Mini Cities Around the World
For a few weeks each summer, in cities across Europe and beyond, something remarkable happens: children run their own city. They create art, they work, they publish newspapers, they manage banks, they argue in council meetings about real problems. Mini-München, Mini-Salzburg, and dozens of others have shown, year after year, that children are perfectly capable of sustaining a complex social fabric when given the chance. Almost all of these mini cities today are temporary summer programs, typically lasting two to three weeks, before it's all over and the children are sent back to the world that keeps them at arm's length from anything consequential.
What excites us most are two directions that barely exist yet, and that we hope to help kickstart. First, permanent mini cities that don’t pack up after three weeks but replace traditional schooling altogether. And second, perhaps ironically, mini cities inside schools, where an entire school decides to transform itself into a functioning city for a week or two, instead of doing regular lessons. Since most of the infrastructure is already there (classrooms become workshops, the cafeteria a restaurant, the gym a marketplace), these school-based experiments strike us as particularly interesting.
Below is our growing overview of mini cities around the world:
Austria
Germany
Italy