Overview

My research develops a reproducible, privacy-by-design framework to analyse city-scale monetary circulation using strictly aggregated electronic payment indicators (no individual-level data). The objective is to reveal economic centralities, territorial dependence gradients, and socio-spatial disparities embedded in everyday consumption and payment practices, and to relate these patterns to urban accessibility, planning layers, and real-estate valorisation dynamics.

This project is not primarily about “adoption” of digital payments. It focuses on post-deployment appropriation: how payment infrastructures (instant payments, card networks, wallets, acquiring, platform payments) become embedded in local economies and reshape where value circulates, who can participate, at what cost, and with what forms of visibility.

Scientific debate and positioning

The project sits at the intersection of three debates that are often treated separately:

Financial inclusion vs. new forms of extraction and dependency. Across the digital finance literature, a persistent tension runs through the evidence: on the one hand, digital payments are associated with lower frictions, expanded economic opportunities, and efficiency gains ("inclusion", smoother transactions, formalisation). On the other hand, they are interpreted as intensifying financialisation and value capture, through fees, dependence on intermediaries, technical lock-ins, and datafication (turning economic activity into exploitable traces). The project aims to identify the mechanisms and socio-spatial conditions that shift a territory toward one scenario or the other.

Payments and money as socio-technical infrastructure. Payments are treated as infrastructure (standards, rails, compliance devices, acceptance networks, interfaces): largely invisible when they work, yet politically decisive as soon as they filter access, generate cost asymmetries, or impose specific formats of visibility. This perspective (Science and Technology Studies (STS) / infrastructure studies) moves beyond a “neutral” view of payments: technical design, organisational arrangements, and regulation co-produce economic and territorial outcomes.

Governing the city, and, ultimately, populations, through metrics and transaction traces. Transaction data now feed a growing set of steering instruments (dashboards, scoring, commercial targeting, urban diagnostics). A critical debate concerns the performativity of indicators: measuring also means producing categories, thresholds, and hierarchies of what counts. The project contributes to this discussion on algorithmic governance, the risks of over-interpretation (coverage bias, Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP)), and the conditions under which evidence can be both auditable and ethically governable.

Core concepts

Urban monetary microflows. Aggregated, fine-grained signals of value circulation (where spending occurs; where consumers originate; when and in what sectors), treated as a lens on the city’s everyday economy.

Payment infrastructures. Socio-technical systems (networks, terminals, wallets, application programming interfaces (APIs), rules) that condition transaction costs, access, reliability, and traceability.

Territorial dependence gradients. Spatial patterns of reliance on specific centralities, corridors, or commercial ecosystems, capturing vulnerability/lock-in for peripheral areas.

Socio-spatial disparity in economic participation. Unequal capabilities to pay/receive, unequal exposure to costs and compliance filters, unequal visibility and eligibility (e.g., for credit, offers, platform access).

Centrality and functionality of consumption spaces. Centralities defined not only by volume but by connectivity/attractiveness; functional areas detected via network modularity/community structures.

Disciplines mobilised

Urban & economic geography: centralities, networks, territorial inequalities, urban restructuring.

Geographies of finance / monetary geographies: spatial organisation of money, intermediation, and financial power.

Urban political economy: financialisation, rent dynamics, platform power, regulation.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) / infrastructure studies: standards, socio-technical systems, “black boxes”, governance through design.

Urban data science & spatial methods: spatial statistics, network analysis, robustness, reproducibility, interpretability.

Data governance (applied): disclosure control, privacy-by-design, and auditable pipelines.

Literature gaps the project addresses

Beyond adoption: much of the literature measures access/adoption; fewer studies explain how payment infrastructures reshape intra-urban economic organisation after deployment, especially in working-class and noncentral areas.

Territory as explanation (not illustration): consumption and payment research often lacks a strong territorial theory of why effects differ across centralities, margins, and mobility constraints.

Infrastructure as mechanism: payment rails and compliance architectures are frequently treated as background; this project treats them as causal mechanisms producing spatial asymmetries.

Reproducible, privacy-safe territorial indicators: research is often polarised between open macro statistics and inaccessible microdata. There is a missing middle: auditable aggregated indicators that remain analytically powerful.

Feedback loop: measurement → decision (bank / payment service provider (PSP) / city) → reconfiguration of flows is under-theorised; the project explicitly models these feedbacks.

Research questions

How is intra-urban monetary circulation spatially structured, and which consumption centralities emerge from payment flows that are not fully captured by employment or transport networks?

What asymmetries in access, dependence, and territorial vulnerability become visible in peripheral and working-class areas?

How do flow signatures relate to valorisation processes and the production of urban space over time (where data allow longitudinal analysis)?

Methods and outputs

Methods. Spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s I; Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA)), clustering, polarization measures, and multi-scale robustness tests (MAUP) are combined with temporal validation and spatial block cross-validation. Where origin–destination (Origin–Destination (OD)) information is available, OD network analysis supports centrality and functional-area detection; where not available, the approach relies on place-of-expenditure indicators enriched by urban context.

Outputs. Multi-scale maps of consumption centralities; territorial typologies; indicators of resilience/diversity/volatility of local economic activity; and documented protocols enabling replication and comparison across neighbourhoods (and, where feasible, across cities).

Data strategy and governance (privacy-by-design)

The project follows a graduated access strategy:

Aggregated OD matrices (preferred) when available under strict governance.

If OD is unavailable: place-of-expenditure analyses using aggregated transaction indicators.

Systematic enrichment with open/administrative urban datasets where permissible (e.g., General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) transport supply, zoning/planning layers, accessibility, socio-demographics, municipal property transactions when open).

Protection and auditability are built into the pipeline: minimisation, disclosure thresholds, top-coding, suppression rules, joinability controls, and strict separation between secure analysis and publishable outputs. The goal is to make results scientifically credible and institutionally acceptable for partners holding sensitive data.

What the project brings that is new

Theoretical contribution: an integrated view of digital payments as urban infrastructures of value circulation, linking territory, infrastructure governance, and socio-spatial inequality.

Methodological contribution: a transferable and reproducible framework to extract territorial indicators from aggregated monetary flows under privacy-by-design constraints.

Empirical contribution: fine-grained evidence on consumption centralities, dependence gradients, and disparities, especially relevant for peripheral and working-class areas.

Applied contribution (bounded): a policy-relevant toolkit that can support public authorities, financial institutions, and international organisations, while explicitly documenting limitations and biases.