Laboratorio para la Ciudad (LabCDMX) — Mexico City’s Government Innovation Lab

Laboratorio para la Ciudad (LabCDMX) was established in 2013 by the Government of Mexico City under Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera, directed by Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Clorinda Romo. With a multidisciplinary team of 18 — including architects, urban geographers, data scientists, coders, journalists, filmmakers and political scientists — it operated as a creative policy lab reporting directly to the Mayor’s Office until 2018.

The lab structured its work across six ‘ciudad’ workstreams: Ciudad Peatón (walkable city), Ciudad Lúdica (children and play), Ciudad Abierta (open governance), Ciudad Propuesta (participatory budgeting), Ciudad Creativa (creative capital) and Ciudad Global (urban diplomacy). Over five years it delivered more than 50 experiments and participatory processes.

Its signature project, Mapatón CDMX, deployed a gamified crowdsourcing app to map Mexico City’s informal bus network — a system of roughly 30,000 vehicles providing an estimated 14 million rides per day yet previously unmapped. Over approximately 400 days, 3,000–3,600 citizens traced more than 1,500 routes covering approximately 50,000 kilometres, producing the first comprehensive map of this transit backbone. Other documented outputs include 20 open-data databases released by 13 government ministries, 52 app prototypes, 42,700 citizen surveys across 1,474 neighbourhoods, and training for over 3,000 public officials.

The lab was dismantled in 2018 following a change of administration; its open-government work was partially absorbed by the successor Digital Agency for Public Innovation (ADIP). LabCDMX’s model directly inspired at least seven urban innovation labs across Latin America, including LABIXBA (Buenos Aires), Laboratorio de Gobierno (Chile), Lab.Rio and Lab Capital (Bogotá). It is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study (HBS 817031).

Read the full analysis: https://labcd.mx