It was “Spider Murphy Gang,” a local ‘80s band from Munich, who sang “It’s summer again, summer in the city,” and captured the city’s midsummer atmosphere. Nowadays, the sun in the white-blue Bavarian sky still shines intensely, while the trees burst with shades of green and the asphalt glows. Children gather and play on the city streets.
The school break begins in the first week of August. For the next six weeks, numerous organizations in Munich offer a wide range of activities throughout the city – from painting for a few hours in the park to day trips to museums and weeks of training in the circus with a final performance in front of an audience. Urban kids discover, try out or master new skills as part of the city’s summer’s program, without the pressure of assessments or grades. But the major event that can’t be missed is Mini-München – one that encourages a unique kind of play and responsibility for kids.
Every two years, in the outskirts of Munich, a miniature version of the city opens its doors to children from ages 7 to 15, and invites them to get involved in nearly every facet of city life. They take on various jobs, earn play money, meet friends at child-run cafes, and even govern themselves.
For more than 40 years Mini-München has been the largest summer initiative in the city, and it has been replicated by close to 300 cities abroad, ranging from Austria to Japan.
In 1969, a group of artists, educators and teachers in Munich and Nuremberg founded the grassroots group KEKS. They strongly believed in the power of the so-called aesthetic education in childhood – and the cultivation of kids’ ability to explore their own living environments. Kids should learn to perceive art and everyday life holistically, rather than separately from one another. Understandably, the public space was the playing field for this endeavor. Activities that put creativity at the center of experiencing the environment took place in playgrounds, parks or museums, and KEKS ended up designing a concept for playgrounds amid the 1972 Olympic games in Munich.
Seven years later, the nonprofit association “Kultur und Spielraum e.V.” (Culture and Playroom) emerged from KEKS, and ultimately led to the creation of Mini-München to celebrate the implementation of the “International Year of the Child” declared by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979.
***
In the morning, children flock to Mini-München and patiently queue up. The queues are long and if the number of kids exceeds 2,000, visitors have to wait for the next slot that starts at lunchtime. Parents and grandparents are informed at the entrance that they need a visa if they want to look around; the children determine whether visas are available. If they are not, adults must go home or wait in the “Parents’ Café.”
If you walk along the wooden fence from the car park or the subway and stand at the entrance of Mini-München, it is hard to imagine that this small town just south of the Allianz Arena, Munich’s main soccer stadium, only exists for three weeks. The play city has been fittingly adapted to the inhospitable landscape, while it uses the premises of the “Showpalast,” an area with a riding hall and stables that was lavishly designed for horse shows, but the company that ran the business no longer exists.
“The use of idle land and the reclaiming of urban space has always been something that has defined Mini-München,” says Margit Maschek, an educator who has been actively involved in the project since the very beginning. During the Covid pandemic in 2020, the city adapted to the social distancing rules while simultaneously underlining the importance of Mini-München: the participating children took over the entire city, and Mini-München activities spread across the city at 40 locations, including Munich’s town hall.
There are basic rules about how Mini-München works: the children first must register with the residents’ registration office, a makeshift stall at the entrance to the “city,” where the children who work there hand out a “pass” to each child. Then they must line up at the unemployment office in order to sign up for their favorite job from what’s left on a long list. The earlier they arrive, the more jobs on offer – usually the more interesting ones. Mini-München’s ultimate goal is to be as inclusive and diverse as possible, where all kids are equal.
There are job openings for city councilmembers, lawyers who argue the daily disputes that arise in the city in a makeshift “court” presided over by a judge. Next to the city court lies a makeshift city hall, where one will find the city mayor, who runs a campaign and must garner enough votes to get elected. How kids play their roles and what they do is something entirely up to them. Occasionally, children work together on site with experts from universities and research institutions based in Munich, who also give input to Mini-München’s team to improve the concept year after year.
Once you step foot in Mini-München, you immediately dive into the hustle and bustle of the city. With the help of 20 full-time and 200 volunteer supervisors (a large group to be sure, but nearly invisible in amongst the far greater number of kids), these little citizens have self-organized into productive work areas where they are running the show – from radio stations that make real announcements about the “city” over the loudspeaker, to newspapers that employ interviewers, writers and editors and publish the news of the day.
The boy in charge of picking up the garbage is already making a second round. “Surprisingly this kind of job is very popular because it allows you to wander around and have a look everywhere in one go,” says Joscha Thiele, an educational scientist and a team member of “Kultur & Spielraum e.V.”
Kids can also be a professor, security guard or work at the city’s garden center. They are building workshop structures and hiring actors to be in films that they create in their temporary “film studio.” They are touring museums and taking public transport – a homemade open-aired “bus” pushed by children – to their “work.” One group tells us that they have registered a patent for candy floss made from sweets, that business is going well, taxes are being paid.
***
Mini-München is a three-dimensional game for children who are not just play figures in the play city, but who also design it. Through all the activities, children experience the city with all their senses and learn that they can actively participate in urban life and shape their own urban environment. That implies fulfilling their needs, enjoying rights that come with obligations, and having opportunities and plenty of room for their own ideas.
Unfortunately this approach comes up short in real life schools in Munich (and in the federal state of Bavaria). For the coming years, creative subjects may be cut from the curriculum in primary schools. This is a political reaction to the poor performance of students in the PISA test that caused heated debates at the beginning of 2024. While some teachers and educators want to continue focusing on the core subjects (Maths, German language and Social Science), others are convinced that school must be taught in a more holistic way. After all, testing one’s own abilities beyond reading, writing and arithmetics is a central element in education.
Thankfully, Mini-München goes against this political current; it is where a kid’s imagination and creativity run free and where those little citizens feel empowered to shape the city of the future they envision.
