Research
Publications
The good, the bad and the tenant: rental platforms renewing racial capitalism in the post-apartheid housing market
This article examines how racial capitalism intersects with platform capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that rental platforms, built upon technologies of credit scoring, extend the extractive logic of racial capitalism through two joint rentier mechanisms. the transformation of rental housing into a new asset class; the extraction and assetization of rental data.
Digital Technology and the City: New Forms of Urban Segregation in Cape Town?
In the age of platform capitalism, how is digital technology reconfiguring real-estate markets and access to housing? In Cape Town, South Africa, credit scoring—a form of selection based on financial behavior—has become the norm in this regard, contributing to the reappearance of apartheid-era segregation.
Urban geographies of financial convergence: situating Indian financial centres across global production and financial networks
Published in Economic Geography.
How does finance transform global production networks and affect the hierarchy of financial centres? Recent advancements in the global production networks (GPNs) literature seek to better emphasize the role of finance by identifying where and how global financial networks (GFNs) intersect with GPNs. Financial centers (FCs) operate as key sites for articulating financial convergence, understood as the merging of financial and nonfinancial sectors enacted by cross-sectoral investments. Yet, how such entanglement both feeds on and impacts intercity networks, affecting metropolitan hierarchies, remains largely overlooked. Using a novel data set of 12,147 intersectoral, cross-border and domestic merger and acquisition deals involving finance and insurance firms throughout the period of 2000–20, this article unpacks the sectoral dynamics that underpin the intersection of GFNs with GPNs at the city level in India, the fifth largest economy in the world.
“You should do what India does”: FinTech ecosystems in India reshaping the geography of finance
Published in Geoforum.
This paper explores the potential of FinTech to change the geography of finance and financial centres through a longitudinal and multiscalar analysis of FinTech in India. Using a financial ecology approach and a mixed-method framework, we document Bangalore’s emergence as India’s FinTech capital and the rise of New Delhi, demonstrate how Mumbai and Bangalore structure India’s financial geography as complementary ecosystemsm, and conceptualize FinTech in India as a “Tech-Fin-State” ecosystem.
Apartheid by Algorithm
A report for the magazine Logic on computer-assisted housing discrimination in South Africa.
Ville et numérique : vers un renouveau de la ségrégation urbaine au Cap ?
À l’heure du capitalisme de plateforme, comment le numérique reconfigure-t-il les marchés immobiliers et l’accès au logement ? En Afrique du Sud, au Cap, la pratique du credit scoring est devenue la règle. Fondée sur une sélection par les comportements financiers, elle contribue à renouveler la ségrégation héritée de l’apartheid.
Housing (In)Equity and the Spatial Dynamics of Homeownership in France: A Research Agenda
Published in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie.
This paper advances a research agenda on how asset-based welfare policies, residential market volatility, stratified accumulation and vulnerability impinge upon the geography of inequality in property markets.
Selecting Spaces, Classifying People: The Financialization of Housing in the South African City
Focusing on Cape Town, this article investigates how financialization unfolds in the South African housing market. I use a mixed method that combines in-depth field research conducted among key market players with an analysis of georeferenced residential transactions.
Who sells to whom in the suburbs? Home price inflation and the dynamics of sellers and buyers in the metropolitan region of Paris, 1996–2012
Published in PLOS One
In a context of a housing inflation in the greater Paris Region, this paper develops new computational methods to understand how housing price dynamics affect socioeconomic segregation.
Urban National Parks and the Making of the Housing Market in Emerging Cities: Places of Exclusiveness, Land of Opportunities
Book chapter
As emerging Global South Cities, Cape Town, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro have experienced the a spectacular increase of housing prices, turning land around urban national parks into places of exclusiveness and opportunities. This chapter is the outcome of my participation in the research project “Urban National Parks in Emerging Countries” led by Professor Frédéric Landy (University of Paris Nanterre).
Showcasing the sovereignty of non-self-governing islands: New Caledonia
Published in Asia Pacific Viewpoint
This paper is the output of my work as a Research Assistant for the Marsden Fund research project on aid and sovereignty across the Pacific island nations, led by Professor John Overton (Wellington’s Victoria University, New Zealand).
Le rugby en Afrique du Sud face au défi de transformation : jeu de pouvoir, outil de développement et force symbolique
A research paper presenting the findings of my Master dissertation on school rugby and urban segregation in post-apartheid Cape Town.
Dissertation
My PhD dissertation, “A city to sell. Digitalization and financialization of the housing market in Cape Town: stratification & segregation in the emerging global city”, was awarded two national prizes:
the 2021 Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies by the PUCA-APERAU-Caisse des Dépôts;
the 2021 Dissertation Award in Geography by the French National Committee of Geography (CNFG).
The thesis also received a Special mention of the jury for the 2021 Humanities and social sciences PSL Dissertation Prize.
In this work, I demonstrated how the digitalization of the real estate industry structured around the implementation of credit scoring and the rise of real estate platforms reshaped the functioning of the housing market, enabling a selective financialization of housing across the mortgage market and the private rental sector. These market reconfigurations have renewed mechanisms and patterns of social stratification and urban segregation in Cape Town, a post-apartheid and emerging city of the Global South.
To investigate the housing market, I conducted 18 months of fieldwork among the real estate industry, from real estate agents to mortgage lenders, from corporate investors to ordinary households. I used expert interviews and ethnographic methods. In parallel, In order to analyze how the spatial dynamics of price and credit influence the evolution of income-based and racial segregation, I sourced raw deeds data to build a database of 900,000 geolocated sales, covering the metro area from 1984 to 2017, and digitally reconstructed the zoning of apartheid. This database was cross-analysed with longitudinal census data. I used open source tools such as R and QGIS to perform computational and spatial analysis.
Public scholarship
- Diagonal, 2022, “An interview with Julien Migozzi, recipient of the dissertation award”, 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 Libération, “Coupe du monde de rugby 2023 : en Afrique du Sud, les rugbymen noirs gagnent du terrain”.