Seminar: Digital Technologies Reshaping Inequalities in the Post-Apartheid Housing Market

SCIS invites you to Julien Migozzi's seminar, Segregation “bit by bit”: Digital Technologies Reshaping Inequalities in the Post-Apartheid Housing Market

Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University, Julien Migozzi, will present a seminar titled Segregation “bit by bit”: Digital Technologies Reshaping Inequalities in the Post-Apartheid Housing Market on 24 May 2024, 09:00 10:30 (SAST). 

Migozzi will discuss how the digitalisation of the housing market reshapes urban segregation and social stratification in post-apartheid South Africa. I use a mixed-method framework that weaves in-depth fieldwork with the analysis of property sales and census data in the Cape Town metro area. I first unpack how the housing market, previously structured upon the racial categorization of people and places, was reconfigured as a flow of data through the adoption of digital technologies, especially credit scoring, allowing the real-time and automated classification of home seekers. I then explore how the spatial evolution of housing prices and mortgage lending intersect with and affect patterns of urban segregation. Finally, I demonstrate how in the context of racialized indebtedness and enduring segregation, the roll-out of digital technologies enabled a selective financialization of housing that operates “bit by bit” through the use of credit scores: on the one hand, I examine how lending practises remain highly selective, tracing mortgage securitization at the neighbourhood level; on the other, I situate how digital platforms allowed the unprecedented rise of institutional investors and enabled the surge of the rental market. This market shift shapes contemporary patterns of urban change while consolidating housing wealth inequalities engineered by racial capitalism. Finally, I discuss how the digital re-mediation of the market encourages us to re-think the contemporary mechanisms of segregation in the era of algorithmic sorting and rentier capitalism

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