Re-imagining a Megalopolis

The “Artefacto Urbano” allows citizens to share their input in an unusual setting. (Image credit: Joy Nuño / Laboratorio para la Ciudad)

Imagine your city’s mayor has just called you up and tasked you with creating and running a new department of city government. You can do whatever you want, really, but it’s got to be new, innovative, interdisciplinary – like nothing ever attempted before. Now imagine your city is the 6th largest on the planet, home to 21 million souls and a notorious array of health, poverty, and public safety problems.

This was the enormous challenge and the incredible opportunity that lay before Gabriella Gomez-Mont in mid-2013. Miguel Ángel Mancera had just become the mayor of Mexico City, and in an effort to think differently about city governance, he enlisted Gomez-Mont – a polymath who defies traditional career path categorization. Her TED webpage (where she was named a 2010 Senior Fellow) lists her profession, in part, as “city thinker, writer, arts and culture consultant, documentary filmmaker, curator, and intoxicating agent.”

“I got free reign,” she explains before speaking at the CityLab, a summit on urban innovation sponsored by The Atlantic, the Aspen Institute and Bloomberg Philanthropies. “I got to invent a city department and really re-think what government is about.” As she laid the groundwork, Gomez-Mont pledged to adhere to three guiding principles: a practical devotion to projects that would actually benefit the city, a spiritual allegiance to the skill sets and abilities she had been immersed in throughout her career, and an unflinching commitment to innovation. The result is the Laboratorio Para la Ciudad, a collective of about sixty do-ers trained in enough different fields to fill a college catalog.

Hearing Gomez-Mont talk about Mexico City is like entering a Tim Burton film. “It’s incredibly quirky and incredibly diverse,” she says. “A complete enigma; it’s very hard to really truly get a grasp on what it is.” She’s helped populate the megalopolis with whimsical creatures worthy of its collective imagination, starting with the Artefacto Urbano, an articulated tube-like “parasite” that showed up in four spots around the city’s historic core. Citizens would enter the structure and share opinions, stories, and ideas with a representative of El Laboratorio. “It’s a wild creature that inhabits the space in a new way,” she explains, “and we’re able to use curiosity and fascination as a political tool.”

She’s also brought a creative logic to the challenges of urban life. El Laboratorio’s team of coders has been developing an app to tackle Mexico City’s notorious taxi problem. Over the last several years, about 20,000 private taxis – whose fraudulent drivers have been linked with a heightened incidence of theft and violence against their passengers – have sullied the reputation of the 100,000 legitimate, registered cabs. As a result, people shied away from taxis, hurting the industry and exacerbating congestion in the city center, where an official study attributed 30% of traffic to people looking for a place to park.

The app – called Traxi – seeks to rebuild public trust in taxis through accountability. Potential passengers can snap a photo of the car’s license plate, which is cross-referenced with the Ministry of Transportation’s records to confirm it’s legal status. You can also see how other passengers rated their experience.

This is where the program’s functionality might stop under most commercially oriented circumstances, but because of the government’s many interconnected departments, additional capabilities are built in. For example, you can check with the Ministry of the Environment to see if the car has passed its emissions test, go through the Ministry of Finance to determine if there are any outstanding fines, and activate a tracking function to feed other drivers information about traffic congestion in real time.

“You wouldn’t have this with just a private company,” argues Gomez-Mont. “This is what happens when you have the government involved – you have so many options through common resources.”