Many North American cities can already be presented in 3D - mainly the inner cities of bigger metropoles. Germany has also started to build 3D models of inner cities. Hamburg and Berlin were the first German metropoles in 2007 which could be discovered in 3 dimensions. Various other cities copied this strategy to present themselves to target groups as tourists and architecture enthousiasts for example. Even smaller German cities as Wiesbaden in Hesse begin to create their urban environment in the world wide network of Google Earth.

If you have ever been to Tokyo or Japan in general, you might have realized that parking in the crowded megacities is a little bit different compared to European or North American car parks. Usually, European car drivers drive into the city, get their parking ticket at the entry lane and steer their vehicle into the lot. Well, due to the lack of space in urban areas especially in Japan, developers, urban planners and technology companies built parks under different circumstances.

In Dubai, Norman Foster plans the first ecological and carbon neutral city of the future: Masdar. To date, the city only exist virtually but this year in February the ground breaking ceremony took place on an area of more than six square kilometers in the desert of Abu Dabhi at the Persian gulf.

At the end of the year 2009, first sections will be completed and ready for use. It is planned to offer residential housing areas for up to 50,000 people with the objective to build them 100 % carbon-free.

Why living and working on solid ground? Why not using water as a basis for urban development and special architectural challenges?

While doing research in the internet I got in contact with an interesting website called competition online. This site offers a big pool of architectural and urban development tenders, mainly focussed on the German market. By registering on the site the user gets the opportunity to participate in the tender process, getting current tender alerts or even posting own tenders to the platform. Users can also contact companies directly by using the competition online's database and finding suitable architects or building contractors.

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.

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.

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

There is a new browser available in the web which can help you managing your blog posts on ourbania as well as managing and sharing your flickr photos. The Flock Browser is totally focussed on Web 2.0 applications and gadgets.

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

Dear Citizen,

An interesting project and initiative from Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation makes its World tour, which focusses on the tendency of so called "shrinking cities". The project is time limited up to three years and has the aim to widen the interest in this complex topic and open people's eyes by supporting the public discussion.

During the project, global urban shrinking processes were analysed, results were pubished and currently, the project organises exhibitions all over the world. Details concerning the project and the exhibitions can be found at:

A lot of new Citizens have joined ourbania during the last weeks and I heartily welcome you guys. I am sure that many people are interested in getting to know you a little bit better, so I invite you to upload your picture and tell a few things about yourself – who you are, what you do or maybe why you are here. I am also very curious to see, what your favourite buildings are, so do not hesitate to actively participate in the community. You can upload pictures of buildings and write a few words about them, comment other citizens’ architectural favourites and many other things.