About

Gregory F. Randolph is an Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech. His research examines the challenges to inclusive urban development posed by 21st-century dynamics of spatial inequality, focusing on labor markets, human mobility, and socio-technical transitions. He authored the book 'Urbanization from Within: A Theory of Urban Transition from 21st-Century India,' which reveals how settlements far from metropolitan regions are urbanizing through internal population growth and socio-economic change, offering an alternative account of contemporary urbanization that challenges conventional narratives of migration and industrialization. Professor Randolph is involved in research areas including the impact of decarbonization on urban and regional labor markets through the FutureWORKS program, and he collaborates with community-based partners in Atlanta to explore collective ownership models to address commercial gentrification and enhance community governance of public spaces and neighborhood economies. He works with governmental and non-profit institutions to create inclusive urban economies, co-founded the Just Jobs Network advising governments in the Global South on labor policies, and is a Senior Research Fellow at Kindred Futures, focusing on building collective wealth in Black communities in the American South. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in urban planning and development from the University of Southern California and an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Geography
• Economic geography
• Civil engineering
• Regional science
• Engineering
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Archaeology
• Environmental planning
• Economy
• Demography
• Cartography
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Beyond Bihar

  2026-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Urbanization from within reflects the confluence of two forces: an acceleration in the technologies of trade and production—widening disparities between regional winners and losers—and the global proliferation of public health and medical technologies, which has disentangled population growth and economic dynamism. Taken together, these forces can generate regions that are both economically “left-behind” and demographically dense and growing. Bihar reflects these realities, but so do other places around the Global South that face a similar conundrum of economic marginality and demographic intensity. This chapter examines examples of these contexts beyond Bihar, from sub-Saharan Africa to Guatemala and Southeast Asia, considering their similarities and differences. While these regions differ in physical, institutional, and morphological characteristics, their commonalities suggest the need to investigate urbanization from within as a global form of “late urbanization,” while developing policies relevant to the demographic-economic context of places undergoing this kind of urban transition.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Ekta</i> and the New Bihar

  2026-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The form of urbanization unfolding in contemporary Bihar has its roots in social and political change, not only demography and the economic driver of remittances. Bihar has long sustained some of the worst forms of social inequality and caste discrimination in India, but in the late twentieth century, political movements began making greater demands of the state government to redistribute power and resources. This mobilization was initially manifest in the election of a populist leader more interested in the politics of revenge than the governance of development. However, in the early 2000s, the succeeding chief minister was able to build a state government focused on improving development outcomes, building infrastructure, and reducing crime and corruption. The changes built a social and physical infrastructure for new market towns to form and grow. The emerging urban system, this chapter argues, illustrates how these social and political dynamics are expressed locally and spatially. Market towns are emerging in settlements where subaltern groups have banded together to resist caste- and religion-based intimidation from wealthy landowners, where they have built ekta (“unity”) to safeguard their small businesses. The participation of these groups in a consumer economy carries the social meaning of having eroded, even if modestly, the agrarian social hierarchy.

  PublisherDOI

• Inequality, not regulation, drives America's housing affordability crisis

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-17

  preprintOpen access

  A popular view holds that declining housing affordability stems from regulations that restrict new supply, and that deregulation will spur sufficient market-rate construction to meaningfully improve affordability. We argue that this ‘deregulationist’ view rests upon flawed assumptions. Through empirical simulation, we show that even a dramatic, deregulation-driven supply expansion would take decades to generate widespread affordability in high-cost U.S. markets. We advance an alternative explanation of declining affordability grounded in demand structure and geography: uneven demand growth – driven by rising interpersonal and interregional inequality – is the primary driver of declining affordability in recent decades. For cost-burdened households, trickle-down benefits from deregulation will be insufficient and too slow.

  Publisher

• Inequality, not regulation, drives America's housing affordability crisis

  2026-01-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  A popular view holds that declining housing affordability stems from regulations that restrict new supply, and that deregulation will spur sufficient market-rate construction to meaningfully improve affordability. We argue that this ‘deregulationist’ view rests upon flawed assumptions. Through empirical simulation, we show that even a dramatic, deregulation-driven supply expansion would take decades to generate widespread affordability in high-cost U.S. markets. We advance an alternative explanation of declining affordability grounded in demand structure and geography: uneven demand growth – driven by rising interpersonal and interregional inequality – is the primary driver of declining affordability in recent decades. For cost-burdened households, trickle-down benefits from deregulation will be insufficient and too slow.

  PublisherDOI

• Translocal Lives

  2026-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract India is a country marked by high mobility but low migration: much of its population is regularly on the move, but only a small fraction of people is permanently relocating. The most common forms of rural–urban mobility are men engaged in temporary and circular migration for wage work. While some live in urban destinations for most of the year and others move seasonally, they are generally united by the fact that they retain their households, voting rights, and economic assets in their places of origin. This chapter examines the reasons why people construct these translocal households, drawing on the narratives of migrants from the state of Bihar, data from recent surveys, and multiple literatures dealing with questions of migration and mobility. Ultimately, it argues that India is a “high-mobility, low-migration” society because of cultural and historical factors—an established practice of remittance-based male out-migration in regions like Bihar—but also because of the structure of India’s economic growth over the past three decades. Driven by a high-skilled services sector that only offers secure employment for a small share of the workforce, India’s metropolitan areas relegate most rural–urban migrants to poorly compensated, informal jobs. The lack of economic mobility, and the anti-migrant political economy generated by a scarcity of good jobs, leads migrants from states like Bihar to build only tenuous ties to the city. This temporary and circular migration becomes a key ingredient in facilitating urbanization from within.

