The theme-park chain where children pretend to be adults.
Several decades ago, the district of Santa Fe, on the western edge of Mexico City, was an industrial zone devoted to strip-mining. After the gravel and sand pits were depleted, they became enormous garbage dumps where scavengers roamed. In the nineties, the government initiated a reclamation project, and the area is now filled with high-rise condominiums, luxury hotels, and office towers occupied by multinationals, set along manicured highways that are free of trash or pedestrians. In the middle of this invented neighborhood is the Centro Santa Fe mall, one of the largest in Latin America. With more than five hundred stores and an indoor skating rink, it draws twenty-two million visitors a year. At one end of the mall is KidZania, a theme park for children that opened fifteen years ago, and has since spread to cities in a dozen other countries, including Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, and Istanbul.
Rather than offering thrill rides, like Disney World, or video-game arcades, like Chuck E. Cheese’s, KidZania gives children between the ages of four and fourteen the chance to enact the roles of grownups in a lavishly realized, scaled-down world. If the neighborhood of Santa Fe is the realization of a contemporary urban vision—corporate, sanitized, market-driven—then KidZania is a quirky, child-size iteration. Known before its international expansion as La Ciudad de los Niños (The Children’s City), the KidZania in Santa Fe—like all the franchises it has spawned—is uncanny in its realism. Its brick-paved streets are lined with buildings in the style of different historical periods, like an authentic cityscape that has evolved over centuries, with storefronts bearing the logos of familiar brands like McDonald’s and Sony. From a child’s perspective, KidZania is an enclosed, enticing world—resembling the outside one but oriented to children’s capacities and interests. Kids can roam freely, since the only traffic is a slow-moving, if clamorous, fire truck and a similarly unhurried ambulance, both of which perpetually circulate through the town square, under a roof that has been painted indigo to represent a sky in the twilight hours, as if it were always—excitingly—just past bedtime.
Whereas Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks promise fantasy and wish fulfillment, KidZania is a proudly mundane municipality: children can work on a car assembly line, or move furniture, or put out a fake fire with real water. KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking debit card. Children receive a check for fifty kidzos upon arriving at KidZania, and can supplement that with the “salary” they earn for participating in an activity. The most popular of them, like training to be a pilot on a simplified flight simulator, are not as remunerative as the less popular, like being a dentist. (You peer inside a dummy’s mouth.) Children can spend their kidzos on renting a car—small electric vehicles moving around a go-kart track that is sponsored by companies like Mercedes-Benz or Renault—or at the mini city’s department store, which bears the name of a regional chain and is stocked with covetable trinkets.
KidZania even has its own “language”—short phrases that are delivered in a combination of English and something that an alien in a low-budget sci-fi movie might speak. “Kai!” is an informal greeting usually delivered with a gesture peculiar to KidZania: the first two fingers of the right hand splayed over the heart. “Zanks!” substitutes for “thanks.” The valediction “Z-U!” is used everywhere from Santiago to Seoul. The adults who staff the establishments and guide the children through the activities are called Zupervisors, and when speaking to children in their native language they end conversations with the exhortation “Have a productive day.” (...)
The Santa Fe park opened in September, 1999. Eight hundred thousand people came in the first year, twice the number anticipated. Corporate sponsors, upon whose investment the business model depends, also embraced the concept, and there are now more than eight hundred worldwide. “KidZania is a good platform in terms of building brand loyalty,” Maricruz Arrubarrena, one of KidZania’s Mexican executives, told me. “Kids don’t have a lot of loyalty—they have a lot of options. In KidZania, the brands can work with the kids when they are kids, and in the future build a more loyal client.”
The Santa Fe park was so successful that, in 2006, López expanded to the Mexican city of Monterrey. (Laresgoiti had sold his share to López in 2002 and moved to Florida, where he launched Wannado, a theme park similar to KidZania. It closed in 2011.) Like the Santa Fe park, the Monterrey branch was owned and operated by López’s company, but later that year the concept was taken to Tokyo under a franchise operation. Franchises have since opened in Seoul, where kids can manufacture ramen noodles, and in Mumbai, where there is a scaled-down Bollywood studio—one of López’s partners is Shah Rukh Kahn, the actor. KidZania opens a London branch this spring. (...)
