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Figure 14.3 Screenshot of the GisMo analysis environment. MAC addresses have been
partly smudged for privacy reasons.
14.3.1 Crowd Management and Safety at a Mass Event: Ghent Festivities
2010 and 2011
Because Bluetooth allows for nonparticipatory, unannounced, and simultaneous
tracking of a large number of individuals, it is particularly useful for monitoring
visitor flows at mass events. However, and despite this potential, only a few
studies using Bluetooth tracking at mass events have been reported in the aca-
demic literature (some are described in Section 14.5 ). Hence, the methodology
was tested at the Ghent Festivities, one of the largest outdoor cultural events in
Europe, which lasts for 10 days in July and attracts around 1.5 million visitors
annually. This setting offers a challenging test bed in terms of crowd size, dura-
tion of the event, and spatial extent of the study area (the historic city center of
Ghent comprises around 4.5 km 2 ). Because of the size and the open nature of the
event - most activities in the festival are free, and there are no explicit entrance
or exit points - collecting objective numerical data on visitors is challenging.
The resulting lack of quantitative data acts as a bottleneck for research into the
spatio-temporal dynamics of visitor movements. Exemplary to this is the issue
of calculating the total number of visitors that attend the festival, which has tra-
ditionally been estimated by using proxy variables such as the daily amount of
waste collected and the number of tram or bus tickets sold. As such, estimations
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