June 10, 2010
 After more than 40 years in practice, it’s reasonably safe to say that
Dr. William Cohen has seen everything that the planning profession can throw at you.
It is those decades of experience that he continues to be excited to share in front of the classroom as a Community and Regional Planning Associate Professor (Practice) in Temple University’s School of Environmental Design in the College of Liberal Arts, located at Temple University Ambler.
“I’ve experienced everything a planner can experience,” Cohen said with a laugh. “From land use surveys with a clip board, maps, and colored pencils to making comprehensive presentations to high government officials, I’ve done it all.”
Dr. Cohen’s contributions to the profession have been rightfully recognized by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) during the American Planning Association’s 2010 National Planning Conference in New Orleans, where he was inducted into the AICP’s College of Fellows. He is the first Delaware planner to date to be elected to the AICP College of Fellows, “the highest honor that professional planners bestow on their peers,” said Dr. Deborah Howe, Chair of the Department of Community and Regional Planning, who was among the numerous individuals that supported Dr. Cohen’s nomination for the recognition.
The honor is awarded once every two years and Dr. Cohen was one of only 37 planners nationally to be elected to the College of Fellows in 2010.
“Dr. Cohen is highly successful in bringing professional practice into the classroom. His very popular course People, Places, and Environment regularly attracts students from a wide range of disciplines who are thereby exposed to Dr. Cohen’s love of cities, communities, and planning,” she said. “Some decide to pursue community planning as a field of study while others are left with the capacity to be more effective citizen activists. This course contributes greatly to our Department’s broader mission of educating Temple students about the promise and value of community planning.”
Cohen, Dr. Howe said, “could be resting on his laurels in contented retirement.”
“Instead he is constantly on the go, challenging students to look at the world around them with a new perspective and giving them innumerable reasons to care about what they are going to do with their lives,” she said. “Dr. Cohen is the epitome of what we look for in the members of the College of Fellows.”
The AICP College of Fellows “recognizes individuals who’ve made exceptional contributions to the planning profession,” said AICP President Paul Inghram.
“The Fellows have devoted their careers to excellence in planning and they set the highest standards for professional planners today,” he said.
The AICP honor, Cohen said, “is the icing on the cake,” of a remarkably rewarding planning career, “and the icing is very sweet.”
“Like many people just out of college in the 60s, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. I sold real estate for a while, which was my first introduction to land use,” said Cohen, who joined Temple’s Community and Regional Planning faculty in 2004. “I would visit with the planners in the city planner’s office in Wilmington, Delaware and that really piqued my interest to move into planning as a career. I was asked to take a (planning) job in the (Delaware) office of the governor and that’s what I did. I haven’t turned back since; it’s been a great ride.”
That was just the beginning of a planning career spanning four decades.
Dr. Cohen was Senior Planner in the Delaware State Planning Office where he worked from 1967 to 1971 and was appointed Planning Director in the City of Newark, Delaware, from 1971 to 1977. In 1977, he founded a multi-disciplinary consulting firm that specialized in planning, government affairs, research, and design, serving as Principal until 1990.
From 1990 to 1998, Dr. Cohen was a Senior Resources Planner in the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control where he was appointed Executive Director of a gubernatorial task force that completed the most comprehensive planning project in the state’s history. That project became the planning, design, and implementation impetus that would revitalize the Wilmington, Delaware, urban waterfront.
“Innovation and excellence have been the hallmarks of (Cohen’s) professional planning practice. As a planning director, he drafted and implemented zoning provisions that protected the integrity of the city’s flood plains and provided for a more flexible approach to site design based on a project’s environmental, social, and aesthetic value,” said Patricia A. Maley, President of the Delaware Chapter of the American Planning Association who nominated Dr. Cohen for his election to the College of Fellows. “As a consultant, Bill developed and marketed a unique planning service know as ‘planner-on-call’ whereby he served as a circuit-rider planner to small towns in Delaware that did not have the resources to employ a professional planner of their own. He was instrumental in facilitating the establishment of the Delaware Institute of Planning and Design, composed of members of the planning, architecture, and landscape architecture professions, a first of its kind nationally, to advocate for good planning and design in Delaware.”
Dr. Cohen is the author or co-author of more than 90 technical and professional publications and reports on a variety of planning topics, including general planning and policy analysis, community studies and evaluations, development controls, environmental impact, land use and site suitability, and riverfront planning and development. In 2002, the Morris Library at the University of Delaware (Special Collections) acquired the William J. Cohen Papers consisting of professional papers, documents, and ephemera covering his planning career from 1967 to 2001.
When Dr. Jeffrey Featherstone, then Chair of the Department of Community and Regional Planning, offered him a full-time teaching position at Temple, Cohen said, “it took me about three to five seconds to accept.”
“I wanted the challenge and I felt very comfortable with the department from the very beginning. I’ve worked very hard and I’m having a ball,” he said. “We have a small faculty that all have strong backgrounds in practice and I think that really makes all the difference. The students want to hear those ‘war stories;’ they want to know what actually happens in the field.”
The time has come for the planning field to move to the forefront, Cohen said, and he is excited to be a part of readying the next generation of planners for the many challenges to come.
“I was schooled in the (Ian) McHargian field of ecological planning. I think after the tragedy of the BP oil spill, more and more people are waking up to the fact that our environment is precious and finite,” he said. “We have to embrace and take the reins of ecological planning and leave the apathy, indifference, and inaction behind. We need to get the job done.”
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