The housing market like every market is the product of thousands of interacting buyers and
sellers driven by different interests. But unlike other markets the housing market is able to
profoundly transform the socioeconomic structure and the image of a city. Very often changes
in urban space are the result of the imperceptible operation of a multitude of
micro-transformations which act with such great energy and decisiveness that they can transform
the 'DNA' of entire urban neighborhoods. These qualitative novelties unpredictable and
non-deducible on the basis of the previous properties are defined emergences. Namely emergence
means a 'pattern formation' characterized by a self-organizing process driven by non-linear
dynamics. This book explores housing market emergence in light of three different phenomena:
search for housing social polarization and gentrification. The book is divided into two
parts. The first part presents contributions on modelling emergence of different phenomena
formalised in multi-agent systems. The second part gathers empirical research and analyses
aimed at supporting the findings of the models.
