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 civic-innovation office created in 2013 by Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera, led by Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Clorinda Romo, reporting directly to the Mayor's Office with a multidisciplinary team working across the city's 16 boroughs.

Organised around six themes -- Walkable City, Playful City, Open City, Proposed City, Creative City and Global City -- it aimed to prototype civic-innovation experiments and participatory processes across the city rather than run a single fixed service.

Between 2013 and 2018 the office implemented more than 50 experiments and participatory processes, most notably Mapatón CDMX (January-February 2016), a gamified crowdsourcing app built with 12 partner organisations to map the roughly 30,000 unofficial 'pesero' buses running on 1,500+ routes, and the Open City workstream supporting Mexico City's 2017 constitutional drafting process.

Mapatón drew 3,594 participants, 3,557 of whom mapped 51,308km of bus routes over about 685,188 minutes of GPS tracking; the resulting dataset was released as open GTFS data and integrated into Google Maps, with independent coverage from Fast Company, Quartz, Next City and CityLab. The Open City process gathered 42,700 citizen surveys across 1,474 neighbourhoods, 100 essays, 1,000 comments, 55 in-person deliberation spaces and 357 Change.org petitions signed by more than 280,000 citizens.

The office was dismantled in 2018 after a change in city administration, with its functions absorbed into the new Digital Agency for Public Innovation (ADIP); by its own account, most of its 50+ pilots never scaled beyond the experimental stage, though its model was credited with inspiring a wave of sister urban-innovation labs across Latin America.