For most children, playing “city” means cardboard storefronts and imaginary money. But in Germany and Austria, thousands of children spend part of their summer running something much closer to a real economy.
They elect mayors. Publish newspapers. Open businesses. Bake bread. Argue court cases. Pay taxes.
These “mini cities”—temporary child-run communities modeled after real civic life—started with Mini Munich in 1979, which is still operating today. Yet they remain almost unknown beyond those countries. Daniel Fetz, an Austrian entrepreneur who attended a mini city in Austria as a boy, wants to change that. He’s translating the handbooks, guides, and essays on mini cities from the original German to English and publishing them on his Mini Cities website.
“I really remembered where I had maybe the most fun educational experience, and that was in a miniature city when I was 10 and 12 years old,” he says of what inspired his project. “I thought, well, that’s something really unknown in the English-speaking world. So maybe I could help there a bit.”
Mini Munich welcomes as many as 2,000 participants each day during its three-week summer program, which runs every other year. This year’s Mini Munich dates are August 3–21, and optional pre-registration opens today. Daniel has identified a dozen mini cities that run on various schedules; some are held each year, and others every two years, like Munich’s.
The beginning of the program can be a bit of a mad rush. Children arrive in the morning and hurry to be first in line at the employment center, where they can choose from dozens of occupations. “They want to get the best jobs initially,” says Daniel. “They work in those jobs as long as they want. But if they want to stop, they can do that. And then this job becomes available again for other children.”
If they don’t see a job they like, they can start their own enterprise. “The number of occupations can also expand because people run their own businesses and hire people,” Daniel says. “That can be a detective agency—maybe there’s too much theft in the city. Or it can be a competing newspaper if you think the existing newspaper doesn’t do a good enough job.”
It’s not all work—there’s theater, festivals, sports, and even a university in Mini Munich. According to Daniel, at the last Mini Munich in 2024, there were over 1,000 courses on 300 different topics. Participating kids can earn income by offering classes. Parents and community experts also teach courses.
The university courses frequently relate directly to what the kids are interested in. For example, kids often want to participate in the stock market, but they don’t quite understand it. They can take a class on it at the university. Sometimes one activity leads to an interest in a related class, such as when kids built a Trojan horse in the woodworking shop for a theater production and got interested in ancient Greece. Someone offered a course on it at the university.
To Daniel, the contrast between learning in mini cities and in conventional schooling is striking. Rather than learning through assignments and grades, children encounter the natural consequences of their decisions. “Mistakes are never pointed out through red marks, for example, or bad grades,” he said. “But instead through consequences of actions.”
If the newspaper publishes confusing articles, readers complain. If a business fails to deliver, disputes may end up in the city’s court. When an improperly washed head of lettuce resulted in a snail in someone’s salad, the city’s newspaper and television station covered the scandal, holding the kitchen staff publicly accountable.
In addition to spreading the word about mini cities, Daniel hopes the concept can expand beyond a summer program. “It’s horrible that every miniature city that currently exists is temporary,” he said. “There should be something permanent.”
His vision is a year-round miniature city that gradually blurs the boundary between children’s work and the real economy. The newspaper might sell subscriptions to local residents. The bakery could serve paying customers. Design studios might complete commissions for local businesses. The miniature city could become a launching pad rather than just a fun summer activity. He imagines children working in the mini city bakery and building skills that equip them to progress from selling to other children to selling to adults around them to one day opening their own bakery.
After nearly a half-century of successful summer experiments overseas, the time could be right for Daniel’s vision to become reality—possibly in the US. Sharing information is easier than ever. There’s an increasing realization that the conventional classroom isn’t the best way for many kids to learn. A growing number of US states have adopted school choice programs, such as education savings accounts, that allow state education funding to be used for a variety of educational expenses.
In explaining the impact and potential of mini cities, Daniel recalls an observation from journalist and filmmaker Reinhard Kahl, who documented Mini Munich. Kahl thought “a researcher coming from a different planet would find nothing particularly special about Mini Munich.” It would seem obvious to them that if adults spend their days starting businesses, running newspapers, electing governments, and settling disputes in court, then a miniature version of that would be a natural way to prepare children for life. In the scaled-down world, cause and effect become easier to see—businesses succeed or fail, policies reveal their consequences, and “a bad law gets repealed after a few days, not after decades or centuries.” Rather than teaching civic and economic life as abstract subjects, miniature cities allow children to experience them firsthand.
Photos by FS1 Community TV, via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
