⟡ Capitalism as Stagecraft: Monopoly Lifesized as Urban Curriculum ⟡
Filed: 1 May 2025
Location: Tottenham Court Road, London
📎 Download PDF — 2025-05-01_SWANK_FieldStudy_MonopolyLifesized_EconomicTheatre_UrbanCritique_PedagogicalPlay.pdf
I. A Living Syllabus in Rent, Risk, and Real Estate Delusion
This dispatch documents SWANK’s immersive educational experience at Monopoly Lifesized, in which students were granted temporary dominion over imaginary assets, priced out of fictional boroughs, and taught — with theatrical flair — how to lose everything with style.
The curriculum?
Risk.
The objective?
Survival by dice.
The lesson?
This isn’t just a game — it’s a glossy rehearsal for adulthood under austerity.
II. What We Witnessed
Real estate transactions conducted with theatrical cruelty
Rent increases that felt legally familiar
Children temporarily empowered to bankrupt each other
Urban planning, but make it immersive and economically violent
They learned how to build.
They learned how to lose.
They learned that capitalism is just performance — until it's your postcode.
And for 90 minutes, everyone played the landlord.
Then we archived the metaphor.
III. Why SWANK Filed It
Because theatrical economics deserve footnotes.
Because nothing teaches systemic injustice like pretending you’re in charge of it.
Because we don’t send children into the world unarmed — we send them with PDFs and receipts.
Let the record show:
Capitalism was dramatized
Inequality was gamified
Learning was aesthetic
And SWANK — filed the entire simulation
This isn’t edutainment.
It’s a syllabus with costume changes.
IV. SWANK’s Position
We do not consider games apolitical.
We do not treat finance as neutral.
We do not redact the lessons of performance-based injustice.
Let the record show:
The children competed.
The rules resembled policy.
The poverty was optional — this time.
And SWANK — filed the theatre of it all.
This is not fieldwork.
It is economic consciousness — in play format.