Randall Crane studies the housing, transportation, and economic development challenges of cities, such as rushed urbanization, urban design/behavior linkages, urban environmental problems, public finances, housing and transportation demographics, and the measure, meaning and governance of sprawl. This work is mostly domestic but his international project experience includes China, Colombia, Guyana, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Yemen, and a Fulbright professorship at the Colegio de México in Mexico City. Crane served on the National Research Council committee producing the report, Does the Built Environment Influence Physical Activity?, National Academies Press, 2005. Our book, Travel by Design: The Influence of Urban Form on Travel, Oxford, 2001 (with Marlon Boarnet) is positioned as the reference monograph on the topic.  In 2008, Crane was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.  Two books in progress include and The Death and Life of Smart Growth (with Daniel Chatman) and Issues in Urban Housing for the USA.   Another on Chinese urbanization is in the planning stages.  In addition to recently editing the field’s flagship journal, the Journal of the American Planning Association, Crane and Rachel Weber edited the Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (Oxford, 2012), a collection of 39 original chapters from the cutting edge of planning scholarship.

1. Does the Built Environment Influence Physical Activity? (National Academies Press, 2005). 

2. Travel by Design: The Influence of Urban Form on Travel – with Marlon Boarnet. (Oxford, 2001).

3. Sex Changes Everything: The Recent Narrowing and Widening of Travel Differences by Gender – with L. Takahashi. (Public Works Management & Policy 13, 2009).