All over the world one can discover a development towards a creative and very innovative building structure: rotating buildings. In Dubai a tower is planned with a solid non-moving core and floors which can rotate individually as well as in combination with others. This gives the viewer the impression of a choreography in gigantic proportions. A video demonstrates this impressively. It is planned to use pre-built sections to improve building time.

The BBR (Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung – Federal Office of the building industry and regional development – Germany) conducted and expert-panel in December 2007/ January 2008 to generate trends in the commercial property market.
Despite a stabilized economic situation and shrinking vacancies, the most attractive field of activity for actors in the real estate market is a general overhaul of real estate inventory, especially in the city centres. There will be an increase in demand and prices for these locations.

I recently wrote about the incredible heights of skyscrapers (Let's talk about skyscrapers) and just when I was starting to wonder, how long one would be staying in the elevator to get to the top of such a high building, I came across another article of the Wirtschafts Woche. It was stating that a Japanese manufacturer of elevator (Hitachi) is attempting to break the current elevator speed world-record of 1010 meter per minute. The new Hitachi elevators will shoot up the skyscrapers with 1300 meter per minute. So, don’t forget the ear-clearing, when you will be staying in one of those high-speed elevators.

We just came across the banner of the CeBIT. Check it out on http://www.cebit.com. This trade fair is the world's largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments. It will take place in Hannover from March, 4th to 9th. The banner really is ourbania like? Is it possible that the producers were inspired by our community to create it? ;-)
This page looks pretty cool as well http://www.cebit.de/solutions.
I believe that most of the buildings are already present in this community.

ourbania started on october 1st. After 4 ½ months, people from 2.700 different cities access this community. Here are the Top-200 ourbania cities, starting with the city with the most people accessing to ourbania.

1. Frankfurt (Main)
2. Berlin
3. Mainz
4. Augusta
5. Munich
6. London
7. Hamburg
8. Milan
9. Eschborn
10. Riyadh
11. Cologne
12. Stuttgart
13. Shanghai
14. New York
15. Madrid
16. Düsseldorf
17. Bucharest
18. Paris
19. Washington
20. Vienna
21. Las Vegas
22. Dubayy
23. Shinjuku
24. Gondomar
25. Warsaw
26. Prague
27. Hannover
28. Essen
29. Torino

The ourbania team is proud to announce that the community is listed in the "Top 10 websites - 2008" of the planning & development network planetizen.com. The site is mainly focussed on urban development & planning and wants to bring people together in that context, including urban insights especially for the American market. In their comments on our community, ourbania is described as "a fun, interactive site that lets you explore the world through its buildings" which underlines the idea behind it.

I recently came across an article in the German economy magazine „Wirtschafts Woche“, discussing the incredible heights of skyscrapers. And the winner is…well, will be the “Burj Dubai” with 818,75 m (310 m higher than the current number 1 Teipei-Tower in Taiwan. 7000 Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers are building on the tower, which should be finished in the summer of 2009. With an investing volume of 1,8 Milliard US-$. Around a completely new district will be developed with 320000 luxury apartments, offices, parks and an artificial lake.
But this won’t be the record holder for long.

This Thursday, the ourbania team is going to upload the new profile sites to the community. Unfortunately, based on that, ourbania.com will be offline and unavailable for a short time from 6:00 am to 10:00 am Central European Time. We apologize for any inconvenience which might occur!

The new profile site will widen the possibilities of entering information about you, the citizen, so that others will be able to get to know you a lot better.

The special campaign ”Build&Win” ended on 31th January. In this campaign we wanted to encourage your enthusiasm on creating urban items on ourbania.com, especially your favorate arenas.

The response rate has been great and the urban items were well done. We would like to thank everyone who created urban items based on this campaign. We look forward to announce the winner. Of course, we will also present the winners’ created urban item(s) to you. By now we are evaluating the items and bringing the winner to light. He / she will be contacted by email.

Bloggers generally want to attract users to read their blog posts. This is just normal. Wired.com has published a good interactive overview how blog posts are transported through the web, which parties are part of the life cycle process, how posts are republished and who plays which role. The blog life cycle map makes it really clear how it works. This can be also relevant for your personal real estate and architecture blog posts.

Have a look here http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/ff_secretlife_1602