Engineering the movement of crowds

April 4, 2018 5:25 PM

I'm interested in books on how crowd control and movement works: through stores, public transport, crowded parks or streets, etc. I'd like to know how engineers plan for crowds, and also what social behaviors are common in crowds, what ways they can be predicted or not. Thanks!
posted by backwards compatible to Science & Nature (15 answers total)

I don't have specific books to recommend, but my cousin has a Ph.D. in this, and the field is called human factors engineering (it is actually a branch of psychology). I only share this thinking it may help with searches of books. I may be telling you what you already know, so this is "just in case." I hope it is helpful.
posted by 4ster at 5:44 PM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

*cough*Disney!*cough* or at least that is the conventional wisdom, but I don’t know that they uave ever published their wisdom of the crowds.

I want to read these books, too, actually!
posted by wenestvedt at 5:45 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

John Seabrook's excellent New Yorker article, "Crush Point," may be of interest. "Crowds are often viewed as a necessary inconvenience of city living, but there are occasions when we gladly join them, pressing together at raves and rock concerts, at sporting events, victory parades, and big sales. ...In fact, a crowd is most dangerous when density is greatest. The transition from fraternal smooshing to suffocating pressure—a “crowd crush”—often occurs almost imperceptibly; one doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late to escape."
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:57 PM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

You might also want to read John J. Fruin's "The causes and prevention of crowd disasters" (1993).

As for books, Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic might be helpful.

Here's Dirk Helbing's lecture, "Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation Dynamics."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:22 PM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs is not about crowd control per se, but it has a ton of useful things to say about the psychology and dynamics of crowd behavior from a street-level view, and is a hugely entertaining read. It might be more informative about the subject than many textbooks.
posted by googly at 6:45 PM on April 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Although it doesn't exactly focus on crowds, I recommend The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which is essentially what it sounds like. It is also apparently a documentary.
posted by miniraptor at 7:09 PM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

John Seabrook's excellent New Yorker article, "Crush Point," may be of interest.

I want to recommend this as well for a description of how crowds behave.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:55 PM on April 4, 2018

I'm not an expert in this specific field, but I believe that "normal" crowds behave in fairly predictable, normal patterns. (By "normal" crowds, I mean busy sidewalks, transit stations during rush hour, event crowds at arenas -- as opposed to riots, stampedes, people fleeing a disaster, etc.) I suspect motivated crowds are much more predictable as well -- the 8 AM rush hour commuters versus the hordes of tourists randomly meandering Times Square.

One example software package is PTV VisWalk. Key search terms would be "pedestrian microsimulation" or "pedestrian flow simulation". I don't know how many projects actually have simulation work -- it's not cheap, so you need to be expecting very substantial crowds to do the analysis, not just a local light rail station or a small theatre.

Through stores/retail (and especially casinos) is a very different proposition; while transportation engineers generally want to minimize travel times, retail planners want to maximize sales. In a transit station with multiple levels, the top of one up escalator tends to point to the bottom of the next up escalator -- in a mall, you usually have to walk around to go up the next flight, because you're more likely to see something to buy the more you walk around. Paco Underhill's Why We Buy is a classic book on the subject.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 9:54 PM on April 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

Seconding Why We Buy. A great read. Underhill also wrote another book, The Call of the Mall, but I didn't enjoy that nearly as much.
posted by peacheater at 12:05 AM on April 5, 2018

Elias Canetti got the Nobel in literature in large part for Crowds and Power:

It is notable for its unusual tone; although wide-ranging in its erudition, it is not scholarly or academic in a conventional way. Rather, it reads like a manual written by someone outside the human race explaining to another outsider in concise and highly metaphoric language how people form mobs and manipulate power. Unlike much non-fiction writing, it is highly poetic and seething with anger
. . .
This work remains important for the insights it provided into the Eastern European upheaval which can be understood within the framework Canetti puts forth.[2] Showing the growth of crowds and their power against even the power of the state.

posted by jamjam at 12:33 AM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

+1 Canetti.
posted by athirstforsalt at 2:16 AM on April 5, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks everyone! These all look great!
posted by backwards compatible at 4:58 AM on April 5, 2018

I don't know of any books, but there are probably quite a number of scientific journal articles and conference proceedings where crowd dynamics have been modeled using compressible flow equations from fluid dynamics. It has been found that crowds of people move very similarly to flows of compressible fluids and there has been success in using fluid dynamics simulations to predict crowd movement.

A google scholar search here shows some papers where this is done.
posted by incolorinred at 7:27 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've done some work in passenger modelling using software called Legion. There's some good stuff on their site.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 1:29 PM on April 5, 2018

I found this book really interesting, and a couple of the disasters included crowd control and how people move in crowds.

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why
posted by haunted_pomegranate at 5:08 PM on April 5, 2018 [3 favorites]