Street Piano: An Instrument of Urban Change

During the last decades the growing importance of culture in urban policy includes a noticeable accumulation of festivals. Next to major spectacles such as Olympic games (festivalization) also smaller size events are staged which aim predominantly at recipients’ emotions and must not necessarily have a direct economic or financial spillover effect (eventification). They are carried out by a large range of stakeholders whereby next to traditional players with their top-down policies the experience economy put forth also some new agents, such as bottom-up cultural initiatives, social associations, and artists. This is also the case with the touring installation Street Piano – Play Me, I’m Yours discussed in this chapter. The project is designed by the British artist Luke Jerram and implies that several artistically painted pianos are put into the urban space to be used and played by anybody who feels inspired. The aim of the project is to induce a “positive change within the city” by “claiming ownership of [the] urban landscape” through musicing. Till 2020 some 2000 pianos have been installed in over 60 cities with an estimated reach of 20 million people which makes it one of the most successful contemporary projects. The method applied for this chapter can be associated with research techniques such as digital ethnography and Internet ethnography, though the Internet has been deployed predominantly as a data-gathering instrument. The interpretation of the project followed the hermeneutical content analysis, whereby the explanatory lens focused on the event character of the project, the role of the artist Luke Jerram as an agent of the urban revitalization, his cooperation with the urban growth coalition and the takeover of his project idea by other stakeholders.