HOTSPOT
Vega Venice The honeymooners’ favourite destination is seducing business investors with a major regeneration project. Francesca Lombardo reports
V
enice, many sigh, is the world’s most spellbinding city – others grumble that in high season it resembles a theme park. But those holding either opinion may be surprised to learn that the canal-riddled tourist magnet is now positioning itself at the forefront of scientific, technological and business innovation. This ambition stems from the emergence of Vega, one of Italy’s most important land-reclamation and urban-regeneration projects, and one of the largest science parks in Europe. Indeed, straddling more than 15 hectares of the Venetian mainland, including the industrial area of Porto Marghera, Vega is keen to scoop up the honeypots of the nano and biotech sectors as well as media outfits and various education and training facilities. Being Venice, it is also trumpeting cultural heritage, aspiring to be “a real city,” with spaces dedicated to culture and entertainment, while some of Vega’s research activities will centre on the restoration and preservation of works of art and architecture – useful in a city that is rapidly crumbling into the sea. Funded by a consortium of 34 private and public investors – the main financial partner being the local council – the €450m first phase of the Vega project began in 1996 and will not be completed until 2018. However, it already provides space for 200 pioneering Italian companies working in various sectors of technological innovation, as well as two research labs for Venice’s Ca’ Foscari and IUAV universities, employing 2,000 researchers and other staff. Soon workers will be spoilt for choice when deciding where to hang up their lab coats and let their hair down. A former fertiliser factory is being converted into the Music City Mall, an 11,600m2 leisure complex that will comprise restaurants, shops, gyms and an open-air theatre.
“The areas have been planned and equipped for the construction of ‘intelligent’ buildings: a city where technological innovation is applied to construction and energy-saving principles, with bio-architecture and environmental sustainability,” explains the project’s communications director, Ilaria Ambrami. “We were inspired by the great European science parks, mainly the English science parks such as Nottingham and Cambridge, where there is even a golf course, because we all know that recreation is fundamental to business networking.” For the second phase, a new tender will be offered for the construction of two leaning towers, the new symbol for what many have, inevitably, dubbed Venice’s Silicon Valley. This €100m vision – a nod, perhaps, to Galileo, who dropped balls from the tower at Pisa to demonstrate his theories of mass – is expected to attract Italian and foreign investment. “One tower will host start-up companies working within the multimedia and digital sector,” says Abrami, who teasingly adds that it might even accommodate Google’s Italian headquarters. It is envisaged that the second tower will be turned into a 400-room hotel with studio flats, a 600-seat restaurant and other amenities to lure a large workforce of marketing agencies, web designers and other black-collar workers. The third stage of the project, which is not due to be finished before 2018, will see film and recording studios and a multimedia centre. Although the project is just over the halfway hump, the influx of high-tech employees emboldens local estate agents to predict that the capital and rental value of the mainland’s property market will rise for the next few years despite the country’s largely crumbling real estate market. Whatever happens to the famous city itself, Vega will do a great deal to keep the local economy afloat. NOVEMBER 2008 I CNBC EUROPEAN BUSINESS 13
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