1001 Smart Cities
🇲🇽 Guadalajara

Visor Urbano: Digital Construction and Business Permits

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified · ◆ 11 sourced claims, none individually verified yet

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page

Guadalajara put its construction and business permits on a public map, where zoning, what a given parcel allows and the application itself sit in one place. The city first developed the platform in 2016 with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, turning a counter transaction into a logged one the applicant can follow. Jalisco took it statewide in 2020, and in November 2024 the platform opened its source code under the AGPL licence, by which point it had been replicated in 62 Mexican cities.

Live 📅 since 2016
Outcome🎯 Succeeded
Evidence📊 Independent
what does this mean?The strongest source is an independent non-academic evaluation: an audit office, a government or EU review, or an NGO. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →
Run byGobierno Municipal de Guadalajara; the statewide platform is hosted by the Government of Jalisco
Scale🏙️ City-wide

📊 Impact

An impact evaluation by researchers at Oxford and Columbia reported an 84 per cent reduction in licensing time, a 74 per cent fall in reported bribe solicitation by municipal officials and an 85 per cent fall in solicitation by third-party intermediaries. By November 2024 the platform reported more than 21 thousand business licences issued and more than 280,500 urban fact sheets downloaded; by April 2026 the statewide figures were 35,000 permits processed and 440,000 fact-sheet downloads, and the operator puts the average turnaround for a permit at three days.

🎓 Lesson

What the platform removed was not the rule but the discretion in front of it, the step where an official, or an intermediary selling access to one, stood between an applicant and a zoning provision that was already written down. That is also its boundary: publishing a rule only works where the rule exists in digital form. The operator counted digitised partial plans in nine of the state's municipalities in 2024, and says not every municipality has an updated and digitised urban plan.

🏛️ GovernanceDigital governmentOpen dataGIS & cadastre

Sources

↗ Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)Published 29 April 2026Interview with Yunive Moreno, director of Visor Urbano. Carries the 2016 origin in Guadalajara with Bloomberg Philanthropies support, the move to state hosting, the three impact-evaluation figures, the 35,000 permits and 440,000 fact-sheet downloads since the 2020 statewide launch, the roughly 60 cities running a version, and the statement that not every municipality has a digitised urban plan.
↗ Quadratin Jalisco, on the platform's seventh anniversary (media)Published 27 November 2024Report on the platform's seventh-anniversary presentation. Verbatim: 'la plataforma redujo en Guadalajara un 74 por ciento las solicitudes de soborno a funcionarios publicos y ha reducido en un 84 por ciento el tiempo del proceso', and 'mas de 21 mil licencias de funcionamiento emitidas, la digitalizacion de los planes parciales de 9 municipios y mas de 280 mil 500 fichas descargadas'. Attributes the evaluation to Oxford researchers only; the Vital City account names Oxford and Columbia.
↗ Publimetro Jalisco, on the open-source release (media)Published 27 November 2024Source for the open-source release. Verbatim: 'la plataforma se ha replicado en 62 ciudades mexicanas y ahora abre su codigo para cualquier ciudad del mundo bajo la licencia AGPL'. The page's own timestamp carries an offset, 2024-11-27T19:04:53-06:00, so the local publication day is 27 November; the permalink's /2024/11/28/ segment is the UTC rendering of the same moment.
↗ Bloomberg Cities Network, Johns Hopkins University, on the impact evaluationThe account of the Oxford and Columbia impact evaluation that the later reports trace back to. The page returns HTTP 403 to automated reading with both a browser and a plain curl user agent, so no date is recorded here and no passage was read directly; its existence and the figures were confirmed through search results and through the two independently readable reports above.
↗ Barrera-Cruz et al., 2017 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (peer-reviewed)Published September 2017Peer-reviewed conference paper describing the platform's design and its stated anti-corruption purpose, doi:10.1109/isc2.2017.8090840, resolved through Crossref against the DOI in the URL. Used for the platform's design and purpose only, not for the impact figures, which it predates.

📅 How old is the evidence?

Two clocks, kept apart: when this entry’s sources were published, and what has happened to its record in the atlas. Documented span: since 2016. 4 of 5 sources carry a publication date, from September 2017 to 29 April 2026.

When the sources were published

  1. Barrera-Cruz et al., 2017 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (peer-reviewed)
  2. Quadratin Jalisco, on the platform's seventh anniversary (media)
  3. Publimetro Jalisco, on the open-source release (media)
  4. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)

Every source, with links ↑

What happened to this record

  1. Entered the record
  2. Sources last read

Every revision, permanent →

Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 11 claims with their sources · the forensic record

Evidence Passport · public beta 11 addressable claims, 5 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.

Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 11

The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.

