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Julien Migozzi, Ph.D.

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

I am an urban and economic geographer. At the intersection of urban studies and economic sociology, my research examines the urban process under digital capitalism, questioning how housing and financial markets reshape cities, markets, and inequalities, with a particular emphasis on the stratifying effects of digital technologies. Methodologically, my research brings together ethnographic fieldwork, spatial analysis and computational social science.

My work is articulated along two principal axes.

The first one investigates the mechanisms of social stratification and urban segregation in the digital era, positioning South Africa as a key site to interrogate contemporary forms of inequalities arising from the digitization of real estate and the spread of credit scoring. This project seeks to map out what the convergence between financial capital and digital technologies enacted by the platforms economy entails for cities and markets profoundly shaped by racial capitalism.

The second axis of my research examines how the reconfiguration of finance by the startup economy reshapes metropolitan clusters, financial neworks, and urban governance across cities, with a particular focus on emerging and postcolonial contexts, questioning the FinTech industry as driver of economic and urban transformations.

I am a coauthor of the Atlas of Finance (Yale University Press, 2024), which combines state-of-the art visualisations and data-driven story-telling to bring the often-abstract world of finance to the ordinary functioning of cities, showing how finance plays a key part in forms and processes of urbanization and uneven development.

Previously, I was a Research Associate in Finance and Geography on the ERC project “Cities in Global Financial Networks” at Oxford University, and a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris).

I hold a PhD from the University of Grenoble Alpes, and a MA in Geography and Planning from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where I was a student fellow. My dissertation received two national awards: the Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies, from the French Secretariat of Urbanism, Planning, and Architecture (PUCA) and the Ministries of Research, Culture, and Ecological Transition ; the Best Dissertation Award, from the French National Geographical Committee.

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 about and visualise the geography of rugby.