In Valencia, legacy is not an outcome but a starting point — designed from the outset to ensure that events generate lasting social, economic, and environmental value. It is the Legacy programme that sets Zentropy MICE apart. Its goal is to ensure that each conference leaves a positive and lasting mark on Valencia, generating an impact that transcends the event itself.
Based on the idea that conferences should give back to the city, the programme generates a direct return for citizens, strengthening the link between MICE tourism and collective well-being.
The Legacy of Valencia Programme
The Legacy Valencia Program is a strategic initiative of the City Council of Valencia designed to transform professional events into tangible, sustainable benefits for the city and its citizens. Its objective goes beyond hosting congresses and events; it aims to create a social, economic, and environmental legacy that strengthens urban quality of life and promotes a balanced tourism urban model, considering the following phases:
Phase 1 – Mapping to transform
Legacy begins by listening. The first step involves mapping the city’s challenges, local priorities, and vulnerable groups, while identifying actors with the greatest potential to receive and amplify legacy projects. Through interviews, workshops, and participatory mapping, communication channels are opened early, detecting gaps and enabling genuine dialogue between organisers and the city’s innovation ecosystem.
This approach ensures that communication is inclusive, strategic and adapted to local needs —ensuring legacy is co-designed with the city’s people and institutions from the very beginning.
Phase 2 – Building synergies
Each legacy project emerges through collaboration. Event organizers share their goals and intentions, while the city connects them to relevant stakeholders — universities, associations, SMEs, and social entities — aligning their aspirations with municipal and public policy priorities.
Communication plays a key mediating role here: it translates objectives into shared value, ensuring that every partner understands how their involvement contributes to the city’s sustainable future. In this way, synergy itself becomes a communication act — one that transforms fragmented objectives into coherent collective action.
Phase 3 – Designing action
Once the connection is made, Zentropy MICE prototypes specific legacy projects for each congress or event at the Palacio de Congresos. These are detailed through an Action Plan that defines activities, responsibilities, and timelines, alongside a Communication Plan ensuring visibility, coherence, and citizen participation.
Clear and creative communication ensures that events gain traction: participants and residents understand and contribute to the positive impact in the city. They tell a unique story for each neighbourhood, reflecting ownership and transformation.
Phase 4 – Valencia’s legacy comes to life
During the events, communication guarantees actions are visible and meaningful. Connections between organisers, citizens, and local actors become tangible. Valencia assumes the role of co-creator of positive impact, where shared knowledge materialises into real initiatives — from circular waste pilots to community-led green actions.
Through continuous storytelling, the city communicates progress, shares testimonies, and celebrates the people behind the transformation. Communication thus amplifies visibility while deepening ownership and belonging.
Phase 5 – Measuring impact
The final step of the Legacy València Programme is not the end, but the beginning of a new cycle. Evaluation combines qualitative and quantitative data to measure real impact and extract lessons learned. Communication is again central: results are disseminated, stories are shared, trust is gained, and evidence informs future policies.
This approach consolidates a methodological framework for continuous improvement, guaranteeing transparency, traceability, and replicability. Communication transforms evaluation into learning — and learning into new opportunities for legacy creation.
The innovation behind Valencia Zentropy MICE legacy approach
The greatest innovation of Valencia Zentropy MICE lies in its reversal of logic: legacy is not something achieved after an event — it is something built before it begins to maximise its positive impact, through deliberate and inclusive communication.
By starting from the desired outcome — the legacy — and designing communication accordingly, every participant, organiser, and citizen becomes part of the story from the first event. This anticipatory approach fosters purpose, clarity, and connection, turning abstract sustainability goals into lived experiences and real solutions in Valencia’s neighbourhoods.
Zentropy MICE demonstrates that in sustainable urban development, communication is not an accessory but a fundamental component of the project’s design. It shapes the way the city of Valencia will innovate, creating value for its citizens and future generations.
In the end, Zentropy MICE is not just about making events sustainable; it is about making sustainability understandable and engaging. Through its communication strategy, Valencia turns entropy into synergy, transforming events into enduring legacies that live on their neighbourhoods. Each event becomes an opportunity to rethink how Valencia learns and evolves, proving that when we envision the legacy we want to leave, we begin to build the cities we aspire to become.
View full article written by Contreras Escribano, Ana (November 4, 2025). The Legacy of Valencia Zentropy MICE: Starting from the end to transform the beginning. PORTICO. Recovered from https://bit.ly/zentropylegacyportico