Hope Cohen is associate director of RPA's Center for Urban Innovation. On March 3, 2010, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed her to the NYC Charter Revision Commission.

Before coming to RPA, Cohen was deputy director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Rethinking Development, where she focused principally on issues of urban environment and infrastructure, publishing Rethinking Environmental Review and The Neighborly Substation, in which she analyzed electrical substations in London, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, as well as Anaheim and New York. She has also published on these topics and others in the New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, and Gotham Gazette.

Cohen worked for many years in New York City's public sector, in areas ranging from urban planning to capital budgeting to strategic information technology. She was at MTA New York City Transit for more than a decade, concentrating for much of that time on bringing the technology used for the city's subway and bus systems into the twenty-first century.

Since 1995, she has supplemented her professional work with voluntary public service as a member of Manhattan's Community Board 7 (Upper West Side), where she has served as board chairperson as well as land-use cochairperson.

Cohen holds a BA from Harvard and an MA from the University of Chicago.