NOT MY IMAGE !!!!!
Part of an online critique: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1005&message=24037640

Critique:

I like the image. A few comments for your consideration.
I hope you don't mind me messing with your perfectly fine pixels,
but a picture is worth a thousand words as they say.

1. the silhouette of the buildings against the skyline is quite compelling.
I'd suggest there is more "visual tension" if you crop off some of the sky.
There is more "Visual Tension" when that jagged edge is closer to the edge of the frame.
Visual tension draws one's eye to it.
With the tighter crop, my eye is invited to dance along the high-contrast roofline.

2. To be able to see the buildings a bit better would be good so that the reward for my eye "dancing along the skyline" is the interesting buildings in the soft light.

3. I love the reflective light on the lines in the street.
For there to be "bright" there needs to be "dark".
So I darkened the street a bit to emphasize the reflective lines are a good device to draw ones eye back towards the sun and then the building's skyline.

Lastly, I'm a proponent of presentation. The intent of the virtual mats is to use colors from the image and to choose colors that we want to draw our eye to. A form of visual reinforcement and even emphasis.

To balance out the tonality presents a greater sense of the place or Context; that tells a richer story.
I suspect that you could see the detail in the buildings in spite of the contrast even though our cameras struggle to cope with such a huge tonal range.
So perhaps the expectation is to be able to see the buildings more clearly than the darker version.
In the darker version the sky is the dominant feature/expression simply because of its brightness.
Consider that the sky is a "universal element" that is everywhere all the time and everyone on the planet has one to look at in some form.
And it is always changing. So the sky adds nothing to the sense of place.
It's always visually interesting, but tells us little about that particular City.
So to emphasize the Cityscape tells a richer and more compelling story.