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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
The founder and C. Role-playing extends to the corporate structure of KidZania, which is modelled on a national government. The manager of each KidZania is its mayor, and the regional director is the governor. The Santa Fe park opened in September, 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.
In KidZania, the brands can work with the kids when they are kids, and in the future build a more loyal client. It closed in KidZania opens a London branch this spring. In the U. 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.
In Lisbon, kids mostly come with their parents, whereas in the Gulf states they are often accompanied by nannies or dropped off by drivers. 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.
He hopes eventually to educate them about it—perhaps by producing a KidZania movie. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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.
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. If they want to eat cereal, they want to manufacture the same thing they eat at home. Please allow cookies: cookies are small text files that are safely stored on your computer. We use cookies to find out how people use this website so that we can make it even better in future.
Event Production Search Staff Archive. Background Privacy Policy Legal. New Idea Amusement 01 Jun Written by: mike harounoff "they've heard what's going on around them, taken the parts of that which feel comfortable to them, and created a hybrid of it all Inspiration: Circa Waves 14 May The numbers count attendance at each park separately. Disney properties make up six of the top seven most visited theme parks in North America, with a total attendance of about 84 million people last year, according to the Theme Index and Museum Index from the Themed Entertainment Association and the economics practice of the engineering firm AECOM.
Walt Disney World opened in , but theme parks were not necessarily a common vacation destination in their early years, Hill said. Visitors often dressed in their Sunday best, a far cry from the T-shirts and fanny packs of today. Disney did not respond to a request for comment on its theme park strategy and how it is appealing to the millennial demographic. Younger adults — or those ages , a slightly larger age range than that of millennials — are more likely to have children under age 18 than adults age 40 and older, according to U.
That younger segment constitutes half of the parents of minor children. Millennials are not alone in their love for nostalgic park themes.
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