Friends at the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Lize Mogel tipped me off to this great story about German politicians their own versions of mini-utopias at Hamburg’s Miniature Wonderland, the world’s largest model-train set up! The story is at Spiegal Online, and you can read it HERE. Make sure to check out the slide show on the left hand side. The image I’ve posted here is from the Green Party model, where punks and cops get along!
Humor aside, I actually think this is quite brilliant, and a great way to concretize and visualize possible ways political policies could play out, and start conversations about them. It’s so simple and direct, and has the potential to speak to really wide sections of the public. Of course it would be much less interesting in the US as there are only 2 major political parties, but maybe if we got them, plus the Green Party, a representative from labor, a couple Maoist and Trotskyist sects, born again christians, the Ayn Rand lunatics, green anarchists, the IWW and anarcho-communists all to make models…..

The images shown from Germany are hilarious, but at the same time an amazing window into the ideologies behind the parties. The free market/libertarian party is against state intervention, but in their model they actually illustrate the removal of street signs and the tossing of them into a hearse! Street signs, those evil, manipulative bugaboos of the State! As if social bodies outside the state wouldn’t also mark generally accepted rules for things like operating fast moving heavy machinery. And the Christian Democratic party’s model must be a joke on their part, it’s a giant pile of model people all embedded head down into a giant German flag, as if Germany was eating their brains.