Case Study

Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad

‘Ministry of Imagination’

Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City or LabCDMX) ran from 2013 to 2018 and was initiated by former Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera. Led by Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Clorinda Romo, LabCDMX consisted of a multidisciplinary team of architects, urban geographers, international experts, designers, artists, activists, historians, data analysts and political scientists, reporting directly to the Mayor’s Office. Operating in Mexico City’s 16 boroughs, LabCDMX was dubbed Mexico City’s ‘Ministry of Imagination’.

LabCDMX aimed to strengthen the connection between the government’s political will and the city’s social energy. It formed participatory spaces to better understand the city and co-create innovative solutions to the city’s challenges, between citizens, the government, civil society organisations, academics and the private sector. By prototyping and experimenting, the Laboratory opened up new forms and possibilities of change for a better city.

LabCDMX was based on the premise that citizen talent is one of the most underutilised resources in a society, that political imagination is fundamental and that joint experimentation is necessary. LabCDMX extended the focus from making government services more efficient (an important agenda led by other government agencies), to creating joint visions for ‘the future we want’ and understanding how to generate new social and urban realities from these joint visions for the megalopolis.

Between 2013 and 2018, the Laboratory for the City implemented over 50 experiments and participatory processes in response to challenges in six policy areas:

This workstream aimed to improve Mexico City’s road safety and transportation services. Participatory projects focused on rethinking mobility from the perspective of pedestrians and cyclists. One of its leading projects, Mapatón, mapped the city’s concessionary transport network, an informal system of 30,000 buses used by 70 percent of the population. The project gathered 3,000 people over 400 days using an app in which citizens could map bus routes and win prizes for their contributions. Over 1,500 routes covering about 50,000 kilometres were identified by participants. After the routes were mapped, LabCDMX organised a hackathon in collaboration with PIDES Innovación Social, a local NGO addressing urban challenges through citizen empowerment strategies and technology. Self-selected participants and experts translated the database into useful transport resources for citizens.
The Playful City aimed to make the city a more playful environment for children and for children to directly engage with the city’s public administration. One of the main projects of Ciudad Lúdica was Juguetes Urbanos (Urban Toys) developed in Mexico City’s Historic Centre. This project invited children, families and the community at large to create public spaces for children and youth through a series of collaborative design and participatory planning workshops.
Ciudad Abierta included the collaborative drafting of Mexico City’s first Constitution after it ceased being a Federal District and gained rights similar to those of a state in 2016. One hundred essays and 1,000 comments were published on the digital platform used to collaboratively write CDMX’s constitution. Results of 42,700 surveys administered in 1,474 different neighbourhoods (via 183 student volunteers) were presented to the drafting committee to guide their discussions. In addition, 55 citizen-convened spaces of deliberation were set up to discuss the Constitution and 357 petitions were presented on change.org and signed by over 280,000 citizens.
This workstream was in charge of researching and strengthening citizen participation from each of the 16 boroughs, including how participatory budgets could work to achieve this.
Ciudad Creativa explored ways to enhance the ‘creative capital’ of citizens and to embed creativity and design across government policymaking processes as a core feature.
Ciudad Global was set up to strengthen new paradigms of urban diplomacy by engaging international actors in local politics. This workstream also explored ways to improve the quality of life of people in Mexico City, regardless of where they have come from.

Change of administration

In 2018, a change of administration in the city led to the dismantling of LabCDMX. The new head of government in Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, created the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (ADIP) in charge of data management, open government, digital government and technological governance policies in Mexico City. ADIP is not a direct continuation of LabCDMX, but it did adopt some of the themes of the ‘Open City’ workstream and LabCDMX’s participatory agenda.

The creation of LabCDMX helped create a movement of urban laboratories that spread through Latin America, including LABIXBA in Buenos Aires, Laboratorio de Gobierno in Chile (the first Laboratory at the federal level), Lab.Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Lab Quito in Ecuador, Santa Lab in the Santa Fe Region in Argentina, Lab Capital in Bogotá and Montevideo Lab in Uruguay.

All in all, an inspiring wave of government initiatives based on the understanding that, as Gabriella Gómez-Mont puts it, “imagination is not a luxury”.