Brasilia, Brazil, 29 March - 3 April 1999
In with the Right Crowd: Crowd movement and space
use in Trafalgar Square during the New Year's Eve celebrations
Mark David Major, Alan Penn, Zachary Au, Georgia Spiliopoulou, Natasa
Spende and Maria Doxa
The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
(Torrington Place Site)
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
England
tel (44) (0)171 813 4364
fax (44) (0)171 813 4363
email mark.major@ucl.ac.uk
www http://www.spacesyntax.com
In the United Kingdom, the Hillsborough and Heysel disasters of the 1980's
led to the Taylor Report recommendations on stadia design and provisions
for managing crowds. However, of equal concern has been crowd management
measures where the recourse to changing the built environment is severely
limited because events tend to occur in urban space over a large area.
This had led to a lack of quantitative data on the way crowds move, use
and congregate in space because of the difficulties inherent in observing
large numbers of people over a short period of time. This paper describes
the use of space syntax in a three-year study to develop crowd management
measures in preparation for the 1999 Millennium New Year's Eve celebrations
in Trafalgar Square, London. The study found that careful observation
and analysis of crowd movement and space use can demonstrate a relationship
between urban morphology and crowd behaviour. It is demonstrated that
before midnight crowd movement in Trafalgar Square is characterised by
a pattern of 'circuiting', both internally in the square and externally
using the larger urban context. After midnight, crowd dispersal from the
square is also strongly influenced by spatial layout and the location
of specific attractors such as public transportation nodes. This knowledge
base was then used as a powerful decision support tool for proposing and
evaluating crowd management measures aimed at improving public safety
in preparation for the 1999 Millennium New Year's Eve celebrations. The
paper also describes some of the methodological innovations to have arisen
during the study.
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