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 founder and C.E.O. of KidZania, Xavier López Ancona, is a tall, energetic man of fifty, with sculpted black hair, a broad smile, and an air of ebullient conviction. I met him recently at the company’s headquarters, which are not far from the mall in Santa Fe. Role-playing extends to the corporate structure of KidZania, which is modelled on a national government. The glass-fronted office of KidZania’s accounting department bears an insignia marking it as the Treasury; human resources is known as the Ministry of Labor. The manager of each KidZania is its mayor, and the regional director is the governor. López cheerfully informed me, “I am the President, but nobody voted for me—it is more like I’m a dictator.”
López grew up in Mexico City, where his father, an immigrant from Spain, had a flour-milling business; he was the fourth of seven children. López attended business school at Northwestern University—he speaks fluent, rapid English—and was formerly the managing director of the private-equity business at General Electric in Mexico City. In the late nineties, López was approached by a friend from first grade, Luis Javier Laresgoiti, who was in the toy-importing business. Laresgoiti was developing an idea for a commercial role-playing park for children, inspired by a day-care center he had seen in the United States that featured a miniature supermarket, a theatre, and a bank; López joined the venture.
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.
In the past few months, López has been visiting all the franchises, to see what might work better. He told me, “Gandhi, when he moved from South Africa to India, said, ‘The first thing I have to do is I have to know my country—I have to know what are their hopes and dreams.’ I want to do the same.” He is in negotiations with a potential franchisee in Guangdong, China. In the U.S., López is in discussions with a potential partner for the first of what might ultimately be sixteen American locations. He’s looked at the South Street Seaport, in New York, but is more likely to open first in Chicago or Dallas, where the real estate is cheaper and there are fewer competing entertainment options.
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.”
Two years ago, KidZania opened a second branch in Mexico City, named for the nearby archeological site of Cuicuilco. One day, I visited it with López. He explained that he sees Cuicuilco, which cost thirty-eight million dollars to build and is more than three times the size of the original park, as a laboratory for the future of KidZania. There, even more emphasis is placed upon educational experiences. “Education and entertainment, it’s like the two legs of KidZania,” he told me. “We want the kids to have fun, and while they are having fun to really learn something.”
In Cuicuilco, KidZania worked with the local government to develop activities that are intended to promote good citizenship: road safety, health, awareness of civic institutions, environmental sustainability, and tolerance of difference among individuals and groups. The program emerged from a series of crime-reduction recommendations made by Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, who had been hired as a consultant by the Mexico City government a decade ago. “One of the points Giuliani made was that we needed to give more education to the citizens, and he suggested that we start with the children, because it is easier to make change with the children,” López said.
I’d brought along my nine-year-old son, who, before departing for Mexico, had speculated about what he might find. Do they have police in KidZania? If so, do they have criminals? Or do they just split the police into good cops and bad cops? And could you be a writer there? He was dubious: “Not many kids want to be writers.” (Actually, you can be a reporter, of sorts: kids are dispatched with a prepared list of questions to interview a specific Zupervisor, who is ready with a prepared list of answers.) We drove into the parking lot of the shopping center, where part of the fuselage of an Interjet plane stuck out from the front of the building, heralding the entrance, which was themed like an airline ticket counter. The entry fee at Cuicuilco was fifteen dollars and fifty cents per child, but it varies from city to city: thirty-eight dollars in Tokyo, ten in Jakarta.
At the ticket counter, my son was given his entry ticket, which resembled an airplane boarding pass, marked with the destination of KidZania, and his fifty-kidzo check. A security bracelet was snapped around his wrist: it would set off an alarm if he tried to leave the premises unaccompanied, and would track his choice of activities, providing data for KidZania’s design team. López quizzed my son about his ambitions for the day. “I might want to be a policeman—it is too dangerous, but it sounds fun,” he told López. “Or a pilot, but I don’t know how to fly.”
“You’re going to learn how to fly!” López promised him.
Turning to me, López said, “When they are kids, everyone wants to be a policeman or a fireman. Then, when they grow up, no one wants to be a policeman or a fireman.”
