We were the first lab in Latin America. We were the first in the megalopolis, and we were first in the emerging world as well.
Mexico City, which is the big stubborn love of my life that I am fascinated by and has also broken my heart over and over and over, is actually a city of such diversity that it feels endless. 22 million people on the metropolitan area, 10 million people city proper. We used to have the billionaire number one of the world now, but we also have one of the lowest minimum wages of Latin America. So as I mentioned many times that diversity can actually become divisive.
The task of our lab was about thinking about the entanglements between the urban, the political, the social, the creative, the cultural, the tensions and the translations between government, civil society, between disciplines. And also thinking about new urban languages and political forms. We realized that we had to talk in a way that was compelling to civil society so that we could really do what we were meant to do, attracting all sorts of people in a city where there is a huge mistrust between public institutions and society.
The lab viewed citizenship as a creative act, democracy as a creative practice, the city itself as a traveling surface for ideas.
By year two, it became obvious that isolated experiments were not enough and there was a need for a bold vision for the megalopolis. This meant identifying best global practices and finding a way to experiment at the local innovation level with a systemic lens in mind.
PEDESTRIAN CITY
So I’ll give you one very quick example. When you look at Mexico city, you do not really think of a pedestrian city, yet less than 30% of the population actually owns a car. The truth is that everybody that uses public transportation is a pedestrian at heart.
On top of that, we have the second largest pilgrimage in the world in Elia de Guadalupe after Mecca with over 11 million people walking into the city each year.
And then we love the protests. We actually have more protests than days of the year.
As a pedestrian city, how can we actually think the urban imaginary? First, we thought we needed to do something with the critical before we walk the possible.
In many countries, including Mexico, pedestrian deaths are the leading cause of death. To tackle this, we brought together over 40 organizations, later growing to 70, and collaboratively drafted the first road safety plan for Mexico City. As a result, we successfully reduced traffic incidents almost in 20% in just two years.
BUS CITY
We also realized that we lacked data on Mexico City’s informal bus system, which handles 17 million rides a day and is used by 70% of the population. As the city sprawled 35 times in size from the 70s to the 90s, we lost track of the routes and how they functioned, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of urban mobility. It’s no surprise that we have one of the most painful commutes in the world.
How do you improve transportation policy if you have no idea how your main mode of transportation is actually functioning in the city? This became the perfect experiment in order to mitigate the risk and find innovative ways to gather data and solve the issue.
We first put together a working team that grew in size as we moved forward, and we invited citizens to help us map the informal bus system of Mexico City. We had more than 7,000 people signing up, more than 700 teams. In only two weeks’ time, we had the equivalent more or less of 472 mapping days. And if you put the kilometers that were mapped by citizens, it would give a turn and a half around the circumference of the earth. We had the first open data map of Mexico City. I was really happy to see that while we were leapfrogging and trying to catch up, we were also in a way prototyping or rehearsing a future. And in fact, Mapathon was considered as an example of civic innovation at scale showcased in Harvard
And this really got us thinking about the politics of possibility and it being another way of participating, of being a citizen, of being part of a larger story. Our big lesson there and one to share is that your community is your superpower.
CONSTITUTION OF MEXICO CITY
Another fascinating experiment was crowdsourcing Mexico City’s Constitution – a collective exercise that resulted in a remarkable document envisioning the city’s future. It included LGBTQ+ rights, cultural rights, and indigenous rights, among others.
This process also served as a thermometer of citizens’ hopes and challenges, ensuring their voices were reflected in the constitution. We conducted a survey across 31,000 neighborhoods, engaging 1,400 people, a statistically representative sample that revealed how residents imagined the city’s future.
FUTURE VISIONING
How do we start thinking about an emerging field of urban creative practices that really takes to into account the diversity of human talent. How can we all start being the city makers for the places that we desire to live in.
I will share three examples that illustrate how, in moments of crisis, we must ask ourselves the fundamental question: Who do we want to be as a society?
Five years ago, the earthquake in Mexico City left a devastated city, and this led to a tragic yet beautiful situation. A massive traffic jam formed – not from escape, but from thousands rushing in to offer aid and medicine.
It was then that bike lanes became the main artery for the transportation of aid, with bike activists acting as the “First responders”. This experience taught us that infrastructure, often seen as a luxury, in cities like Mexico or Paris, can become a vital, life-saving network in times of crisis.
Second example, while in the Mexico City government, we hosted Daniel , who studied why resilience varied across Japanese cities after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Despite similar social and economic structures, mortality rates and recovery efforts differed greatly. Why were some cities abandoned while neighbours returned to other cities? And he found the key was in the civic infrastructure. For example, in some Japanese cities, community kitchens are quite common. In these kitchens neighbours know each other which makes it easier to identify who may actually need help. These social bonds not only saved lives but also gave people a reason to return home after the tragedy.
The third example comes from The Netherlands during the pandemic, where a supermarket chain introduced a “slow line”, a checkout lane where people could take their time and talk to the cashier. The initiative was so successful that it has now been implemented in more than 200 supermarkets across the country.
CONCLUSIONS
There is an important paradigm shift on how we imagine governments, not as service providers or as those who receive our complaints, but rather as the orchestrators of citizen talent, a talent that, in my opinion, is one of the most underused resources that any society has.
We have seen many compelling examples of participation, but what about engaging citizens in shaping the city’s future? Participation must go beyond isolated efforts – it needs to be multifaceted and multidimensional, influencing decision-making at different levels, scales and intensities.
In Mexico City, we learned that not everyone wants to participate in the same way: some people want to give you 15 minutes while some others give you six years of their life. The challenge is to design participatory frameworks that are complex and dynamic, rather than monolithic and simplistic.
The essence of participation is that there is a hybrid articulation, where state initiatives and mutual support intertwine across different layers and complexities.
In Mexico City, while diversity is a strength, without care it can lead to social and political division.
Such topics as spatial justice (understanding urban and human geography beyond misleading averages), and equity (where individual lacking is compensated through collective wealth, e.g. public spaces, shared infrastructures) – must be at the center of city planning.
With nearly 5 million children under 14, Mexico City is truly a city of children. Yet, we do not officially become citizens until we are 18 years old. The challenge is, we must start engaging people in solving problems much earlier.
We need spaces and structures that nurture collective life preparing us to think and act together as a society. Most importantly, we need to start exercising our citizen muscle from childhood, building a foundation for the future from the very beginning.