Laboratorio para la Ciudad (LabCDMX) — Mexico City's Experimental Urban Innovation Office

Laboratorio para la Ciudad (LabCDMX), nicknamed the city's 'Ministry of Imagination,' was an experimental office created in 2013 by Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera and led by Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Clorinda Romo. Reporting directly to the Mayor's Office, its multidisciplinary team of architects, urban geographers, designers, artists, data analysts and political scientists ran civic-innovation experiments across the city's 16 boroughs, organised around six themes: Walkable City, Playful City, Open City, Proposed City, Creative City and Global City. Between 2013 and 2018 it implemented more than 50 experiments and participatory processes.
Its best-documented project, Mapatón CDMX (January 29–February 14, 2016), addressed the fact that Mexico City's roughly 30,000 privately operated 'peseros' buses — carrying an estimated 14 million rides in 2016 across more than 1,500 routes — had no official public map. Working with 12 partner organisations, LabCDMX built a gamified app that drew 3,594 participants; 3,557 of them mapped 51,308km of routes over a combined 685,188 minutes (about 475 days) of GPS tracking. The resulting dataset was released as open GTFS data and integrated into Google Maps, independently reported by Fast Company, Quartz, Next City and CityLab, among others.
LabCDMX's Open City workstream supported Mexico City's 2017 constitutional drafting process: its digital platform hosted 100 essays and 1,000 comments, 42,700 citizen surveys were administered across 1,474 neighbourhoods and fed to the drafting committee, and 55 in-person deliberation spaces were convened, alongside 357 Change.org petitions signed by over 280,000 citizens.
The office was dismantled in 2018 following the change in city administration under Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, and its functions were absorbed into the newly created Digital Agency for Public Innovation (ADIP) — a reminder that mayor's-office innovation labs remain vulnerable to political cycles, and that, by LabCDMX's own account, most of its pilots never scaled beyond the experiment stage. Its model was nonetheless widely credited with inspiring a wave of similar urban labs across Latin America, including LABIC in Buenos Aires, Laboratorio de Gobierno in Chile, Lab.Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Lab Quito in Ecuador, Lab Capital in Bogotá and Montevideo Lab in Uruguay.

Read the full analysis: https://thelivinglib.org/mapaton-cdmx/