GCMA Field Guide to Crowds

Why is this called a “Field Guide to Crowds?”

Usually, a field guide discusses wildlife, plants, or minerals as elements of our natural environment. This is a field guide to crowds because it is based on a recognition that participating in shared experiences is an equally essential part of our man-made environment.

The word “crowd” is not pejorative, even if some people use it that way. Like birds or flowers, mass gatherings can be delightful or dangerous, and may be both simultaneously. It is up to crowd managers and their colleagues in operations, security, and public safety to make spaces for group activity as safe as possible under the circumstances of each event.

This GCMA Field Guide to Crowds does not seek to be comprehensive. That would require many more pages than are contained in this First Edition, which would reduce the likelihood you’d read any of them. Rather, we have organized this as a series of eight monographs, each a deep dive into a situation you probably haven’t heard about before. We hope the stories, which range from amusing to heartbreaking, will stick with you.

Each chapter can be processed at two different levels. On a micro level, there are takeaways on a specific subject which are applicable for any crowd manager. On a macro level, we take seriously a point which is often stated, then ignored – safety guidance must be scalable. Authoritative works such as the National Incident Management System in the United States assert that they are equally applicable to events of all sizes, yet much conversation about mass gatherings focuses on large scale disasters like the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas, the Manchester Arena bombing, the Itaewon crowd crush on the streets of Seoul, South Korea. It is our job as crowd managers to honor the diversity of our crowds, and the circumstances in which they gather. We must tailor our plans and resulting actions to their physical and emotional needs. We hope this GCMA Field Guide to Crowds will stimulate your thinking, and that of your colleagues, to help create safer gatherings. Because the one certainty is that we human beings will continue to gather.

Please enter your name and email address below to download the guide. You will be re-directed after submission.

Interested in submitting an article for a future edition of the GCMA Field Guide to Crowds? Submit your contributor application here.