Draft:Mini city

A mini city, also called a children's city or play city (German: Kinderstadt, Kinderspielstadt, Spielstadt), is a large-scale educational play project, run by youth and cultural educators, in which children build and inhabit a temporary miniature town. Over a period of days or weeks, participants take paid jobs, earn and spend a local play currency, pay taxes, study, start businesses, elect a government and run institutions such as newspapers, banks and broadcasting studios.

Such projects are usually staged as school-holiday programmes by municipal youth services or non-profit cultural-education associations, and range in scale from a few dozen participants to several thousand a day. Participants are typically aged between about seven and fifteen.

The format originated with Mini-München, first staged in Munich in 1979 for the International Year of the Child, and became the prototype for comparable projects across Germany and, subsequently, elsewhere in Europe and beyond.

Format

Work and currency

Participants register on arrival and receive an identity card on which their activities are recorded. An employment office lists available posts; children queue for these at the start of the day and may hold a job for as long as they wish, at which point it returns to the pool. Those who see nothing they want may instead register a business of their own and hire other children; past ventures have included a detective agency.

Work and study are both paid, in a play currency issued by the city's bank. At Mini-München the unit is the MiMü: an hour of work earns five, of which one is withheld as city tax.

Institutions

The city reproduces the institutions of urban life at a reduced scale. Alongside businesses and workshops there is a city administration, an elected government, courts for settling disputes, refuse collection and public transport, and media, including a daily newspaper and, in the larger cities, radio and television studios. Children take roles from mayor and council member to journalist, taxi driver, gardener and street cleaner.

The larger cities also run a university, at which participants may both attend courses and teach them, earning income either way; parents and outside experts teach as well. At the 2024 edition of Mini-München more than a thousand courses were offered across some three hundred subjects, many arising directly from what the children were doing elsewhere in the city.

Cultural and leisure activity forms a substantial part of the programme. Mini-München has a cinema, theatre, sports facilities, markets and festivals, much of it organised by the children themselves.

Role of adults

Adult access is deliberately restricted. At Mini-München, parents and other visitors require a visa to enter, issued at the discretion of the children; when none are available, they must wait in a designated parents' café or go home.

Educational aims

Organisers describe the aim as allowing children to experience how work, money, taxation, administration, politics and culture interlock, and to negotiate and alter those arrangements themselves rather than have them explained. A handbook drawn from the Mini-München experience, Die Kinderstadt: eine Schule des Lebens (1989), edited by Gerd Grüneisl and Wolfgang Zacharias, characterises the format as a "school of life".

Daniel Fetz, who publishes English translations of the German literature on the subject, describes the difference from conventional schooling as lying in how feedback is received: a mistake is marked not by a teacher's correction or a poor grade but by whatever follows from it. A business that fails to deliver may find itself before the city's court, an unclear newspaper article draws complaints from its readers, and a lapse in a kitchen may be reported by the city's own newspaper and television station.

History

Mini-München

The first such city was staged in Munich's Olympiapark in August 1979 to mark the United Nations International Year of the Child. It grew out of a children's festival programme organised by the association Pädagogische Aktion München, with funding from the organisation Spielmotor, and was conceived as a social work of art. More than a thousand children took part on the opening day, and the name Mini-München was chosen by vote at one of the first citizens' assemblies.

A second, longer edition followed in the mid-1980s at a disused hall near the Westpark; its closing days featured a debate among the participants about the project's future. The event subsequently settled into a biennial rhythm during the summer holidays. In 1990 responsibility passed to the association Kultur & Spielraum e.V., which has run it since on behalf of the city of Munich. In 1994 the children campaigned successfully, by letter and petition, against the withdrawal of its funding.

Mini-München is free to attend and requires no registration. It is normally housed in a single large hall or compound; in 2020 the organisers dispersed it across the city in response to the COVID-19 pandemic rather than cancel it. In 2023 it received the Golden Cubes Award of the International Union of Architects. The 2026 edition was scheduled for 3–21 August 2026.

Spread

Mini-München served as the prototype for similar projects throughout Germany and for many others in Europe and worldwide. Documented examples include:

• Austria: Mini-Salzburg; KleinFeldkirch (Feldkirch)
• Germany: Mini-Regensburg; FEZitty (Berlin); Düsseldörfchen (Düsseldorf); OTTOPIA (Magdeburg); Simsalon (Sindelfingen); Klein NeFingen; Bad Kresselnau (Kressbronn); Stutengarten (Stuttgart)
• Italy: Mini-Bozen (Bolzano)

Reception outside the German-speaking world

The format has remained little known in English-speaking countries, in part because most of the handbooks, guides and evaluative literature exist only in German. From the 2020s the Austrian entrepreneur Daniel Fetz, who had attended one in Austria as a child, began translating this material into English and publishing it, with a directory of active projects, on the website Mini Cities. Fetz has also argued for extending the format beyond the school holidays, envisaging a year-round city in which the boundary between children's work and the surrounding economy gradually dissolves, with the newspaper selling subscriptions to local residents and the bakery serving paying customers. On his own website he describes such a city as a replacement for conventional schooling, and separately proposes converting whole schools into functioning cities for a week or two, since most of the necessary infrastructure is already present.

See also

• Democratic education
• Junior Achievement
• KidZania
• Model United Nations
• Self-directed learning
• Youth participation

Further reading

• Burgstaller, Petra (2005). Zukunft:Spiel. Am Beispiel Kinderstadt „Mini-Salzburg“. Vienna: Lit Verlag. (in German)
• Gräber, Martina; Neubauer, Bettina (2000). Karamempel & Co. – Spielstadtprojekte für Kinder. Esslingen: Stadtjugendring Esslingen e.V. (in German)
• Grüneisl, Gerd; Zacharias, Wolfgang, eds. (1989). Die Kinderstadt: eine Schule des Lebens. Handbuch für Spiel, Kultur, Umwelt. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. ISBN 3-499-18595-4 (in German)

External links

• Mini-München – official site (English)
• Mini Cities – directory and English translations

Category:Alternative education Category:Play (activity) Category:Youth in Germany