civicvirtue.ai was founded by Alexandros Washburn, an architect who has spent his life in cities and his career changing them. As Chief Urban Designer of New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and later Industry Professor of Design at the Stevens Institute of Technology, he worked the pulleys and levers by which a city changes its people and its people change their city.
Once, finding himself in an elevator with a mayor-to-be and time for one important thing to say, he said: cities build citizens. That observation became a question — whether the oldest technology we have for turning strangers into fellow citizens can do the same for artificial intelligence — and the question became a book, a formal framework, and this lab.
The lab's work is to make the question testable: a theory of civic ascent, a measurement layer built from New York City's own data, and a simulation testbed on the Manhattan grid where machine agents can be studied not for what they are told, but for what they become.
