Milad Haghani, Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering of UNSW Sydney, is, together with 19 other professionals, the author of the paper “Contemporary challenges in crowd safety research and practice, and a roadmap for the future: The Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety and the need for a Vision Zero target”. In an interview with Haghani, we focused on the role of education in increasing awareness of crowd safety.
Haghani: “There are two potential sources of risk: intrinsic and extrinsic risks. It is one thing to train people to avoid crowd crushes and incidents that are the result of intrinsic risk. However, it is another thing to train the population for extrinsic risks, such as the actions of third parties.”
The paper, published directly after the first Australian Crowd Safety Summit in May, names various layers of protection against crowd safety risks. Traditionally, we look at crowds as mad entities that need to be managed and controlled. People themselves, as of right now, do not have a role in the prevention and mitigation of risks. Haghani highlights the need to shift away from this point of view and to use the power of people. People can actually contribute to crowd management in order to prevent and mitigate the impact of disasters. This has become in and of itself an extra layer of protection. According to Haghani, this can be one of the most effective ways of protection.
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Knowledge vectors
Changing the behaviours of individuals is a difficult task. The most cost efficient and effective way of promoting safety in communities would be through schools. Haghani sometimes calls students ‘knowledge vectors’. He explains: “When school students are taught something useful, in Australia for example about bush fires, they immediately share this information at home with parents. The students become knowledge vectors and can share their knowledge with the rest of the community. Raising awareness on crowd safety could be embedded in part of a general safety package. In this way, knowledge travels across generations.”
Haghani was sure that were currently no campaigns or systems in place that educate the community on crowd safety. However, he was pleasantly surprised to find the Global Crowd Management Alliance (GCMA) running a campaign ‘Be CrowdWise’ that educates and encourages the attendees to take a proactive role in delivering a safe event experience. This was the very first time that Haghani saw that the community was targeted. “This is a great first step to bringing knowledge to the community”.
Embedding crowd safety into every school curriculum will be a difficult task. The best way, according to Milad Haghani, would be to run a pilot study at two schools and to have seminars on the subject. The level of preparedness of the students as well as their parents should be measured before the start of the study and at the end to see substantial results.
Haghani is very resolute: “Education is the missing element in achieving Vision Zero. Vision Zero is the global initiative of bringing deaths and severe injuries in crowded spaces to zero by a set year. The sooner we can embed education, the sooner we can achieve vision zero. Increasing the level of awareness on crowd safety and reaping it’s benefit for the next generations to come.”