Cuicuilco is the only KidZania that is partly outside—tents shield it from rain and sun—and it was less cacophonous than Santa Fe, and brighter, its streets edged with fake palm trees and equipped with globe lamps. A highway system snaking through the park was navigated by scaled-down cars, available for a rental fee of fifteen kidzos. At one bend in the road, a crashed car has been permanently installed, like a sculpture in the Whitney Biennial, its buckled engine periodically emitting steam, to illustrate the dangers of careless driving. I saw children with clipboards acting as insurance agents, taking an inventory of the accident.
Such attention to detail delights López. “We immerse our visitors in a simulated reality,” he told me later that afternoon. “If they want to drive a car, they should drive a car like their parents’ car. If they want to use a phone, they want the same phone as their mother’s. If they want to eat cereal, they want to manufacture the same thing they eat at home. It’s having the real buildings, materials, products, and services. This is not about fantasy. This is not princesses and dwarfs.”
As we walked through the pedestrian streets, we passed bronze statues of inspirational eminences represented as children—Martin Luther King, Florence Nightingale, Mahatma Gandhi—while real children darted around us with fists full of kidzos. “You go to Disneyland, and you see all those kids walking with their parents, very tired,” López remarked. “There is two minutes of magic—the ride—and then they see the Disney characters, which no one can surpass. But here, most of the time they are running, engaged, happy.” Occasionally we came across an adult wearing the costume of one of KidZania’s RightzKeepers—anime-like cartoon characters who represent the six rightz of children. They are KidZania’s equivalent of Mickey and Minnie and include Urbano, a green-haired boy, who represents the “right to know,” and Chika, who has purple hair and cat ears, and represents the “right to share.” López said of Chika, “She’s all about meeting people—her biggest ambition is to get a million friends.” López greeted the Zupervisors and other staff with “Kai!” and a splayed hand to the heart. In the town square, there was a golden statue modelled on a celebrated one in Mexico City depicting the Angel of Independence. “That one is a naked woman, but ours has to have clothes, because it is for children,” he said. It was like being in a reimagined Las Vegas, with the celebration of virtue substituted for the celebration of sin.
Having been to children’s museums where kids can wheel trolleys around a play-set supermarket, I thought I knew what to expect from KidZania, but nothing had prepared me for its verisimilitude. At a dog-training activity, participants are taught to lead a real dog around a series of small jumps; they also have to clean up fake feces that have been scattered around the track. And though children’s museums often have some level of corporate sponsorship, the presence of brand names at KidZania was jarring. We passed a cell-phone rental store sponsored by Telcel, a regional company, where kids can text each other within KidZania, and get free downloads of video games or screen savers; Coca-Cola was the sponsor of a scaled-down soccer stadium. Some visitors have criticized KidZania’s promotion of junk food, but López insists that the authenticity enhances the experience. “Those companies are all over, kids go to any shopping center, any street, they are there,” he told me. Nonetheless, healthier options are being introduced. In Cuicuilco, I visited a culinary school, sponsored by Nestlé, where a Zupervisor was preparing a session on how to make a tuna sandwich cut in the shape of a fish.
While wandering through the Cuicuilco park, I watched a group of children from a local preschool—wearing hairnets, matching neckerchiefs, and jackets bearing the name Quaker—solemnly pouring sugary sprinkles into small cups. It was a granola-bar factory. For all the emphasis on realism, there is a lot of sleight of hand. Most of the industrial processes are simulated: the packaged granola bars that pop out of the final machine are factory made, switched in at the last moment. The natural suspicions of kids, particularly older ones, can be hard to overcome. New activities sometimes must be tweaked after introduction. Children making “hand sanitizer” pointed out that the product they had been manufacturing—colored water—was less viscous than the liquid inside the sample-size bottle they received at the activity’s end.
