Michele Neri and Valeria Arrigo (Odos Group) take us behind the scenes of a very specific and little-known Real Estate field, to discover unexpected treasures of sustainability.
For the first appointment in our _Real People_ interview series, we go straight to the centre.
Which centre? The shopping centre!
Michele Neri and Valeria Arrigo are, respectively, Head of Marketing and Executive Assistant for Corporate Communications and Management at Odos Group, a company that commercialises, manages and leases more than 50 shopping centres and retail condominiums across Italy.
Odos is a reality committed not only to Real Estate—with over 750,000 sqm of properties—but also to changing the paradigm that views shopping centres as purely consumerist places centred only on shopping.
Let’s start with a small game… For you, what is the world, in three words?
Valeria: “World” comes from the Latin mundus, which means clean, clear, visible, orderly. Today, though, I’d say the world is the exact opposite. And then other words come to mind—there could be so many: the world is a miracle, it’s a stage, it’s a starry sky.
Michele: I let my mind wander. And I realised the world is three words: “so much”, “incomprehensible”, “surprising”. In life as well as at work, the world still manages to surprise me every single day.
Another game: I meet you at dinner, or at a conference, and I don’t know you. I ask: what do you do for a living?
Michele: My children ask me that too—always! It’s a difficult job to explain and decode, because it deals with things people don’t see.
I work on promoting and making shopping centres known. But our work really happens behind the scenes. What we do has a very visible outcome—advertising campaigns or events. What people don’t expect is everything behind that: both in Marketing, which is my area, and in Real Estate, which is my sector. It’s not only about advertising, or the property returns—which are important, without a doubt—but above all about tracing our work back to those who make these places function through people, for people.
Valeria: I joined Odos a year and a half ago, and I was the first to realise what lies behind it all. I discovered that so many cross-disciplinary skills are involved, so many resources, so many people. If I used to think shopping centres were only a place for shopping, I had to change my mind and see that there is much more.
That’s interesting: challenging stereotypes. How can a shopping centre become “much more”?
Michele: Let’s start from the fact that shopping centres are often experienced as purely consumerist places. The effort of our Marketing activity is aimed at positioning the “shopping centre product” as something different. We try to promote an experience with a social, cultural, human dimension—because that’s what is missing in how these places are perceived.
We Europeans have a cultural and social history that leads us to experience places as gathering spaces, based on the model of the Agora—which later became the church square, the town square, and so on. Unfortunately, these places have partly lost that function today. We feel invested with the task of bringing that concept back to life, creating—around the moment of shopping—an opportunity for connection and for exploring certain values.
Can you give us some concrete examples?
Michele: From a practical standpoint, it’s very tailored work.
In Naples, for example, we took over the management of an existing shopping centre called “La Birreria”. It is located in the Miano district, between Secondigliano and Scampia—an area that has long attracted media attention, not always in a positive way.
We had to restore the image of a place that could be safe, and that placed legality at its core. We began involving the entire social fabric: associations and organisations that were desperately looking for a space to show that these neighbourhoods are not only what the media portrays.
We offered them a place where good things could happen: where children could be welcomed, play and study during the summer. A place for all the craftspeople who make nativity scenes to gather, work, and exhibit their creations: today, it hosts the largest nativity scene exhibition in Naples.
We also gave space to an association of theatre writers and actors, who used vacant shops to run courses and performances involving local schools. Today we work with 40 associations in the area.
In Turin, with “Officine S”, we started from the exact opposite situation: an industrial regeneration project—a former factory where railway tracks were produced, near Parco Dora. The strength there was being embedded in a very prosperous office and residential context.
There were already shopping centres in the area, so we asked ourselves: what will people go there to do? They will go to have fun. We created a place with restaurants and entertainment venues, following a different logic than usual: creating a product that responded to the area’s demand for leisure.
Valeria: And here it becomes very clear just how much work happens behind the scenes—work that, a year and a half ago, I couldn’t even imagine. You always start from the analysis of a geographical and social area, from the needs of the population and the territory around it.
So we can say that the shopping centre is returning “to the centre” of experiences—not only for shopping, but also for social life and community connection.
At the recent conference “E.S.G. – the values of sustainability in Real Estate”, organised by Requadro on 20 November, this concept emerged very clearly: that the S (social) in E.S.G. is becoming increasingly important in this sector… but at the same time, it is the hardest to measure and communicate.
In this regard, how do you communicate these sustainability initiatives? What tools do you use?
Valeria: To communicate with investors and institutions, the B2B channels we use are social media (LinkedIn first and foremost), as well as events, conferences, trade fairs and forums—such as the Requadro event you mentioned, where we were present. These tools are extremely important because they generate relationships, dialogue and thought. And for us, that is vital.
2024 has been a year for mapping and reporting what will bear fruit in 2025: obtaining certifications we didn’t have before and planning the certifications we aim to achieve in the new year, ultimately to build a Sustainability Report.
This is not only a communication tool that is gaining more and more value, but it is also essential to participate in tenders, and over time it will become an essential business tool in order to continue operating in the sector. The future is compliance.
So communicating sustainability in Real Estate is not only “communication for its own sake”.
Michele: The big challenge is making all intangible assets tangible, because in fact they are assets just like the bricks that make up these buildings. We work in an extremely tangible sector, but in practice the results are driven more by intangible elements.