Recoding racial capitalism: platforming the post-apartheid housing market

This presentation will analyse how digital capitalism renews wealth inequalities and urban segregation through the transformation of urban housing markets by real estate platforms. Focusing on post-apartheid South Africa, I examine how housing, a foundational site of racial capitalism, has been re-coded financially, algorithmically and legally into an asset class over the last decade through the entanglement of financial capital with digital technologies. Combining in-depth fieldwork in Cape Town with the computational analysis of sales and census data, I analyse three joint processes that reconfigured the market around a data imperative: the datafication of home-seekers by credit bureaus; the rise of rental platforms offering tenant screening solutions; the emergence of corporate landlords. The trajectory of South Africa illustrates how digital capitalism intersects with racial capitalism through the integration of home-seekers and properties into large and networked databases, renewing mechanisms of value extraction and shaping patterns of residential sorting.

Speaker: Julien Migozzi, University of Oxford