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.
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.<p><a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....</a>
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'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.