Stadiums
– or crowd trouble at Wembley during the Euro 2020 final – that trigger investigation and analysis. The ingredient that can make sports spaces unpredictable is human emotion. Stadiums are places of elation, grief, rage, disappointment – all happening within a few metres of each other. Team rivalries can lead to tipping points that turn anonymous crowds into dangerous entities. Innovations for monitoring and analysis help teams respond to bottlenecks in real time, or provide deep analysis of how fans behave in various scenarios. In addition to human eyes on video monitors, some tech uses low-energy radio absorption to detect crowd density live, while others work with AI to evaluate live video. But technology won’t help if the basic principles of venue design aren’t right. Even with effective monitoring in place, by the time teams realise there is a problem, it may be too late to do anything about it. “One of the failures at the Stade de France incident this year was that Bluetooth connection on fans’ phones had to be turned on to get their tickets verified. And we’ve seen other stadiums with electronic ticket checking run into problems when the Wi-Fi has gone down,” insists Still. Technology can speed things up, but moving people more
quickly sometimes creates as many problems as it solves. If e-tickets allow the venue to fill up rapidly, concourses need to be equipped to handle that higher density of traffic, which will affect pressure on concessions and other vendors. Stadiums that are decades old won’t have been designed with this rate of traffic flow in mind. Mass notifications may have a powerful impact on managing crowds, or directing people to better access of services, but these have to be considered in their emotional context. Notifying fans that there’s no wait at the bar almost guarantees a stampede. “Information systems associated with transit are good and effective,” maintains Still, “providing you understand the consequences of your words. Rather than saying: ‘There are five spaces left in this area’, when you have 1000 people that want to get in, it’s better to say: ‘Avoid the following areas because they are congested.’ Then you will get a better distribution of crowds around those spaces.” SAFE FAILURE MODE Venue designers have to anticipate the worst possible thing that could go wrong and plan for it. Technology needs to be designed around a ‘safe failure mode’, recognising systems don’t always work – and to build in mechanisms so that when they fail, they do so safely. If, for example,
a camera which is monitoring wait time breaks, it shouldn’t then broadcast a wait time of zero minutes, but instead go to infinity until the issue is resolved. The biggest threat to fan safety is almost always the fans themselves. “People can do the stupidest things,” continues Still. “It’s worth imprinting that into people’s minds when they think about crowds. So, how do we consider the implications of that and design safety within those concepts?” Sports is built on the aspiration of achieving what to some seems impossible. And this human drive – often tweaked by alcohol – creates situations that get people into trouble. Still cites examples of people trying to climb a 100ft drainpipe to get over the walls at Wembley Stadium – without thinking about how they would then get down the 100ft drop on the other side. Or another, where fans were attempting to get into a venue by knocking faulty hinges off a steel door – which happened to weigh four tons. “When you examine that from a human perspective, it’s all down to perception of risk and reward. They didn’t perceive the danger of a four-ton steel door falling on them, but they did perceive the reward of getting into a cup final event. The human mind weighs risk, but often incorrectly. We look at it and think it’s really stupid, but it’s all down to how a person’s brain can discern risk and reward. “You have to consider: ‘What is the stupidest thing that can be done?’ Then assume they are all going to do that,” concludes Still.
LEGACY FOR ALL Originally built for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Bird’s Nest continues to host big events – sporting or not
PAST MASTER Roman Colosseum vs Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium
MEET YOUR MATCH Capua Amphitheatre shares many features with Rome’s Colosseum
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 FEED:XTREME 69
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