This post is part of a larger exploration (not yet finished, but you can follow it at minicities.org) on whether a permanent miniature city could replace school. Tentatively, I think so, but the boundary between it and the adult world has to be deliberately porous, as I describe here.
There are two well-known attempts to build miniature cities for children: Mini-Munich and KidZania.
Both have streets, storefronts, jobs, and a local currency. But they are built on opposing assumptions about what children are capable of. One treats children as consumers of scripted activities; the other lets them participate in a city whose parts depend on one another and is malleable to their actions.
KidZania vs Mini-Munich
KidZania, founded in Mexico City in 1999 and now in around thirty countries, is a polished commercial operation. Corporate partners fund branded workplaces (banks, hospitals, restaurants) and children rotate through them in fifteen-to-thirty-minute slots. They enter a workplace, follow a pre-choreographed sequence of steps, collect their wages, and exit. The production values are impressive. But nothing connects to anything else. Goods made in workshops aren’t sold in the department store. The newspaper doesn’t run ads for other businesses. It has the aesthetic of interdependence, the streets, the storefronts, the uniforms, without any of its logic.
This is less a design failure than a consequence of what KidZania is. Scripted, time-boxed activities are after all a sensible way to run a throughput-based attraction where large numbers of children rotate daily through a fixed set of “jobs”. Allowing a child to stay at a sought-after job all afternoon because she is genuinely absorbed would be operationally catastrophic: it blocks every other child from that slot. The model that would actually deepen learning — open-ended time, children finding novel ways to do the job — directly undermines the model that makes the business viable.
Mini-Munich, organized by a group of Munich cultural pedagogues since 1979 as a three-week-long summer program, is built on the opposite premise: that a city only becomes real when it responds to what its inhabitants do.
What this means in practice is that the city functions as a social order rather than a collection of separate activities. The newspaper has a deadline. It must be finished by five o’clock for it to be printed and sold before the children go home in the evening. Children in the editorial office decide what to write about, set rates for ads, invent new sections, and type the copy themselves while reporters return from assignments across the city. When something goes wrong in the kitchen — a snail turns up in the salad because the lettuce was not washed properly — it is in the newspaper that evening, and three people from the kitchen are in the TV studio the next day being grilled by the news anchor.
The workshops follow the same logic. Children make real things, briefcases, baskets, jewelry, pottery, glassblown objects, which they can sell on the market or in the department store. The advertising agency designs flyers and posters commissioned by other enterprises. If the text is confusing or the work isn't finished by the deadline, the enterprise that commissioned it complains and may not pay the contract value, leading to a conflict that ends up in court. An architecture studio designs a façade for another enterprise; a workshop then builds it. Decisions in one part of the city create needs and problems in others. The institutions are not performing city life; they are, in a reduced and somewhat simplified form, living it.
Governance is real in the same way. Children elect their mayor and city council, pass laws in citizens’ assemblies, and sit at the city court. In 1985, the city council introduced a police force. Various incidents led the same council to abolish it. Children who wanted a stock exchange built one. Children who wanted to strike organized one and lived with the consequences. If a child wants to introduce something that does not yet exist, there is room for it, though it requires their own initiative, just as it would in the real world.
The two miniature cities also differ in their appeal depending on the age of the children. KidZania is most appealing between five and ten: dressing up as a pilot or a doctor and following a script is genuinely exciting at that age. But the experience has a low ceiling. By eleven, the scripted roles feel babyish. There is nothing to master, nothing to deepen, no reason to return. The very features that make KidZania accessible to a six-year-old — the short activities, the clear instructions, the guaranteed outcomes — are what make it hollow to an eleven-year-old.
Mini-Munich’s age curve runs almost in reverse. For a six-year-old, the city is exciting but somewhat overwhelming. It becomes most interesting around nine, ten, eleven, and twelve, when children are sophisticated enough to understand the interplay between institutions and hold positions of real responsibility. Some stayed for weeks at the same job, not repeating the same experience but developing it further, doing things the organizers had not anticipated. And because Mini-Munich runs for weeks at a time, children who return after a brief absence find a city that has changed: laws had been passed, businesses had opened and failed, scandals had been debated and half-forgotten. A child who spent two weeks writing for the newspaper could run for city council in week three on the basis of a public reputation she had actually built.
KidZania is commercially sustainable but thin to inhabit — impressive to look at, entertaining for a few hours, incapable of accommodating genuine agency because the environment is a commercial product whose parameters cannot be renegotiated by the children. Mini-Munich is rich and formative, but runs for three weeks every two years on municipal grants that have to be argued for each cycle. Its survival depends entirely on the goodwill of local authorities and the endurance of a small team of pedagogues.
The open question is whether anything can exist between these two poles: commercially viable enough to run year-round, but philosophically closer to Mini-Munich than to KidZania. If it can, we may have found what the school of tomorrow will look like.
