Research

Publications

Scoring high, paying up, gating in: middle-class formation and asset inequalities under digital capitalism in South Africa

Accepted in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
South Africa
Housing market
Finance
Digital Technologies
Segregation
This paper examines how modern class dynamics become intertwined with automated classifications and data-driven regimes of value creation under digital capitalism. I demonstrate how housing markets and sorting algorithms shape asset inequalities and middle-class formation in South Africa.
Aug 15, 2025

Follow the data: Computing the algorithmic periphery with credit scores and property values

Forthcoming in A. Datta and F. Hoefsloot (Eds), Informational Peripheries. Rethinking the urban in a digital age, UCL Press.
Digital Technologies
South Africa
Segregation
A method to analyse the political economy and stratifying effects of data flows.
Mar 1, 2025

Exploring the spatial segmentation of housing markets from online listings

David Abella, Johann H. Martínez, Mattia Mazzoli, Julien Migozzi, Thibault Le Corre, Eduard Alonso-Paulí, Rafel Crespí-Cladera, Thomas Louail, José J. Ramasco.
Accepted in EPJ Data Science.
Housing market
Digital Technologies
Real estate agencies unevenly operate and specialize across space, price and type of properties, thereby segmenting the housing market into submarkets. We introduce a new methodology based on multipartite networks to detect spatial segmentation using online listings.
Feb 1, 2025

Apartheid: Still present in the South African landscape?

Published in Pouvoirs. Translation of the original French version by the editor.
South Africa
After thirty years of democracy during which South Africa became an emerging economy, these dividing lines of electoral geography confirm that apartheid, as a multiscalar system of racial and ethnic segregation, remains key to understanding South African society spaces.
Jan 1, 2025

L’Apartheid, toujours inscrit dans l’espace sud-africain ?

Published in Pouvoirs
South Africa
Housing market
Segregation
L’apartheid demeure une clé de lecture indispensable de la société sud-africaine et de ses espaces toutefois insuffsante pour en comprendre les mutations
Dec 31, 2024

Maps, Apps and Race: The Market as a Theoretical Machine

Published in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
Housing market
Segregation
Commentary for the Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie’ annual lecture delivered at the 2023 AAG in Denver. I suggest to understand Desiree Fields’ intervention as a fourth conceptual moment in the study of housing markets and inequalities, for it brings racial capitalism and settler colonialism as theoretical starting points to analyse the political economy of housing in the era of digital property technologies.
May 10, 2024

The good, the bad and the tenant: rental platforms renewing racial capitalism in the post-apartheid housing market

Published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Housing market
Segregation
Digital Technologies
South Africa
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.
Aug 25, 2023

Digital Technology and the City: New Forms of Urban Segregation in Cape Town?

Published in Metropolitics.
Housing market
Segregation
Digital Technologies
South Africa
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.
Jun 30, 2023

Urban geographies of financial convergence: situating Indian financial centres across global production and financial networks

With Dariusz Wójcik and Michael Urban
Published in Economic Geography.
Finance
Digital Technologies
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.
May 25, 2023

“You should do what India does”: FinTech ecosystems in India reshaping the geography of finance

With Dariusz Wójcik and Michael Urban
Published in Geoforum.
Finance
Digital Technologies
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.
Mar 3, 2023

Ville et numérique : vers un renouveau de la ségrégation urbaine au Cap ?

Published in Metropolitiques.
South Africa
Housing market
Digital Technologies
Segregation
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.
Mar 7, 2022

Housing (In)Equity and the Spatial Dynamics of Homeownership in France: A Research Agenda

Renaud Le Goix, Laure Casanova Enault, Loïc Bonneval, Thibault Le Corre, Eliza Benites‐Gambirazio, Guilhem Boulay, William Kutz, Natacha Aveline‐Dubach, Julien Migozzi, Ronan Ysebaert
Published in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie.
Housing market
Segregation
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.
Aug 11, 2020

Selecting Spaces, Classifying People: The Financialization of Housing in the South African City

Published in Housing Policy Debate.
South Africa
Housing market
Finance
Digital Technologies
Segregation
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.
Dec 31, 2019

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

With Renaud Le Goix, Timothée Giraud, Robin Cura and Thibault Le Corre
Published in PLOS One
Housing market
Segregation
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.
Mar 21, 2019

Urban National Parks and the Making of the Housing Market in Emerging Cities: Places of Exclusiveness, Land of Opportunities

With Abdul Shaban and Rafael Soares Gonçalves
Book chapter
South Africa
Housing market
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).
Jul 18, 2018

Showcasing the sovereignty of non-self-governing islands: New Caledonia

With Gerard Prinsen and Yves Lafoy
Published in Asia Pacific Viewpoint
Early work
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).
Jun 9, 2017

L’école des Springboks : le rugby scolaire au Cap, entre ségrégation et déségrégation

Published in M@ppemonde
Early work
A research paper presenting the findings of my Master dissertation on school rugby and urban segregation in post-apartheid Cape Town.
Dec 31, 2011

Le rugby en Afrique du Sud face au défi de transformation : jeu de pouvoir, outil de développement et force symbolique

Published in Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer
Early work
A research paper presenting the findings of my Master dissertation on school rugby and urban segregation in post-apartheid Cape Town.
Apr 1, 2010
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Dissertation

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

Media

Early work