Portugal gets own Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Portugal gets own Silicon Valley

euobserver.com

33 pointsbase22 comments

I'm skeptical about this. The city I live in has declared itself as the 'IT City of the North' a few years ago, but still most IT jobs are in the West of the country. You don't become a Silicon Valley by declaring yourself one. It's a political pipe dream. This new city in Portugal leaves the same taste in my mouth: lots of fashionable marketese (what does 'being green' and 'carbon neutral' has to do with being succesful in IT?) hot air and vapourous ideas. Let's see where it is in a few years from now.

Sounds like they are ignoring Jane Jacobs. Her four rules for a flourishing city area: the area must serve more than one primary function, and preferably more than two; most blocks must be short; the district must involve mixed aged buildings; and there must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people.

Those sound like proxies for measuring some other factors; who flourishes based on the range of ages of the surrounding buildings? Presumably that really measures some variation in the types of businesses nearby, or that there are some long term residents, or the area has some hook factor which keeps people investing over and over.

All of which they could design in or design around without having to have old buildings, say.

But it sounds like they are designing for the administration of the city, not for the end users. I wouldn't want to live there for a few revisions at least...

By those rules, Silicon Valley is not a "flourishing city area".

Let me guess - Ms Jacobs wants to "encourage" those factors by various means.

What would the Portugese rather have, a "flourishing city area" or a job and technology producing area?

In other news, black families are leaving "flourishing cities" http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-10/bay-area/17121007_1_af... . See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%20flight .

In that, black families are like other families - http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/03/san-francisco-becomi... .

Some people prefer urban. However, a lot of people don't. The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals.

Silicon Valley isn't a city. San Francisco is. I don't know whether Jacobs wanted to encourage such factors --- she turned city planning on its head with her book in 1960, and it was a data-driven book, while the orthodoxy at the time satisfied "The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals."

I'm not sure why "encourage" is in quotes. If you mean, "inspire the next generation of city planners and architects to design places that people want to actually live" you're right. But I'm reading a more dismissive tone and I'm not sure why.

Jacobs' work directly contributed to the decline of the urban superblock (that mainstay of 1960s urbanism and blight on 21st century cities) and a rebirth of the mixed use development. The later is especially popular in inner suburbs going through phases of new growth looking for an antidote to their original strip-mall and subdevelopment plans (usually lack of plans).

Sounds a bit cargo-culty. Those four factors happen to apply to the vast majority of cities in the world, most of which aren't necessarily "flourishing".

And one of the places which least fits the bill is the very place they're trying to replicate: Silicon Valley, where the blocks are long, the population sparse, the buildings mostly from the last few decades, and the whole area ain't nothin' but high-tech.

Now I'd say that Silicon Valley succeeded despite its lousy geography rather than because of it (most people I know who work there hate it and commute from San Francisco) though there's one important exception: the sparse population means that big companies can build those huge campus-like HQs which you just couldn't do in a denser city.

That sounds like a list of correlations, rather than causation.

It takes a lot more than 10 billion euros of infrastructure to create a Silicon Valley. Else, China would have about ten of them by now.

It sounds way too artificial. They don't even have any universities of note in a radius of, what, over hundreds of kilometres?

I don't know how far this is from Porto, since the article just stated "Not too far from the northern Portuguese city of Porto", but there's a notable engineering university in Porto, FEUP (Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto). The other one (Instituto Superior Técnico) is in Lisbon, around 300km away.

It really depends on what you consider an university of note, if you set the bar really high you can raise that to a thousand kilometers. Is there any engineering university of note in Portugal or Spain?

That said, there are more than acceptable universities around and with really good traits like Universidade do Minho and the Porto's university.

I'm portuguese but from the south, formed in the engineering university with most tradition in Portugal, Tecnico (IST), do you know it?

But it also sounds too artificial too me, maybe they are there for the landscapes, for the Porto wine and the 'francesinhas' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesinha).

True, but I'm even more skeptical about the the Venture Capital firms they assume will appear.

http://living-planit.com/whyportugal.htm

Portugal offers a high level of education and location of universities in relation to the PlanIT Valley site (5 major universities within 90 km) with the largest in Portugal – University of Porto – less than 15 km away. In addition, there is a significant emphasis placed on knowledge development to support transition to a knowledge economy.

They are probably counting galician Universidade de Vigo as one of those major universities. Not portuguese, but closer than Lisbon, and there's actually quite some circulation of students and workforce both ways across the Minho river:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte_Region,_Portugal

North Portugal and Galicia form a Euroregion, based on the common historical, cultural, linguistic and economic similarities. The Euroregion has its origins in the Galicia-North Portugal Work Community, established in 1991. This Euroregion is also backed by the so-called Eixo Atlântico ("Atlantic Axis"), a lobby of Galician and North Portuguese cities and municipalities.

For a bunch of smart, wealthy people, they really don't grok emergent phenomena. The Silicon Valley ecosystem, like so many things, is a product of human action, but not of human design.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....

What are taxes, non-disclosures, non-competes, and angel investing rules like in Portugal?

It would depend on which politician you have in your payroll or influence network. If don't have any, get ready for a slow, agonizing, unintelligible maze-like process through twisted Portuguese law, local authorities, government authorities, back to local authorities, different local authorities, back to central government, eventually a little showdown on the court, more laws, and finishing realizing you could have saved a lot of time (and money) and accomplish exactly the same by just ignoring any kind of regulation, and being prepared to pay the fines for doing it.

This is an exaggeration of course, but you're bound to experience this someway, one way or another. Everybody does, no matter what they're trying to do. As for what you specifically asked, I don't know. But I'd like to as much as you...

Sounds like that new Silicon Valley they were building outside Moscow, or the one they built in Malaysia, or the high-tech cluster outside Kathmandu, . . . you get the point.

I seem to possess a bias against cities that doesn't grow organically.

I'm in Lisbon and nobody I asked today had ever heard anything about this. Given the economic climate (2% fall in GDP forcast for the next year or so) I'd be really surprised if it was possible to raise the funding for this. As others have pointed out Silicon Valley has very little to do with location so recreating it is rather fanciful at best.

Just like startups, anything that displace the silicon valley would probably not be like silicon valley. It'll be something else probably...

This is something else actually. It's intended to be an utopian sustainable smart city. I don't think they call it the "Silicon Valley of Portugal" because of the projected startup ecosystem, but for the hi-tech aspect.

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