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

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.

When building or editing Urban Items, you can add related links. This is an excellent thing to do because it adds enormous value to the Urban Item. It means that for additional information you can provide interested people with a direct link to other websites about the building and save them a lot of time searching the web. The more related links there are, the better it is. For adding more than one link it is necessary that you separate the links by introducing a comma and a space character. Otherwise there will only be one very long link, which will lead nowhere.

Dear Citizens,
Talking about great numbers in my last post, here is another one:
Flickr reached 2.147.483.647 pictures at the very end of the year 2007. (Congratulations to Flickr!!) This is also the limit for signed integer data type and it unfortunately causes some problems by users of the Flickr API.
What does it mean for ourbania citizens?
It means that for a couple of days it will not be possible to upload

What a good beginning of the year 2008! I hope you recovered well from all end-of-the-year celebrations and I have good news about the community to share with you.
We started this year by breaking the 300-mark in terms of Urban Items as well as Citizen. Congratulations! I hope you will continue to enjoy the community, tell your friends about it and build the world :-).