The CUNY Public Interest Technology Lab held a pop-up event on Aug. 13 at the Oculus at the World Trade Center featuring City Lens NYC, an urban data platform built by CUNY student Ashley Peguero.

City Lens NYC combines more than 50 public data sources with artificial intelligence and interactive mapping to help New Yorkers understand development, housing, policy and other changes happening in their neighborhoods.

The platform includes a permit reader that shows displacement risk for a given address, a neighborhood dashboard tracking local events and community board activity and an interactive city map showing how an area has changed over time. 

A separate feature, City Briefly, summarizes active policies in plain language, while an AI-powered city translator converts dense policy text into simple explanations.

Peguero said she built the platform after noticing that residents in her own community, the Bronx, often lacked the tools to interpret the data behind decisions affecting their neighborhoods. 

“I try to work to bridge the gap between data and understanding and real life,” she told The Ticker in an interview.

Peguero is a first-generation college student pursuing a dual degree in data science and business administration, with a minor in urban community development. 

She left high school at 17, worked as an operations manager across multiple companies, earned her GED at 24 and returned to college the following year. She has been in school for about three years.

The idea for City Lens started during an AI prompting workshop, where Peguero chose to build a tool focused on public information rather than a typical consumer app. She said hearing residents discuss gentrification and displacement without reliable sources of information motivated her to create something that could translate city data directly for the people it affects.

She described facing imposter syndrome while developing the platform as a self-taught, undergraduate developer and said feedback from early users who found the tool useful helped her keep building. Peguero also said her personal background shaped her interest in creating tools meant to help others.

Peguero has continued developing City Lens using tools including Claude and VS Code. She said human oversight remains necessary regardless of how advanced the underlying technology becomes. 

She compared the relationship between people and AI to a pilot and an airplane, saying that a person, not the technology, ultimately decides the direction of a project.

Peguero said she plans to expand City Lens by working more closely with community boards and hopes to eventually launch a nonprofit called Civic Tech Initiative, intended to give other student technologists space to build public-interest tools.