr. Garret Nelson Speaks on Geography and Community

On October 30th after sit-down dinner, President and Head Curator of the Boston Public Library Leventhal Map & Education Center Garrett Nelson gave a talk focusing on the connections between physical geography and community. The talk, titled “The Here In Togetherness: Place, Territory and the Challenge of Common Ground,” sought to bring the conversation over geography and physical location back into Deerfield’s limelight, focusing on spatial analysis, how we construct community, and how our concept of it has changed over time. 

Nelson opened his talk by examining the pre-modern world and its relatively static boundaries—a world where “the boundaries of the community are the boundaries of the government, are the boundaries of the economy, are the boundaries of the environment,” according to History Teacher and Department Chair Brian Hamilton, who organized the event. Covering a wide-range of topics, places, and times, Nelson anchored his talk in several critical questions: “How do we decide on boundaries, and who and what are we excluding?”, “How do we balance diversity and conformity when community-building?” and, referring back to his opening thoughts, “What comes next for present communities who no longer have the intimacy and constraints of the pre-modern ‘village-style’ community?”

Aside from these questions, Nelson introduced three schools of thought—three methods people have used in the modern era to form communities. Mr. Hamilton described the first method, which involved “returning from the stressful, broadening modern world [and] returning to small, insular communities.” Mr. Hamilton said that “Historic Deerfield was an example of that,” explaining that “people in a Cold War context, when they imagined what made America great, [imagined] communities like Deerfield, small towns that had a sense of shared government and shared purpose.”

The other two methods directly clash with each other. Nelson juxtaposed the rising idea of a global community, having things on a worldwide scale, embodied in our own Center of Community Service and Global Citizenship, with an exclusionary reaction to that where “people anxiously build higher and higher walls between communities.” 

Nelson then substantiated these questions with multiple case studies. For example, he talked about how multiple countries from both the communist Warsaw Pact and Western-aligned NATO came together to manage transportation and commerce on the Danube River as an example of finding common ground. In another example, Nelson used Frederick Law Olmsted’s journey of bringing public national parks to America and designing Central Park to introduce bigger ideas of constructing a community and what sharing spaces looks like in a democracy, where anyone, rich or poor, can use the park together. 

Associate Editor for the Scroll Nicholas Xu ’27 found the unique combination of subject matter and expertise exciting. “[Geography is] pretty much treated as an aspect of history courses…and to have someone who specialized in that field come and share some of his ideas was intriguing.” He also believed that the evidence and the talk itself were meaningful: “I think a lot of the examples he gave were niche examples…everyone could have gone to the talk and taken something away from it.’ Similarly, Mr. Hamilton found the subject matter of the talk stimulating: “I've admired Nelson's work for a long time, and I find it inspiring the way that planners and other thinkers have wrestled with these questions and come to very different conclusions.”

While the talk wasn’t specifically tailored to Deerfield specifically, Nelson still managed to use Historical Deerfield as an example in his talk. Mr. Hamilton shared that Nelson “was struck by the many markers of community and the community-building practices that we employ even in his short time here.” Perpetuating these practices to create a purposeful community and a strong sense of togetherness is key to keeping inspiring those in and out of campus.