KidZania Cuicuilco also has several activities, funded by government agencies, that were developed with the cultivation of civic responsibility in mind. There is a tax office, because a “tax” of twenty per cent is deducted from all KidZanian salaries. “Of course, in Mexico nobody wants to pay tax—most people don’t pay tax,” López said. “So here is a fun way we teach them to pay tax.” Children can choose what they would like to see funds spent on—education, the environment, hospitals, or roads—and then claim a percentage of their taxes back. There’s also a miniaturized police station. “In Mexico, we have all this crime and nobody reports it, because people don’t trust the police,” López told me. “Kids can come here and report that someone skipped the line, or somebody took their kidzos. So we are teaching kids to tell. In Mexico, no one tells.” In back is a small jail cell, equipped with a bunk bed with a sad beige blanket and pillow; its black bars look forbidding but are made of foam, and can be bent for easy exit.
I stepped into the courthouse, and found the proceeding eerily convincing, with microphones on the desks, a KidZanian flag hanging in the background, and sober-looking children sitting in the jury box. A girl who looked to be about ten was in the dock, reading from a cue card. She was playing the part of the accused in a case that concerned garbage being thrown illegally into a river. Another girl sat behind a central desk, playing the part of the judge, faced by two other children representing the lawyers. All dutifully followed along with their own cue cards, interjecting a line or two when necessary. The girl was found not guilty.
KidZania has hired its first Head of Education for the upcoming London park. The post is filled by a former elementary-school teacher named Richard Barry, who has been working with corporate sponsors to create activities that complement the U.K.’s national curriculum. A smoothie-making activity, sponsored by Innocent Drinks, a Coca-Cola subsidiary, will underscore the curriculum’s requirement that children learn about nutrition, seasonality, and food sources. Joel Cadbury, one of the co-founders of KidZania U.K., points to a recent survey reporting that almost one in ten middle-school-age children in Britain thinks that tomatoes grow underground. KidZania, he said, could help to address that kind of deficit. “We are convinced that this is an integral part of the educational process for the next generation,” he told me. And the process of earning kidzos in exchange for labor will be an education in itself for children. “We’re going to have kids who will benefit from learning the harsher side of life,” he added. At the other end of the economic spectrum, “we have families in London who have never had a job in three or four generations.”
A key tenet of much education theory is that children’s play is not meaningless fun but, rather, an important developmental process that serves as a preparation for adulthood. In progressive kindergartens, building with blocks or dressing up is often referred to as “work.” Maria Montessori was so struck by the preference shown by children for practical activities, like sweeping, over playing with toys that she remarked, “In the life of a child, play is perhaps something of little importance which he undertakes for the lack of something better to do.” Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, who argued that play was an essential element of children’s social and moral maturation, identified several developmental stages. In the preschool years, play is often symbolic: a child might pretend a box is a car that he or she is driving. Later, children introduce rules into their games, which accounts for the byzantine variations on tag that emerge among third or fourth graders.
At first glance, the experience offered by KidZania appears to draw on aspects both of symbolic play—the “let’s pretend” aspect of dressing up as a fireman—and of rule-based play, with its enactment of conformity to civic regulation. But by some definitions the activities at KidZania, however entertaining, barely qualify as play at all. Thomas Henricks, a professor of sociology at Elon University and the author of the forthcoming “Play and the Human Condition,” offers a list of the requirements for play: that children have chosen their own activities and their own play environment, that children decide whom they play with, that children decide their own rules and determine the stakes of the game or activity, that children choose when play begins and when it ends, and that children get to determine what their play means.
In KidZania, adults determine the content of activities in advance, and Zupervisors follow scripts that offer children little room for ingenuity or deviation. (There is no activity at KidZania that would do much to nurture the entrepreneurial skills of a young Xavier López Ancona.) The activities last, on average, about twenty minutes—and are far from open-ended or exploratory. Even artistry is directed. I passed by the art studio, where small children sat before easels, coloring in preprinted cartoon images of Urbano or Chika.
One innovation, at KidZania Cuicuilco and a handful of other locations, is the introduction of a passport office: for a payment of three kidzos, children can apply for a “pazzport,” which bears their photograph and date of birth. Kids with pazzports receive extra kidzos at the end of each activity, and get such rewards as a larger slice of pizza at the Domino’s-sponsored pizza-making activity. After a child completes every activity, his or her pazzport is scanned and then stamped. “What this is, honestly, is a loyalty program, but it is themed as citizenship,” López said. In the past two years, four hundred thousand children have signed up worldwide, enabling López and his team to see in detail which activities are the most popular with which segments of the audience, and to market directly to the adults who are responsible for them. The goal is to introduce the pazzport into every KidZania in the next year, to track children’s interests and tastes.
