Randall Crane

Randall Crane is an American urban planner who is professor emeritus of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, where he taught since 1999. He was associate then editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Planning Association, chair of the executive committee and director of Undergraduate Studies of the Luskin School, associate and acting director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, and department vice chair and director of PhD studies of the urban planning department, among other cross-campus administrative appointments.

After graduating from Paradise High School in the Northern California Sierra foothills in 1970, Crane received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Following a period as an anti-poverty worker in East Tennessee, he later earned a Ph.D. in urban studies & planning from MIT, where he studied micro, public and urban economics with Peter Diamond, Martin Feldstein, Eric Maskin, Daniel McFadden, Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Larry Summers, and William Wheaton. His dissertation is titled, Essays in Local Public Finance, 1987.

In 2016, he was senior scholar at the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, World Resources Institute, DC.

In 2008, he was visiting scholar at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

From 1990 to 1999 he was assistant and associate professor of urban planning, economics, and transportation science at the University of California, Irvine.

From 1994 to 1995 he was visiting research fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego.

From 1989 to 1990 he was Fulbright Professor at El Colegio de México, Mexico City.

In 1990 he was resident advisor to the Harvard Institute for International Development Public Finance project in Jakarta, Indonesia.

He continues to consult as a development reform advisor, with field experience in China, Colombia, Guyana, Indonesia, Kenya, México, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Yemen.

On November 8, 2022, Crane defeated incumbent Sat Tamaribuchi in the general election for Division 5 of the Municipal Water District of Orange County.[1][2]