Patrice Derrington

Patrice Derrington is a Lecturer and Senior Fellow in Real Estate contributing teaching and research to the Master in Real Estate (MRE) program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Also an Associate Professor in the Columbia University M.Sc. Real Estate Development program, she led that program as the [Marc] Holliday Professor and Director for nine years and was the Director of the Center for Urban Real Estate. Her teaching and research address the creation, delivery, and stewardship of the built environment through the intersection of architectural design and development dynamics, critiquing financial calculative practices, and proposing new methods, economic structures and technologies that will deliver more equitable and sustainable urban centers. At the core of this scholarship is her recently published book, Built Up: An Historical Perspective on the Contemporary Principles and Practices of Real Estate Development, 2021, London: Routledge, with its robust interrogation and application to diverse areas of scholarship in the international symposium Valuing the City.

Commencing as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Derrington taught numerous architecture studios, often in collaboration with eminent theoreticians and practitioners such as Peter Eisenman and Rodolfo Machado. Extending her doctoral work in architecture and civil engineering at U.C. Berkeley, she lectured on the design and development process for students of architecture and in the School of Urban and Public Affairs. As a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology she also taught on property life-cycles, investment and asset management, and environmentally sustainable building systems.

Adding insight into the economic and financial dimensions of the urban fabric through a Harvard MBA, Dr. Derrington gained over 20-years of “Wall Street” experience in restructuring defaulted real estate debt and syndicating property investments both in the US and internationally, managing private equity funds for major individual and institutional clients, such as David Rockefeller and Keybank, serving as an independent board director of various publicly traded companies, and appointed as a Vice President of the New York State’s Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to formulate the $20B Economic Revitalization Strategy for the recovery of NYC after the devastation of Sept 11^th, 2001.

Over the past decade, she has resumed her academic activities, firstly at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, followed by Columbia University, and now brings to the MRE program a rigorous knowledge of financial structures and a critical dynamic of linking the design of built form with the creation of socio-economic value for urban communities.

Other representative research publications include:

• 20+ Years of Urban Rebuilding: Lessons from the Revival of Lower Manhattan after 9/11,Routledge, June 2024.
• “Valuing the City” Proceedings of Symposium on Patrice Derrington’s Built Up, Gordon C. Clark and Richard Florida (eds), Environment & Planning A, proceedings publication (upcoming 2022).
• “Property and Thomas Piketty: Casting the Lens of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century on Inequality in the Urban Built Environment”, Journal of Contemporary Urban Affairs, 2018, Volume 2, Number 2, pages 90– 105.
• ”Chasing Speculative Returns in the Post GFC Recovery: Yield versus Price Appreciation in Real Estate Investment Objectives” in American Association of Geographers conference proceedings on Real Estate, Finance and Urban Development, April 2018.
• “Real Estate Speculation in the Highest Office: George Washington, and then, Donald Trump” in Journal of Economics and Business, Vol. 8, No. 11, November 2017.