Novalis

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.