Maya Chen
I write and speak about how technology is quietly redrawing our cities.
A policy desk, and a question
I spent three years advising a city government on transit data. I left because the most interesting question, who the smart city is actually for, was the one nobody wanted on the agenda.
The first book
Quiet Streets came out of those years. It argued that most urban technology optimises for the city's operators, not its residents. It found more readers than I expected.
The main stage
A fifteen-minute talk on empty pandemic cities became the thing people knew me for. I have since given a version of it on five continents.
The second book
Soft Infrastructure looked at the maintenance work, human and digital, that keeps a city standing. It is the book I am proudest of.
Writing the third
I am at work on a book about the cities we are building for machines to move through, and what that leaves for the rest of us. And I am speaking, selectively.
Speaking
Who Is the Smart City For?
The keynote. A tour of the invisible choices baked into urban technology.
The Maintenance We Cannot See
On the human labour that keeps digital cities running.
Streets After the Algorithm
What autonomous everything does to the space between buildings.
Past stages includeWeb Summit, SXSW, TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, Singapore's URA lecture series, and city halls in Rotterdam, Bogotá and Seoul.
The books
Quiet Streets
Why the smart city optimises for its operators, and how it could optimise for us instead.
Verso · 2017
Buy the book →Soft Infrastructure
On the maintenance, human and digital, that keeps a city standing when nobody is watching.
MIT Press · 2023
Buy the book →She left our audience arguing in the lobby for an hour. That is the whole point.Programme Director, Web Summit
For 2027 programming, write me directly.
Or reach me at hello@mayachen.work