  PublisherDOI

• Linking Urban Evolution to Development

  2026-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract As a specific mode of urbanization, urbanization from within reflects some expansion of human freedoms and capabilities but also serious limitations on them, imposed by the social, economic, and institutional circumstances that give rise to it. This chapter starts by considering these broader implications for human development, using Amartya Sen’s definition of development. It then examines the future of places urbanizing from within and the policies required to promote development within them, with a focus on expanding economic opportunity. Given population dynamics and wider processes of uneven development, urbanization from within is likely to persist in Bihar for decades to come, heightening the need for urban governance models that harness their positive potential and address the challenges that constrain more transformative economic development. Current policy frameworks in places urbanizing from within need to focus on supporting tradable sectors and harnessing the skills and experiences of return migrants. However, for as long as the economies of these settlements remain largely informal and consumption-oriented, policies will also need to sustain direct social welfare support to households—a role that Indian policy frameworks imagine as more vital in rural than urban locations. In addition, future policies must promote integrated spatial planning that links urbanizing settlements to one another and to legacy cities in their wider regions.

  PublisherDOI

• From Urbanization to Pauperization

  2026-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Bihar, the locus of urbanization from within in India, has long been considered enigmatic. The region anchored one of the largest waves of urbanization in the ancient world, beginning more than two millennia ago. By the twentieth century, however, this part of the eastern Gangetic Plain was associated with endemic poverty, social inequality, and corruption. This chapter traces the long arc of Bihar’s history to understand the imprints it has etched into its social and economic fabric. It focuses on the factors of physical geography, technology, trade, demography, and sociopolitical change that drove the emergence of cities in the first millennium BCE. The chapter then describes a period of pauperization, when caste-based feudalism took root, and the ways in which British colonization deepened the immiseration of Bihar’s peasantry through the zamindari system. Practices of circular out-migration evolved out of these structures of underdevelopment. These historical developments form the social, economic, and institutional backdrop for contemporary dynamics in urbanizing Bihar.

  PublisherDOI

• Telecom Expansion and Internal Migrants in Indian Cities

  Journal of Regional Science · 2026-04-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT This paper estimates the impact of mobile phone service expansion on migration to and between cities of India during 2001–2011. We show that the number of cross‐state migrants living in urban areas of India increased significantly due to telecommunications infrastructure growth. The increased migration reflects better labor and marriage market information transmission across regions as well as a positive labor demand shock in the service sector resulting from telecom expansion. The evidence indicates that telecommunications technologies act as forces of urban concentration, disproving the “death of distance” hypothesis. Furthermore, our findings imply that technological growth can reduce the barriers to internal migration in developing countries.

  PublisherDOI

• Urbanization from Within

  2026-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Urbanization in the twenty-first century is defined not only by mass movements of people from villages to cities, but also the transformation of rural habitats into urban places. Unlike in the past, many of these in situ rural-to-urban transitions are happening without the influx of people or concentrated capital from elsewhere. Rather, this “urbanization from within” involves the evolution of places into urban towns via natural population increase and densification, with an accompanying set of social and economic changes. This new pathway of urban transition still involves migration; but paradoxically, it is the places from which people are out-migrating that are becoming urban. This book uses India, and the specific state of Bihar, as a case study for examining this unprecedented form of urbanization. The phenomenon reflects particular realities of demography, migration, and economic development in the twenty-first century, while speaking to core debates in urban theory.

  PublisherDOI

• Urbanization from Within

  2026-01-26

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Urbanization is generally narrated as a tale of mass rural–urban migration. This book challenges that conventional wisdom, drawing on the case of India. It argues that twenty-first-century urban transitions are also defined by another process, urbanization from within, in which villages are becoming urban towns through internal population growth, densification, and accompanying social and economic change. Migration is still part of this phenomenon, but rather than the migrant’s destination, it is the migrant’s origin that is urbanizing. Circular flows of people—and the resources, experiences, and expectations they carry and transmit to their hometowns—interact with other local and global forces to facilitate this new form of urbanization. On the one hand, these emerging towns lie at the intersection of demographic intensity and economic marginality, reflecting the uneven development processes of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, they represent incremental improvements in living standards and are subtly reshaping social structures, raising progressive possibilities. Whether places urbanizing from within foster human and economic development depends on policymakers and planners understanding the conditions of their emergence and acting to address their limitations and needs. The book relies on various sources of evidence: qualitative research in the Indian state of Bihar, analysis of geospatial data and large-scale surveys, econometric modeling, and an integration of scholarship from urban studies, geography, planning, economics, sociology, and history. Fundamental mechanisms underlying urbanization from within make it likely to unfold in other parts of the urbanizing Global South, heightening its importance for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mukta Naik

  Erasmus University Rotterdam

  5 shared

• Michael Storper

  University of California, Los Angeles

  3 shared

• Elizabeth Currid‐Halkett

  University of Southern California

  1 shared

• Chandan Deuskar

  1 shared

• Arnab Dutta

  1 shared

• Dhruv Jain

  Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Fulbright-Hays research fellowship
• Fulbright-Nehru research fellowship