Laboratory for the city

Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City, or LabCDMX) ran from 2013 to 2018 as a participatory space with the goal of generating common understanding and prototyping collaborative processes between citizens, the government, civil society organizations, academics and the private sector. Operating in CDMX’s 16 boroughs and under the Mayor’s Office, it was dubbed Mexico City’s “Ministry of Imagination.” LabCDMX focused on civic innovation and the creation of “forms of interaction and connections between the government’s political will and the city’s social energy.” It designed paths and spaces for exchange and deliberation between the government and the civil society. It also experimented with different processes aimed at collaboratively solving everyday problems related to road safety, play, community dialogue and capacity building. LabCDMX did this by finding new gaps within the city’s challenges, objectives and practices; raising new conversations; and borrowing experimental methodologies and frameworks already present in other areas such as academia and the private sector. LabCDMX employed a wide range of experimental participatory methodologies to support mobility, urban, artistic, data and child-centered policy-making in Mexico City—a city of 9,209,944 inhabitants.