Jul04TOPFECs

This year IAAPA invited FECs from around the world to enter its inaugural Top FECs of the World awards program. Eleven winners were chosen, and each issue of Funworld this year will feature one of the winners.

La Ciudad de los Niños, or Kids City, in Mexico City combines a unique business model with one of the oldest games children have ever wanted to take part in—playing Grown Up. Together, this approach makes La Ciudad de los Niños a truly remarkable place, a cutting-edge FEC for others to admire and learn from.

Like many FECs, La Ciudad de los Niños is laid out as a city, and young visitors are able to walk through a kid-sized town that features the staples of any ordinary town—places where adults go about their business. But here, kids don’t just look and walk around the area; they participate in the life of the town while pretending to be pilots, firefighters, doctors, and other characters.

Located within the Santa Fe Shopping Mall, La Ciudad de los Niños stresses interactivity. The large size, 68,000 feet, and the fully realistic settings and props let children gain a sense of what it might really be like to do work they’ve imagined. They learn about what the various jobs do, they look for jobs, they are “paid” in Kids City currency, and they later spend that money on products and services throughout the town. No wonder the FEC’s slogan is “Play it Big!”

Each occupation that is represented is located in its own pavilion, so that the total of 54 stops encompasses an impressive array of city life, from a play construction site to a bakery to a local discotheque. In the Urban Transportation pavilion, kids ride in and drive miniature buses around town. At the Police Station, children play the roles of judge, jury, lawyer, and witness, and they can also sign on as private investigators who look for clues and solve cases. The entrance to La Ciudad de los Niños is built to look like an airport terminal, so that as visitors enter, they receive a boarding pass map, and security bracelet. They board the cockpit of a plane and can play with a real flight simulator.

Other pavilions include the Hospital and Ambulance Service, the Jewelry Store, the Photo Lab, the Car Dealership, the TV Studio, and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Children leave with more than just a day’s entertainment; they have participated in a slice of life that requires them to bring something to the table—it’s not just the passive entertainment they find in so many other places.

La Ciudad de los Niños opened in 1999 using a new kind of business model after 18 months of construction and a unique effort to sell sponsorships for each of the pavilion areas. The developers’ idea was that each career-based pavilion should be sponsored by a leading company in each field, so that, for example, the Bank and ATM pavilion could be sponsored by Mexico’s Bital Bank and the Photo Lab would be presented by Fuji Film. This was a novel idea, and initially sponsors were hesitant to participate. But the logic of the breakthrough was undeniable—brand names and corporate images being actively engaged with children turned out to be a compelling idea. And the FEC wins with this proposition, too, because it requires little advertising—the pavilion sponsors are happy to put out the word.

So far, the model has been a huge success. In fact, the target yearly attendance of 400,000 was nearly doubled during the first year of operation

The young Mexican entrepreneurs who came up with this unique concept have been happy to put their earnings back into the business. As the facility has expanded, the investors have opened another FEC in Madrid, Spain, and soon they plan to announce two locations in the United States. So kids around the world might soon be taking part in a new kind of FEC, one that combines play and adult work in an imaginative way, and one that operates on a model that fosters lower costs and higher visibility.