Applied Crowd Management Strategies in Germany

A mass panic at the 'Love Parade' 2010 in the German city of Duisburg caused the death of 21 people. More than 500 visitors were injured. As an event management student, Sabrina Bardili started asking herself two questions: 'How could that happen ' and 'Is it possible that such a crowd disaster will happen again at other outdoor music festivals in Germany '. During her research she investigated the topic of crowd management in general analysing different expert theories and models in order to identify useful crowd management strategies. Examples of former European crowd disasters happened at outdoor music festivals due to lacking crowd management highlight its importance for the event management sector. Sabrina Bardili especially investigated German laws and regulations in terms of crowd safety as well as existing training possibilities and qualification in crowd management. She conducted four in-depth interviews with four German music festival organisers to learn about their crowd management strategies. Based on the results of those conversations, she revealed some points of criticism and came up with some conclusions and recommendations regarding the implementation of crowd management in Germany.