This post is part of a larger exploration (not yet finished, but you can follow it at minicities.org) on whether a permanent miniature city could replace school. Tentatively, I think so, but the boundary between it and the adult world has to be deliberately porous, as I describe here.
There are two well-known attempts to build miniature cities for children: Mini-Munich and KidZania.
Both have streets, storefronts, jobs, and a local currency. But they are built on opposing assumptions about what children are capable of. One treats children as consumers of scripted activities; the other lets them participate in a city whose parts depend on one another and is malleable to their actions.
KidZania vs Mini-Munich
KidZania, founded in Mexico City in 1999 and now in around thirty countries, is a polished commercial operation. Corporate partners fund branded workplaces (banks, hospitals, restaurants) and children rotate through them in fifteen-to-thirty-minute slots. They enter a workplace, follow a pre-choreographed sequence of steps, collect their wages, and exit. The production values are impressive. But nothing connects to anything else. Goods made in workshops aren’t sold in the department store. The newspaper doesn’t run ads for other businesses. It has the aesthetic of interdependence, the streets, the storefronts, the uniforms, without any of its logic.
This is less a design failure than a consequence of what KidZania is. Scripted, time-boxed activities are after all a sensible way to run a throughput-based attraction where large numbers of children rotate daily through a fixed set of “jobs”. Allowing a child to stay at a sought-after job all afternoon because she is genuinely absorbed would be operationally catastrophic: it blocks every other child from that slot. The model that would actually deepen learning — open-ended time, children finding novel ways to do the job — directly undermines the model that makes the business viable.
Mini-Munich, organized by a group of Munich cultural pedagogues since 1979 as a three-week-long summer program, is built on the opposite premise: that a city only becomes real when it responds to what its inhabitants do.
What this means in practice is that the city functions as a social order rather than a collection of separate activities. The newspaper has a deadline. It must be finished by five o’clock for it to be printed and sold before the children go home in the evening. Children in the editorial office decide what to write about, set rates for ads, invent new sections, and type the copy themselves while reporters return from assignments across the city. When something goes wrong in the kitchen — a snail turns up in the salad because the lettuce was not washed properly — it is in the newspaper that evening, and three people from the kitchen are in the TV studio the next day being grilled by the news anchor.
The workshops follow the same logic. Children make real things, briefcases, baskets, jewelry, pottery, glassblown objects, which they can sell on the market or in the department store. The advertising agency designs flyers and posters commissioned by other enterprises. If the text is confusing or the work isn't finished by the deadline, the enterprise that commissioned it complains and may not pay the contract value, leading to a conflict that ends up in court. An architecture studio designs a façade for another enterprise; a workshop then builds it. Decisions in one part of the city create needs and problems in others. The institutions are not performing city life; they are, in a reduced and somewhat simplified form, living it.
Governance is real in the same way. Children elect their mayor and city council, pass laws in citizens’ assemblies, and sit at the city court. In 1985, the city council introduced a police force. Various incidents led the same council to abolish it. Children who wanted a stock exchange built one. Children who wanted to strike organized one and lived with the consequences. If a child wants to introduce something that does not yet exist, there is room for it, though it requires their own initiative, just as it would in the real world.
The two miniature cities also differ in their appeal depending on the age of the children. KidZania is most appealing between five and ten: dressing up as a pilot or a doctor and following a script is genuinely exciting at that age. But the experience has a low ceiling. By eleven, the scripted roles feel babyish. There is nothing to master, nothing to deepen, no reason to return. The very features that make KidZania accessible to a six-year-old — the short activities, the clear instructions, the guaranteed outcomes — are what make it hollow to an eleven-year-old.
Mini-Munich’s age curve runs almost in reverse. For a six-year-old, the city is exciting but somewhat overwhelming. It becomes most interesting around nine, ten, eleven, and twelve, when children are sophisticated enough to understand the interplay between institutions and hold positions of real responsibility. Some stayed for weeks at the same job, not repeating the same experience but developing it further, doing things the organizers had not anticipated. And because Mini-Munich runs for weeks at a time, children who return after a brief absence find a city that has changed: laws had been passed, businesses had opened and failed, scandals had been debated and half-forgotten. A child who spent two weeks writing for the newspaper could run for city council in week three on the basis of a public reputation she had actually built.
KidZania is commercially sustainable but thin to inhabit — impressive to look at, entertaining for a few hours, incapable of accommodating genuine agency because the environment is a commercial product whose parameters cannot be renegotiated by the children. Mini-Munich is rich and formative, but runs for three weeks every two years on municipal grants that have to be argued for each cycle. Its survival depends entirely on the goodwill of local authorities and the endurance of a small team of pedagogues.
The open question is whether anything can exist between these two poles: commercially viable enough to run year-round, but philosophically closer to Mini-Munich than to KidZania. If it can, we may have found what the school of tomorrow will look like.