Although KidZanias look much like one another, the behavior of their visitors varies by nation. In Mexico, kids tend to spend their kidzos immediately after earning them; in Japan, it is difficult to persuade children to part with their kidzos at all. López jokes that when KidZania arrives in the U.S. kids will demand the introduction of a credit card. In Lisbon, kids mostly come with their parents, whereas in the Gulf states they are often accompanied by nannies or dropped off by drivers. KidZania tries to be sensitive to local mores, but López also sees a role for the company in implicitly promoting the values of a Western, market-driven democracy. In KidZania Jeddah, which is scheduled to open in Saudi Arabia later this month, girls will be permitted to drive cars, a privilege denied their mothers.
A few years ago, López’s marketing department came up with an origin myth for KidZania: kids, having seen what a mess adults had made of the world, founded their own country, whose borders children cross every time they visit the park. A KidZanian Declaration of Independence was written, which outlines the six “rightz” of childhood: to be, to know, to create, to share, to care, and to play. It concludes with the national motto: “Get ready for a better world.” To López’s frustration, children who visit KidZania are largely unaware of this invented history. He hopes eventually to educate them about it—perhaps by producing a KidZania movie. “Usually, all these stories start with a movie or a TV program, and then that story comes all the way to a theme park—that’s what Disney does,” he told me. “We started from the theme park, and have to go backward.”
López believes that his young visitors are getting ready for a better world, whether they realize it or not. “We are empowering them to become independent,” he said. “What they love most, on the second or third visit, is their independence. They have their own kidzos; they can make their own decisions. This is their world, where they are not being told what to do. Even if you go to Disneyland, you are guided—you are supposed to walk a typical way. But here children are by themselves. We don’t tell them anything. Just cash your check, get money, and start spending money—that is the only thing we tell them.”
Several decades ago, the district of Santa Fe, on the western edge of Mexico City, was an industrial zone devoted to strip-mining. After the gravel and sand pits were depleted, they became enormous garbage dumps where scavengers roamed. In the nineties, the government initiated a reclamation project, and the area is now filled with high-rise condominiums, luxury hotels, and office towers occupied by multinationals, set along manicured highways that are free of trash or pedestrians. In the middle of this invented neighborhood is the Centro Santa Fe mall, one of the largest in Latin America. With more than five hundred stores and an indoor skating rink, it draws twenty-two million visitors a year. At one end of the mall is KidZania, a theme park for children that opened fifteen years ago, and has since spread to cities in a dozen other countries, including Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, and Istanbul.Rather than offering thrill rides, like Disney World, or video-game arcades, like Chuck E. Cheese’s, KidZania gives children between the ages of four and fourteen the chance to enact the roles of grownups in a lavishly realized, scaled-down world. If the neighborhood of Santa Fe is the realization of a contemporary urban vision—corporate, sanitized, market-driven—then KidZania is a quirky, child-size iteration. Known before its international expansion as La Ciudad de los Niños (The Children’s City), the KidZania in Santa Fe—like all the franchises it has spawned—is uncanny in its realism. Its brick-paved streets are lined with buildings in the style of different historical periods, like an authentic cityscape that has evolved over centuries, with storefronts bearing the logos of familiar brands like McDonald’s and Sony. From a child’s perspective, KidZania is an enclosed, enticing world—resembling the outside one but oriented to children’s capacities and interests. Kids can roam freely, since the only traffic is a slow-moving, if clamorous, fire truck and a similarly unhurried ambulance, both of which perpetually circulate through the town square, under a roof that has been painted indigo to represent a sky in the twilight hours, as if it were always—excitingly—just past bedtime.
