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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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Did you hear about Kista in Sweden? Never? OK, according to Wired Magazine it's the 5th by its size IT area in the world just behind the Silicon Valley in California, Silicon Hills in Austin (Texas), Kompala in Finland and Silicon Fen in UK*. It seems that for the Swedish and Stockholm city authorities that isn't enough because they plan to make their "valley" first among all the other IT zones in the world in the coming 10 years.

Let's put aside the IT technologies and focus on the commercial side of this project. For a long time Swedish economy has been suffering from the strong, even by the European standards, presence of the trade unions. The results of it in the last half a century were the big taxes and the huge outflow of capitals from the country. The traditional industries like coal or steel stimulated the workers the become union members. With the IT technologies the picture looks more different.

Many experts say that they were the IT technologies that turned up again the Swedish economy in the last decade. Having in mind that the main force behind the IT aren't the manual workers but the students and venture capitalists I'm ready to agree with such explanation of the economic trends. Now let's turn to the project itself. At the beginning there was a Kista Science Park, a cluster of IT companies (local and foreign**) that benefited from the concentration of highly educated IT students and graduated scientists (IT University).

Till the 2010 the City of Stockholm that stands behind the whole project expects the local population to double from 30 to 60 000 and the number of students to triple from 3 to 10 000. This mean many more new academic and business facilities have to be build. For that purpose has been designed the Kista Science Tower - the tallest building in Sweden that will house 2500 new offices. The number of companies in the area already 700 (400 of them in IT sector) have to reach almost 3000.

It's obvious that the mayor of Stockholm can't sleep thinking how to turn the capital suburb into a new Silicon Valley. More than that, his dream isn't only to catch up with the Americans but also to make Kista a kind of a new renaissance Florence, a place where the culture and science meet. That's how the idea of turning the Science Park into the Science City was born.

Instead of focusing only on the pure business development of the area, the City of Stockholm began coordinating the realization of the many more auxiliary projects - building new cultural and sport facilities such as auditorium, library, football hall and field and outdoor swimming pool, rebuilding the transport infrastructure and planning new residences for the expected students and businessmen.

Skeptics will say that these projects may become void given the IT industry problems in the recent months around the world. Maybe they are right in a short term period. But I'm optimist about Kista and other projects of this kind in Europe. On one hand, mane countries in the continent, especially with strong trade unions, simply don't have many other options for their development. They must follow the way that brings prosperity, not stagnation. On the other hand, these countries are accustomed to use hidden forms of corporate subsidies to attract foreign firms, so the companies from the IT sector may find beneficial to relocate to Kista especially in the hard times.

* - Ranking is based on factors such as existing IT infrastructure, proximity to university and research centers, amount of risk capitals and the number of newly started companies.

** - Kista Science Park houses the Swedish or Scandinavian headquarters of Compaq Computers, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ICL, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. In the area the single largest employer is the Swedish company Ericsson and the Finnish Nokia has a development center.

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