Julien Migozzi, Ph.D.
I am an economic and urban geographer. Currently, I am an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. In 2024-2025, I will be a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
My research interests lie at the intersection of economic sociology and urban studies. I examine how platform capitalism reshapes cities and markets in emerging economies, questioning theoretical boundaries and empirical connections between the Global North and the Global South.
My ongoing research analyses how financial and housing markets, as re-mediated by digital technologies, intersect with social and spatial inequalities. Focusing on South Africa and Cape Town, a post-apartheid and emerging global city dubbed as the “Silicon Cape” of Africa, I explore how financial capital and property technologies shape mechanisms of segregation and patterns of urban segregation, by interrogating the stratifying effects of data, algorithms and platforms over people and places.
My current project, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation, investigates how the platform economy reconfigure value chains and housing wealth inequalities in South Africa.
My work combines qualitative and quantitative research to measure and map out markets, inequalities, and economic transformations in the digital era. I use long-term ethnographic fieldwork (expert interviews, participant-observation) and spatial data science, leveraging computational tools, spatial analysis, and data vizualisation.
At Oxford, I previously worked on the ERC-funded project “Cities in Global Financial Network” as a Research Associate in Finance and Geography, analyzing how the rise of digital technologies transform financial centres and financial markets. I co-authored the first Atlas of Finance, forthcoming at Yale University Press in 2024. From 2017 to 2021, I was a Lecturer at the Department of Geography at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
I am a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where I completed my MA in Geography and obtained the agrégation of geography. I hold a PhD from the University of Grenoble Alpes. In 2021, my dissertation was awarded both the national Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies and the national Dissertation Award in Geography.
I am an Associate Member of St Peter’s College, a regular Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, and a Research Associate at the CNRS Research Centre Géographie-cités.
I occasionally write and talk about the geography and sociology of rugby.