At the end of my tour, I reunited with my son, who had spent several hours in the company of Enrique Mena Ferreira, López’s chief of staff. My son looked bashfully excited, and more than slightly overwhelmed. He was eager to show me his pazzport: it hung around his neck in a red wallet that also contained a stash of kidzos. He’d earned much of it by delivering DHL packages, which he had discovered was a quick and easy way of making money, even if you didn’t speak Spanish. He had particularly enjoyed being a detective for KidZania’s crime lab, in which he had tried to identify a suspect who was allegedly plotting to rob the bank that day by drugging the staff—a story in whose truth my son had utter faith. He had passed his driver’s test—he proudly brandished his license—and had rented a car. “It’s not like a video game—if you hit the barrier, you will crash,” he told me, with a conviction that Mayor Giuliani would have approved. The following week, his teacher reported to me that he had held his classmates rapt during share time, giving an account of his adventures and fielding their fascinated questions.
His adventures had included being a pilot. “He did it twice,” Mena told me. “The first time, he crashed right away—the controls are very sensitive, and he was taking off and lost control. But the second time it was perfect.”
My son wanted to show me his skills, and so we returned to the interior of the plane fuselage, which had been transformed into a flight school, complete with several rudimentary flight simulators. He scanned his wristband and was given a pilot’s cap to wear. I sat in the co-pilot’s seat and watched a screen in front of us as we accelerated shakily along the runway, then lifted into the air. Soon we were aloft above an urban airport. The intended flight path was indicated by a series of squares hovering in the air. For a few minutes, my son flew through the squares as directed. Then, without saying a word, he turned the controls decisively to the right, skimming the outer edge of one square and steering out over the ocean, away from the flight path. I didn’t know whether to be horrified by the insubordination or delighted by the show of independence. But before the KidZanian authorities had time to scramble the virtual jets the screen went black, and the activity was over.
All KidZanias are attached to shopping centers, and the company has targeted sprawling megacities where, for reasons of security or climate, a mall culture has flourished, and parents can, in theory, drop off their children at the park and then go to browse the stores or eat lunch at one of the mall’s restaurants, tidily completing a circuit of consumption. The ideal location for a KidZania is a place where there is a high disposable income and an ethos of spending prevails; where children are sophisticated consumers of popular culture and users of digital media, and expect novelty and stimulation; and where there are few cultural or historical attractions, and little else to do in the way of entertainment. Best of all for KidZania would be a spectacular and well-trafficked mall that is otherwise surrounded by a barren, inhospitable desert.
This is an apt description of one of KidZania’s newer outposts, in Kuwait City, which opened in 2013, in the Avenues Mall, one of the world’s largest. The mall offers elegant, simulated pedestrian streets, edged with trees and lined with cafés and luxury-brand stores, all under a translucent glass roof that admits natural light but keeps at bay the hostile outside temperatures, which can rise above a hundred and twenty degrees. The mall is Kuwait’s principal recreational resort: twenty-two million visitors went there in 2013, eight times the population of the country. In 2014, four hundred and fifty thousand of them went to KidZania, which ranks as Kuwait City’s No. 1 attraction on TripAdvisor.
In November, Cammie Dunaway, KidZania’s head of global marketing, visited KidZania Kuwait for the first time. Dunaway, who was formerly an executive at Yahoo and Nintendo, was appointed in 2010 to head KidZania’s U.S. expansion, and to manage marketing the company internationally. She brings an American corporate sensibility to the endeavor: it was Dunaway who advised López not to refer to the KidZania marketing department as the Ministry of Propaganda.
