Our next edition of Global Players comes to you from Dubai, where leading developers and investors are meeting at Cityscape, the world’s biggest real estate event. 682 billion dollars changed hands last year in property deals, up 38 percent from the year before; this year’s transactions could exceed a record 800 billion. Accelerating urbanization and an increasingly mobile and affluent elite are fuelling the growth of red hot real estate markets in the Gulf and in megacities such as Shanghai, New York, Moscow and Paris. There, real estate prices have taken on their own dynamic, rising far faster than national economic growth. Does globalization make such markets less vulnerable to the old boom-and-bust cycle? Which centers and sectors will still be a good risk if the US credit crisis provokes a worldwide downturn? Are emerging markets overvalued and overheated? Are established markets saturated? And how much are economic and environmental sustainability intertwined?