Why
European City²?

The European City² project revisits the foundations of democratic decision-making. Building on Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem—the result that no standard voting system can perfectly translate individual preferences into a collective decision—the project asks what changes when preferences are enriched with cardinal intensity (quadratic voting) and with other voting mechanisms that are designed to encourage cooperation. Across seventeen European, Israeli, and American partners, EC² combines computational social science, agent-based simulation, large language models, Active Inference, and quantum computation to test a range of voting rules against one another. Among the hypotheses under investigation: that democracies become more robust when the relationship between citizen and society is bidirectional — when societies value sustained civic contribution (emergent altruism) as much as individuals value the collective.