At the KidZania Kuwait headquarters, in a characterless office park owned by the Alshaya company, Dunaway met with the marketing team, whose energetic young members were Kuwaiti-born but of international descent—Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian—and often educated in the U.S. Kuwait, it was explained to her, has almost no tourist industry—its only visitors are Saudis for whom Dubai is too racy—and so drawing local visitors back repeatedly would be key to KidZania’s success. One particular concern was attracting parents, for whom there is little to do inside KidZania, and who had been voicing objections to the twenty-seven-dollar adult entrance fee. Dunaway suggested placing a salon offering manicures in the parents’ lounge—one in Cuicuilco had worked well. The team also discussed the necessity of reaching populations like the Bedouins, who had yet to discover KidZania or who were suspicious of what they knew of it. Already, KidZania had fallen afoul of local sensibilities: a festival of “Scary Fun,” planned for late October, was hastily cancelled after there were protests on social media that KidZania was promoting Halloween, which observant Muslims do not celebrate. (An earlier social-media protest, indicting the park for immorality on the ground that its name included the Arabic word zania, which means “adulteress,” had been quietly ignored.)
Even when the company was taking care to avoid violating religious interdictions, it was acknowledged that the very premise of KidZania, with its rhetoric of children’s independence, ran counter to deep cultural sensibilities. Mariam Draz, who has the title of Ambassador for the Middle East and North Africa, and was visiting from KidZania Cairo, said, “We are telling the children things that are not encouraged in the Middle East—all the old ways of parenthood. People don’t know what KidZania is: Is it a school? Is it a nursery? Is it some devil-run thing that isn’t acceptable in our culture?”
KidZania had to figure out how to sustain the fickle interest of those children who were already fans: the marketing team stressed to Dunaway the importance of social media in the lives of their young audience. Seven- or eight-year-old Kuwaitis have the latest smartphone, and the KidZania Kuwait Instagram account has more than fifty thousand followers, many of them kids who post selfies from the town square or other attractions. Dunaway urged caution. “As company policy, we don’t communicate directly with kids,” she said. “We don’t want to be engaging directly with children. But we can’t control what we don’t know.” However, she suggested, KidZania might be productively promoted to parents as a place for kids to get unplugged. “So it becomes an advantage for us—we are about role play, and hands on,” she said, to murmurs of agreement. “It’s not about criticizing the technology. But there’s a need for something to balance it out—a need for kids to become more involved, and face to face, and hands on, and for teamwork.”
The next day in the park, Dunaway had the opportunity to see for herself the teamwork of young Kuwaitis, most of them visiting with school groups. Many of the attractions were familiar: at ten-thirty in the morning, kids in school uniforms of green sweatpants and sweaters were mobbing the Burger King-sponsored make-your-own-fast-food venue. But some areas had been developed with local industry in mind, including a plastics-making activity, sponsored by Equate, a petrochemical company. We watched as half a dozen boys, between the ages of nine and eleven, took part, wearing overalls and protective goggles. First, the Zupervisor directed them to turn stainless-steel wheels on an industrial-looking tank—supposedly full of gas—to produce a cannister full of translucent pellets. After putting their gloved hands inside a glassed-in tank, the kids manipulated the pellets from a funnel into a beaker, then poured them into a hole that led into what the Zupervisor told them was a melting machine that produced small plastic disks—one per child.
The children seemed engaged by the machines, though the hands-on part of the activity might not have been very challenging to a child half their age. After the disks emerged from the melting machine, they were placed on a conveyor belt leading into another apparatus, while the kids pressed some brightly colored flashing buttons labelled “mold” and “color,” as inscrutably connected to the process of transformation as the “Drink Me” label on Alice in Wonderland’s bottle. After a lot of clanking, a molded white plastic helmet, complete with elastic chin strap, popped out of the other end of the machine, to the delight of the young petrochemical engineers. Out of earshot of the children, Stephen Putzeys, the mayor of KidZania Kuwait, told us that the Zupervisors had to remember to remove the “Made in China” stickers from the helmets before loading them into the machine. As the boys surrendered their goggles at the end of the activity, I asked one of them what he and his friends had learned. “We learned how to make a helmet,” he said.
