Crowd safety refers to the set of conditions, practices, and analytical frameworks aimed at preventing injury, crushing, and fatalities in densely populated gatherings by understanding and managing pedestrian flow dynamics and emergent crowd behaviors. It matters to the field because high-density crowd events present life-threatening risks — such as crowd crush and stampede — that require both rigorous physical modeling (e.g., continuum fluid-like descriptions of pedestrian density and velocity fields) and systemic risk-governance approaches (e.g., layered barrier models analogous to Swiss Cheese accident causation theory) to anticipate and mitigate. Key variants in how the problem is framed include micro- and macroscopic perspectives on crowd motion, reactive versus proactive safety management, and the aspirational policy standard of Vision Zero, which targets the complete elimination of crowd-related fatalities through coordinated research and practice.
Source Papers
- A continuum theory for the flow of pedestrians ↗ — A continuum theory for the flow of pedestrians
- A roadmap for the future of crowd safety research and practice: Introducing the Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety and the imperative of a Vision Zero target ↗ — A roadmap for the future of crowd safety research and practi
- Modelling physical contacts to evaluate the individual risk in a dense crowd ↗ — Modelling physical contacts to evaluate the individual risk
- Recent trends in crowd analysis: A review ↗ — Recent trends in crowd analysis: A review
- State-of-the-art crowd motion simulation models ↗ — State-of-the-art crowd motion simulation models