Fred Presley

Theme Leader: Urban and Community Planning

I’ve spent the much of the last 15 years working for state and local government, first as an environmental planner for the RI Department of Environmental Management and later as the Director of Planning and Economic Development for the Town of Smithfield, Rhode Island (a suburb of the City of Providence). The experience of working within these two organizations was invaluable particularly now that I have immersed myself into the Resilient Futures Network.  Those years gave me an inside look at the systems that were being used at the state and local level to manage the ecology, the economy, education, the built form and the social elements of Rhode Island.  That inside look frustrated me tremendously because what I a saw was government entities attempting to manage tremendously complex non-linear issues with linear post-industrial era systems.  It simply does not work.  And what’s worse is that the unintended consequences of these systems actually exacerbate the problems they are intended to solve.   

The Resilience Futures Network Framework and Process takes a complex adaptive systems approach to these complex issues and I have witnessed first-hand, on several occasions as a practitioner of the process and many more now as a partner in the network, that this process works.  It works at the community level, the state level, the site level, and right down to the individual.  I am confident it will work at the national and international level as well.

I serve as the Urban and Community Planning Theme Leader for the network largely do to my experience and knowledge in these areas.  I am also certified by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). But I believe one of my greatest strengths is that I also worked as an environmental scientist, I have been a business owner, I have worked for developers, regulators, universities and non-profits. This experience gives me perhaps a wider worldview of many of the issues we are facing today. I strongly believe that the type of thinking that is promoted by the Resilient Futures Network is critically important for communities and all of the integral players that make up a community: the businesses, the non-profit organizations, the government agencies, and the individuals as well. Although I lead the Urban and Community Planning Theme, my focus is on bringing this framework and process to all of these players. It is only then that we can truly expect to have a Resilient Community.  

As is repeatedly mentioned in the various articles and pages of this website, we are at a point of convergence.  It is a convergence of mega conditions at the global level that are now and will continue to impact all of us directly an indirectly. Our window of opportunity to transform the thinking of all of those players mentioned above is closing quickly.  My goal is to engage the networks we have within our reach, to get this thinking out to as many people as we can through identifying and creating real projects that can be used to educate the players (because we learn best by doing).  I invite you all to join the Network! 

To learn more about the very latest projects I am currently engaged in, check out the Resilient Rhode Island Section of the Action Report Card. Just click here.

To read some of Fred’s thinking click here. 

For more information, contact Fred at fred[dot]presley[at]resilientfutures.org.