Whereas Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks promise fantasy and wish fulfillment, KidZania is a proudly mundane municipality: children can work on a car assembly line, or move furniture, or put out a fake fire with real water. KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking debit card. Children receive a check for fifty kidzos upon arriving at KidZania, and can supplement that with the “salary” they earn for participating in an activity. The most popular of them, like training to be a pilot on a simplified flight simulator, are not as remunerative as the less popular, like being a dentist. (You peer inside a dummy’s mouth.) Children can spend their kidzos on renting a car—small electric vehicles moving around a go-kart track that is sponsored by companies like Mercedes-Benz or Renault—or at the mini city’s department store, which bears the name of a regional chain and is stocked with covetable trinkets.
KidZania even has its own “language”—short phrases that are delivered in a combination of English and something that an alien in a low-budget sci-fi movie might speak. “Kai!” is an informal greeting usually delivered with a gesture peculiar to KidZania: the first two fingers of the right hand splayed over the heart. “Zanks!” substitutes for “thanks.” The valediction “Z-U!” is used everywhere from Santiago to Seoul. The adults who staff the establishments and guide the children through the activities are called Zupervisors, and when speaking to children in their native language they end conversations with the exhortation “Have a productive day.” (...)
The Santa Fe park opened in September, 1999. Eight hundred thousand people came in the first year, twice the number anticipated. Corporate sponsors, upon whose investment the business model depends, also embraced the concept, and there are now more than eight hundred worldwide. “KidZania is a good platform in terms of building brand loyalty,” Maricruz Arrubarrena, one of KidZania’s Mexican executives, told me. “Kids don’t have a lot of loyalty—they have a lot of options. In KidZania, the brands can work with the kids when they are kids, and in the future build a more loyal client.”
The Santa Fe park was so successful that, in 2006, López expanded to the Mexican city of Monterrey. (Laresgoiti had sold his share to López in 2002 and moved to Florida, where he launched Wannado, a theme park similar to KidZania. It closed in 2011.) Like the Santa Fe park, the Monterrey branch was owned and operated by López’s company, but later that year the concept was taken to Tokyo under a franchise operation. Franchises have since opened in Seoul, where kids can manufacture ramen noodles, and in Mumbai, where there is a scaled-down Bollywood studio—one of López’s partners is Shah Rukh Kahn, the actor. KidZania opens a London branch this spring. (...)
Although KidZanias look much like one another, the behavior of their visitors varies by nation. In Mexico, kids tend to spend their kidzos immediately after earning them; in Japan, it is difficult to persuade children to part with their kidzos at all. López jokes that when KidZania arrives in the U.S. kids will demand the introduction of a credit card. In Lisbon, kids mostly come with their parents, whereas in the Gulf states they are often accompanied by nannies or dropped off by drivers. KidZania tries to be sensitive to local mores, but López also sees a role for the company in implicitly promoting the values of a Western, market-driven democracy. In KidZania Jeddah, which is scheduled to open in Saudi Arabia later this month, girls will be permitted to drive cars, a privilege denied their mothers.
A few years ago, López’s marketing department came up with an origin myth for KidZania: kids, having seen what a mess adults had made of the world, founded their own country, whose borders children cross every time they visit the park. A KidZanian Declaration of Independence was written, which outlines the six “rightz” of childhood: to be, to know, to create, to share, to care, and to play. It concludes with the national motto: “Get ready for a better world.” To López’s frustration, children who visit KidZania are largely unaware of this invented history. He hopes eventually to educate them about it—perhaps by producing a KidZania movie. “Usually, all these stories start with a movie or a TV program, and then that story comes all the way to a theme park—that’s what Disney does,” he told me. “We started from the theme park, and have to go backward.”
López believes that his young visitors are getting ready for a better world, whether they realize it or not. “We are empowering them to become independent,” he said. “What they love most, on the second or third visit, is their independence. They have their own kidzos; they can make their own decisions. This is their world, where they are not being told what to do. Even if you go to Disneyland, you are guided—you are supposed to walk a typical way. But here children are by themselves. We don’t tell them anything. Just cash your check, get money, and start spending money—that is the only thing we tell them.”
by Rebecca Mead, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Nishant Choksi