Claim 1 clm-072bb4a4b7bf77ca descriptive
Guadalajara put its construction and business permits on a public map, where zoning, what a given parcel allows and the application itself sit in one place
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The interview describes exactly this combination of map, permission lookup and application in one place: applicants 'can pull up zoning maps, see what's allowed on a given parcel and apply for a permit to open a business or begin construction - entirely online'.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)
Claim 2 clm-cd76410b93b2098e quantitative
The city first developed the platform in 2016 with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Verbatim: 'Visor Urbano was first developed by the Mexican city of Guadalajara in 2016 with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies.'
Caveat
Widely reported elsewhere as an entry to the 2016 Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge. No source read for this entry uses that name, so the entry says only what the readable sources say.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)
Claim 3 clm-b219118f5fd8697a quantitative
Jalisco took it statewide in 2020
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The director describes building the statewide version for municipalities with thinner administrative capacity and says they 'built Visor Urbano Jalisco accordingly and launched in 2020'.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)
Claim 4 clm-188f753f2528f320 quantitative
in November 2024 the platform opened its source code under the AGPL licence
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Publimetro, published 27 November 2024: the platform 'ahora abre su codigo para cualquier ciudad del mundo bajo la licencia AGPL'. Quadratin the same day reports the seventh-anniversary presentation at which the release was announced.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Publimetro Jalisco, on the open-source release (media)
  2. Quadratin Jalisco, on the platform's seventh anniversary (media)
Claim 5 clm-e5aec93c1e3d1e75 quantitative
it had been replicated in 62 Mexican cities
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Verbatim: 'la plataforma se ha replicado en 62 ciudades mexicanas'.
Caveat
A count the platform gives about itself, and it moves: the April 2026 interview says 'some 60 cities across Mexico'. Neither figure comes from a register of installations.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Publimetro Jalisco, on the open-source release (media)
Claim 6 clm-f23a4dc2953c4446 quantitative
An impact evaluation by researchers at Oxford and Columbia reported an 84 per cent reduction in licensing time, a 74 per cent fall in reported bribe solicitation by municipal officials and an 85 per cent fall in solicitation by third-party intermediaries
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Verbatim in Vital City: 'An impact evaluation from researchers at Oxford and Columbia found an 84% reduction in licensing time, a 74% drop in reports of bribe solicitation by municipal officials and an 85% drop in solicitation by third-party intermediaries.' Quadratin carries the first two figures independently and attributes the evaluation to Oxford researchers.
Caveat
The evaluation itself could not be read for this entry: the operator's own copy returned an HTTP 500 error and the Bloomberg Cities account of it returns 403 to automated reading. The three figures rest on three independent accounts of the study rather than on the study.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)
  2. Quadratin Jalisco, on the platform's seventh anniversary (media)
  3. Bloomberg Cities Network, Johns Hopkins University, on the impact evaluation
Claim 7 clm-1779e79e47273d5e quantitative
By November 2024 the platform reported more than 21 thousand business licences issued and more than 280,500 urban fact sheets downloaded
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Verbatim: 'mas de 21 mil licencias de funcionamiento emitidas, la digitalizacion de los planes parciales de 9 municipios y mas de 280 mil 500 fichas descargadas sobre los planes de desarrollo urbano'.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Quadratin Jalisco, on the platform's seventh anniversary (media)
Claim 8 clm-007ec245483f2539 quantitative
by April 2026 the statewide figures were 35,000 permits processed and 440,000 fact-sheet downloads
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The director gives both: 'we've generated 440,000 urban fact sheet downloads since the platform launched in 2020' and 'In addition, 35,000 permits have been processed through the platform across the state.'
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)
Claim 9 clm-0690efae7e698406 descriptive
the operator puts the average turnaround for a permit at three days
Published field
impact · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Verbatim: 'The average turnaround for a permit is three days.'
Caveat
An operator figure, stated in an interview rather than drawn from published processing data.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)
Claim 10 clm-1fef58ecf81aada8 quantitative
The operator counted digitised partial plans in nine of the state's municipalities in 2024
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Verbatim: 'la digitalizacion de los planes parciales de 9 municipios'. The April 2026 interview gives ten municipalities, so the number is growing.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Quadratin Jalisco, on the platform's seventh anniversary (media)
Claim 11 clm-a463d484c80d0853 descriptive
says not every municipality has an updated and digitised urban plan
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Verbatim from the director: 'Not every municipality has an updated and digitized urban plan - that's a separate process'.
Caveat
No claim-specific caveat recorded

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media)
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders

This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.

unreviewed Revision 2026-08-24-guadalajara-baseline effective 2026-08-24 · created 2026-08-24

Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.

