Mike de Kreek is an action researcher in the project Human Values for Smart Cities which runs from 2022 to 2026. The project is based on the promise that smart city technologies could bring a higher quality of life and more efficiently managed cities. However, various ethical challenges in implementing these technologies, require revisiting our design processes. Mike’s focus lays on civic participation and engagement in articulating, making and evaluating of smart city technologies.
Mike has a background in participatory action research and arts-based research in contexts of collaborative learning, co-creation and collaborative governance. He gets enthusiastic when academic processes are collaborative in themselves, nurturing improvements of work or empowerment of people.
Since 2008, he works as a lecturer on action research in the Master Social Work program at the Faculty of Social Work and Law. Social professionals enter this part-time program in order to tackle complex challenges in their workplace. They learn how powerful the combination of action research, change management and professionalization strategies can be for innovation. Mike enjoys supporting these processes.
As a researcher at the Amsterdam Research Institute for Societal Innovation Mike has been part of various projects since 2006. His research focuses on the relationship between cultural interventions and collaborative learning processes in contexts where various stakeholders face the challenge of taking up roles in new collaborations. The contexts of these projects consisted of urban commoning in shopping streets, collaborative governance in community centres and co-creation between citizen initiatives and local government. One of his favourite topics in these contexts is how arts-based interventions can unleash other human intelligence than reason and how this leads to other forms of interaction.