Ed Shoucair
President
Firm co-founder, Ed Shoucair, is an accomplished master planner. He brings over 40 years of experience leading projects involving place-making, community development, resource management, and proactive community engagement. His work includes the creation of neighborhood and downtown redevelopment plans, small-area plans, site plans, park and trail plans, and comprehensive municipal plans. A former documentary filmmaker, Ed serves as the Creative Director of the firm’s Emmy Award-winning Communications Group. Before the Collaborative, Ed served as Senior Planner for Wallace, Floyd Associates, Community Planner in Durham, NC. and he founded the Massachusetts Riverways Program under the former Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs.
A sample of Ed’s projects include having served as project manager of some of Boston’s most technically complex city planning projects. These include serving as the last project manager of the Long-Range Water Supply Plan for Boston and 43 metro communities. At stake was ensuring that over 2.7 million people had sufficient high-quality water through the year 2020. Ed served as project manager of the Neponset River Master Plan, one of the largest urban recreation initiatives in Boston’s history. In doing so he oversaw five consulting firms and facilitated 35 community engagement meetings. A $40 million bond followed the plan that transformed several former brownfield sites into a new park system used by thousands of visitors per year. In 2019, the American Planning Association named the Neponset River Corridor one of “America’s Great Places.” Outside of New England, Ed has also led Collaborative projects in Georgia, California, North Carolina, and other communities around the country.
Outside the Collaborative, Ed founded the nonprofits: Gloucester Education Foundation; Restore Olmsted’s Waterway Coalition; and Volunteer Express. He has been a Guest Lecturer at Boston University’s Department of Urban Affairs and Planning. For the American Planning Association’s National Conference, Ed served as Moderator for a panel on “National Historic Landscape Areas.” He also served as a Panelist for the Project for Public Spaces’ Citizen’s Institute on Rural Design. He’s the recipient of: “Outstanding Planning Project,” NE Chapter, as Chair of Restore Olmsted’s Waterway Coalition; “Environmental Action Award,” Massachusetts Campaign to Clean Up Hazardous Waste; and “Youth Development Award,” Massachusetts North Shore YMCA.
Currently writing a book, Big Truth, Ideas for Uniting a Divided World, Ed’s essays on urban planning and the environment have appeared in the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, and Medium.
Ed holds a Master of City Planning degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Duke University.