sha256:e3a8d4fa26817054e0f6d783d5bb7d6103249f025e6092b4b30b532040138e07
Revision history → Permanent version link → Machine-readable record → Evidence Constitution →
11
of 11 claims mapped
5
source dossiers
3
publication dates recorded
0
archives linked
0
exact locators
0
content captures hashed

Governance facts carried by the record

Operator
Gobierno Municipal de Guadalajara; the statewide platform is hosted by the Government of Jalisco
Actor types
city-government, regional-government
Funding model
grant
Funding description
Not recorded
Cost
Not recorded
Ownership
Not recorded
Decision rights
Not recorded
Exit conditions
Not recorded

5 source dossiers

Vital City, interview with Visor Urbano's director (media) vitalcitynyc.org · 7 linked claims

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-3fc7e4c3895403f8
Publisher
Name not classified · vitalcitynyc.org
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
2026-04-29
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-24
Dossier created
2026-08-24
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

Interview with Yunive Moreno, director of Visor Urbano. Carries the 2016 origin in Guadalajara with Bloomberg Philanthropies support, the move to state hosting, the three impact-evaluation figures, the 35,000 permits and 440,000 fact-sheet downloads since the 2020 statewide launch, the roughly 60 cities running a version, and the statement that not every municipality has a digitised urban plan.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Quadratin Jalisco, on the platform's seventh anniversary (media) jalisco.quadratin.com.mx · 4 linked claims

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-a0d4ccf219bd7367
Publisher
Name not classified · jalisco.quadratin.com.mx
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
2024-11-27
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-24
Dossier created
2026-08-24
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

Report on the platform's seventh-anniversary presentation. Verbatim: 'la plataforma redujo en Guadalajara un 74 por ciento las solicitudes de soborno a funcionarios publicos y ha reducido en un 84 por ciento el tiempo del proceso', and 'mas de 21 mil licencias de funcionamiento emitidas, la digitalizacion de los planes parciales de 9 municipios y mas de 280 mil 500 fichas descargadas'. Attributes the evaluation to Oxford researchers only; the Vital City account names Oxford and Columbia.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Publimetro Jalisco, on the open-source release (media) publimetro.com.mx · 2 linked claims

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-cbf7f1a480ef154d
Publisher
Name not classified · publimetro.com.mx
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
2024-11-27
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-24
Dossier created
2026-08-24
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

Source for the open-source release. Verbatim: 'la plataforma se ha replicado en 62 ciudades mexicanas y ahora abre su codigo para cualquier ciudad del mundo bajo la licencia AGPL'. The page's own timestamp carries an offset, 2024-11-27T19:04:53-06:00, so the local publication day is 27 November; the permalink's /2024/11/28/ segment is the UTC rendering of the same moment.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Bloomberg Cities Network, Johns Hopkins University, on the impact evaluation bloombergcities.jhu.edu · 1 linked claim

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-443778fdd81c4fca
Publisher
Name not classified · bloombergcities.jhu.edu
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
Not recorded
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-24
Dossier created
2026-08-24
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

The account of the Oxford and Columbia impact evaluation that the later reports trace back to. The page returns HTTP 403 to automated reading with both a browser and a plain curl user agent, so no date is recorded here and no passage was read directly; its existence and the figures were confirmed through search results and through the two independently readable reports above.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Barrera-Cruz et al., 2017 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (peer-reviewed) ieeexplore.ieee.org · background

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-1732e2e6b0bbb303
Publisher
Name not classified · ieeexplore.ieee.org
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
Not recorded
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-24
Dossier created
2026-08-24
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

Peer-reviewed conference paper describing the platform's design and its stated anti-corruption purpose, doi:10.1109/isc2.2017.8090840, resolved through Crossref against the DOI in the URL. Used for the platform's design and purpose only, not for the impact figures, which it predates.

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Background source; no baseline claim points here
Known limits of this passport
  • Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
  • Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
  • A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
  • The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇧🇷 Mapa de Manaus: Resurveying a Property Register Frozen Since 2010 · Manaus Two parcel maps, two jobs: Manaus re-surveys what is there, Guadalajara publishes what may be built on it. 🇩🇪 Hamburg Online Administration & Electronic Residence Registration · Hamburg Both were written once and reused elsewhere. Hamburg's service spread through a federal programme, Guadalajara's through an open licence. 🇺🇬 eCitie Online Revenue Management System · Kampala Digitising the same counter for opposite reasons: Kampala to collect more revenue, Guadalajara to remove the discretion in front of it.

Explore the wider context

💸 The Price Nobody Publishes🪪 Digital government guide🏙️ Guadalajara city profile🏛️ Governance projects📖 Open data📖 Urban data platform (UDP)📖 Building performance standard (BPS)
📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Visor Urbano: Digital Construction and Business Permits” — Guadalajara, Mexico. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/guadalajara-visor-urbano/ (last verified 2026-08-24). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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