Robert S. Cornish Endowed Chair of Regional Planning
The Cornish Chair honors Robert S. Cornish, FAICP (1925–2013). Cornish (BA Architecture 1951, MCP 1958) was one of the first graduates of Berkeley’s Master of City Planning program. Cornish Chairs advance his emphasis on regions as a natural framework for managing growth and promoting sustainable futures. They are regional planners with a distinguished background in practice who have demonstrated a clear and continuing interest in active professional training and practice in integrated regional planning.
About Robert Cornish
Robert “Bob” Cornish, born in Minneapolis in 1925, earned his BA in architecture from UC Berkeley in 1951. He worked in architecture in Los Angeles until 1955, when he traveled throughout Europe by Vespa scooter, ending up in Stockholm, where he worked as an architect-planner for a year. In 1958, Cornish became one of UC Berkeley’s first Master of City Planning graduates.
Cornish served as principal planner for the Tahoe Regional Plan and for the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). At ABAG, he authored the regional open space system plan for the nine-county San Francisco Bay region.
In 1969, Cornish joined the graduate faculty of Texas A&M University, where he taught urban and regional planning for 20 years. While at Texas A&M, he was granted a Fulbright Award that enabled him to travel to Iran in 1978 as a senior scholar at Tehran University. Forced to flee on one of the last planes out of Tehran when the Shah fell in January of 1979, he transferred to Stockholm, where he taught classes in urban planning at Stockholm University.
He was active in the APA Texas Chapter and a founding member of the Texas Chapter’s Education Foundation. He established the Short Course for Planning Commissioners and Local Officials in Texas and was one of the original contributing authors to the Guide to Urban Planning in Texas Communities.
In 1989, he retired to Kirkland, Washington, where he became involved in growth management issues in the Puget Sound region. He also founded the senior action committee of the Washington State Chapter of APA. In 2000, he was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners.
Cornish Chairs
2025-2026
AJ Kim
2024
Marc Weiss (PhD 1985, MCP 1978)
2021-2023
Egon Terplan (MCP 2001)
2019-2021
Dena Belzer (MCP 1983)
2017–2018
Gabriel Metcalf (MCP 2002)