Later that evening, KidZania hosted a grand ceremony for the inauguration of a pseudo-Congress: a cohort of twenty kids whose yearlong participation in a series of focus groups is ingeniously themed as public service. “We really treat the kids with respect,” Dunaway told me. “We really convey to them that they have a sense of responsibility, and that they are training and learning to be great leaders.” Members of the Kids Congrezz, as it is known, are drawn from the pool of regular visitors by means of an online election that is monitored, and sometimes heavily manipulated, by a team of marketing executives and clinical psychologists. “It keeps us very tuned in to what kids need, to what they think, and to what we need to do differently,” Dunaway said.
The ceremony took place in KidZania’s theatre, most recently used for an adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz” that conformed to local mores. (The representation of wizards is forbidden in Kuwait, so in KidZania’s version the wizard was on vacation.) Local dignitaries had been invited, including representatives from the ministry of education, and the chargé d’affaires at the Mexican consulate. There were swarms of press photographers, and waiters passed around platters of hors d’oeuvres and Middle Eastern sweets.
Twenty children wearing red KidZania sports shirts and serious faces sat on the stage, at desks that resembled those in the Security Council chamber at the United Nations. Fernando Medroa, KidZania Kuwait’s governor, a veteran of Disney Europe and Six Flags, went to the lectern to herald the new Congrezzmembers. “Kai, everyone—good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to zank you all for coming today,” he began, explaining that this Congrezz, the first in the Middle East, was “giving children a platform to voice their opinions, express themselves, and work together as a team improving their own city.”
There were further speeches, and then Medroa invited the children to rise and swear an oath, pledging to maintain the rights of children as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, and to fulfill their duties as Congrezzmembers. Medroa announced the national anthem, and a swelling tune sounded over the loudspeakers, the kids joining in at the refrain, “KidZania, KidZania, you’re always in my heart.” Then Medroa distributed ceremonial buttons to them all, and posed with each for a photograph mid-handshake—a politician’s grip-and-grin. The proceedings seemed to be over, but then, from the back of the theatre, figures wearing the costumes of the five RightzKeepers processed down the aisles and stood before the stage. They waved KidZanian flags in time to quasi-martial orchestral strains, like participants in a synchronized performance celebrating the birthday of Kim Jong-un. At the tune’s end, confetti exploded from a cannon, and the children finally burst forth from behind their desks and gleefully threw handfuls of it around the room.
Afterward, I huddled with several of them at the foot of the stage, while their parents looked on proudly. Though the four hours of rehearsal had been tedious, they said, they all seemed thrilled by the ceremony, and by the honor of being chosen to represent their peers. One girl admitted to having campaigned in the park, handing out sweets and flyers; others said that their schools had urged their classmates to vote for them.
They were all frequent visitors to KidZania—one girl told me that before the school term had begun her driver had brought her there every day—but they also had ideas about how the place might be improved. “I love KidZania, but there are not as many activities as there are in other countries, like Japan,” another girl said. “They have trains, but we don’t have trains, and I think we could incorporate it.” One child said that she wanted to see a recycling plant; another wanted a taller tour bus, to provide a better view. They all agreed that they loved getting paid for their work. One girl withdrew from her handbag a thick wad of bills: five thousand kidzos, she said. They all carried iPhones—“my social-media folder has over a thousand notifications,” one eleven-year-old boy told me, with affected weariness—but insisted that they would much rather be at KidZania than in a virtual world. “On the phone, you can’t really feel your happiness,” one girl said. “What a boring thing, just touching a screen,” another added.
They said that KidZania gave them what they desired most of all: a sense of autonomy. “Whenever you’re at home, your parents say, ‘You need to do this, this, and this,’ and you say, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ ” the boy with the overwhelming social-media presence told me. “But, when you’re in KidZania, you feel like you’re an adult, and you say what you want to do.” His favorite activity was the karaoke bar, because he wanted to be a singer—a quite different career from that of his father, who works for the al-Sabah family, Kuwait’s ruling dynasty. But KidZania also helped him to better understand the challenges his parents face. “In Kuwait, parents and adults have responsibility for everything you do,” he said. “But in KidZania it’s different—it’s like kids rule the world. That’s really fun, but you can also learn how hard and complicated it is, and how adults feel when they work. I have learned that being an adult is actually hard.” ♦
