Crowd Behaviour Theory

Abstract

Crowds and crowd behaviour are consistently studied in an attempt to make sense of the phenomena that affect human safety. However, crowd deaths and incidents continue to occur frequently, suggesting modern theories around crowd behaviour are not being appropriately understood and applied to crowd management and crowd control. You don’t have to have the academic acumen of Alexander E. Berlonghi, the pioneer in event risk management, to agree that without an understanding of crowd behaviour, crowd management and control activities are random, and ineffectual. This chapter will provide an overview of crowd behaviour theories as a starting point for understanding how they can be utilised to assist in effective crowd control and crowd management. It is helpful to imagine that crowd theories and crowd models are as diverse as crowds themselves and that as crowds change, evolve and develop, the theories and models must either change with them or the definitions move to a different phase. This text proposes future pathways for crowd management.