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, led by Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Clorinda Romo, with a multidisciplinary team of 18 reporting directly to the Mayor's Office until 2018.

The lab organised its work around six 'ciudad' workstreams — walkable city, children and play, open governance, participatory budgeting, creative capital and urban diplomacy — aiming to embed civic experimentation directly in city government.

Over five years the lab delivered more than 50 experiments and participatory processes, most notably Mapaton CDMX, a gamified crowdsourcing app used to map Mexico City's roughly 30,000-vehicle informal bus network, which had never been mapped despite carrying an estimated 14 million rides a day.

Mapaton traced more than 1,500 routes covering approximately 50,000 kilometres with 3,000-3,600 citizen participants over about 400 days; the lab also released 20 open-data databases across 13 government ministries, produced 52 app prototypes, ran 42,700 citizen surveys across 1,474 neighbourhoods, and trained more than 3,000 public officials.

The lab was dismantled in 2018 after a change of administration, with its open-government mandate only partially absorbed by the successor Digital Agency for Public Innovation (ADIP); despite this, its model directly inspired at least seven urban innovation labs across Latin America and is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.