Julien Migozzi, Ph.D.

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Hi, I am Julien, an economic and urban geographer. I am currently an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sociology and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative at UC Berkeley.

At the intersection of financial geography, urban studies, and economic sociology, my research examines how digital capitalism reshapes cities and markets, questioning theoretical boundaries and empirical connections between the Global North and the Global South.

Focusing on South Africa, my current project investigates how housing is coded into a new asset class by financial capital and digital technologies, and how this transformation of the market by real estate platforms shapes urban segregation and wealth inequalities. From Cape Town, a post-apartheid city rebranded as the “Silicon Cape” over the last decade, I examine how digital property technologies, as part of a new PropTech industry, reconfigure value chains, organizational practices, and social inequalities across urban housing markets profoundly shaped by racial capitalism.

I use mixed-methods that combine long-term ethnographic fieldwork with spatial data science, leveraging computational social science, spatial analysis, data visualization, and expert interviews.

I am a coauthor of the forthcoming Atlas of Finance, published by Yale University Press. At Oxford, I was previously a Research Associate in Finance and Geography on the ERC-funded project “Cities in Global Financial Network”. From 2017 to 2021 I was a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

I am a former student (élève normalien) of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where I completed my MA. After passing the agrégation in Geography, I earned my PhD from the University of Grenoble Alpes. My dissertation received two national awards: the Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies and the Dissertation Award in Geography.

I am an Associate Member of St Peter’s College at Oxford University, a regular Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, an Early Career Representative at the Global Network on Financial Geography Committee, and a Research Associate at the Research Lab Géographie-cités (CNRS).

I occasionally write and talk about the geography of rugby.