Research

Publications

Atlas of Finance

I am a coauthor of the Atlas of Finance at Yale University Press, led by Professor Dariusz Wójcik (NUS), in collaboration with Oliver Uberti and Professor James Cheshire (UCL).

Praises:

This volume gives readers a real, intrinsic view of how, where, and when financial markets do their work. It follows the history of money from cuneiform tablets to Bitcoins, showing how the essence of finance is in the networks that it both creates and destroys; and each page bursts with stunning and illuminating illustrations. Everyone from students to seasoned professionals to armchair experts will learn something from this unique and fun book.

– Robert J. Shiller, Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences and author.

Erudite, spectacular, and revealing, the Atlas of Finance sheds a bright light on the history and geography of finance–its contribution to unleashing human potential but also its darker side. A tremendous accomplishment!

– Gabriel Zucman, professor at the Paris School of Economics and University of California, Berkeley.

The book is a lot of fun. Data-fixated readers will enjoy unpicking its main content: a series of elegantly produced maps, graphs and other visualisations. These are eclectic in scope and ambitious in intent.

– Financial Times, “Atlas of Finance — a visual aid to the global money maze”

Dissertation

• 2021 Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies, PUCA-APERAU-Caisse des Dépôts;

• 2021 Dissertation Award in Geography, French National Committee of Geography (CNFG).

• 2021 Special mention of the jury, Humanities and social sciences PSL Dissertation Prize.

My PhD dissertation was entitled “A city to sell. Digitalization and financialization of the housing market in Cape Town: stratification & segregation in the emerging global city”.

The thesis demonstrates how the digitalization of the real estate industry, structured around the implementation of credit scoring and the rise of real estate platforms, profoundly reshaped the functioning of the housing market in post-apartheid South Africa. This re-mediation of the market enabled a selective financialization of housing, enacted by restrictive lending policies and by the consolidation of the private rental sector, characterized by the emergence of institutional investors. This evolution of the market renewed mechanisms of social stratification and patterns of urban change in Cape Town.

I used a mixed-method framework combining expert interviews, participant-observation, and spatial data science. I conducted 18 months of in-depth fieldwork across the real estate industry (real estate agents, mortgage lenders, institutional investors, buyers and tenants). In parallel, I source Deeds data and longitudinal census data to analyze how the spatial dynamics of price and credit influence the evolution of urban segregation, building a new database of 900,000 residential transactions, while reconstructing the zoning of apartheid with GIS and archival maps. I used open source tools such as R and QGIS.

Public scholarship

• Diagonal, 2022, “An interview with Julien Migozzi, recipient of the Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies”, Issue 215.
• Migozzi, J., 2019, “When real estate financialization filters people out”, ideas4development.
• Migozzi, J., 2019, “L’Afrique du Sud : le rugby, un sport de blancs ?”, L’Histoire, n°8.

Media

• Interview for France Culture, “”L’Afrique du Sud : sortir des townships?. Cultures Monde, série”Crises du logement”, Radio France.
• Interview for Libération, “Coupe du monde de rugby 2023 : en Afrique du Sud, les rugbymen noirs gagnent du terrain”.

Early work

• Migozzi, J., 2012, Spatial Justice in Postcolonial Noumea: The Tuband project. MA Thesis / Mémoire de Recherche de Master 2, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.