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than the action behind him. Humans have the ability to foresee the actions of other humans and
thus they can react due to actions made by other humans.1 2
This attraction and repulsion behavior is accentuated in case of a bottle neck. While at
free-flow conditions, pedestrians will walk in the center of the bottleneck, thereby maximizing
the distance between themselves and the walls. During capacity conditions, two trails or lanes in
opposite directions are formed: pedestrians tend to walk diagonally behind each other. Also it
turns out that only a small amount of the width is used at the location of the bottleneck (namely,
the width of the bottleneck itself). Further upstream, the pedestrian movement ‘spreads out’
covering more or less the entire available width (Daamen, W, & Hoogendoorn, SP 7). Another
phenomenon is the one way opening. In case of a confined door way, one sided circulation takes
place with people lining up diagonally behind one person to minimize flow resistance. This
maintains until an opening is found on the other side and then the conditions reverse.
Such restrictions force people to behave in a certain manner. The space itself, the
built up area around it and the opportunities provided to each pedestrian mold their interaction
with the space and the dynamics of their motion. Desire and an appreciation of the activity and
movement within a space are based on opportunities to linger or sit and watch people go by.
Places can accentuate social interaction and serve as an important background scaffolding
for ongoing interaction (Wiberg 11). But places can also be designed to encourage direct social
interaction between persons. Places can in fact be designed to trigger social interaction, i.e. to go
from a passive mode of interaction to a more direct and active mode. A corridor encourages
lateral interaction but the nature of the space changes the activity. A wide pathway through a
park will allow pedestrian to wander while the same setting in a building corridor will force the
passerby to acknowledge the person coming towards them in the corridor.
However here we have just discussed the flow of pedestrian in a normal free flowing
environment. The activity dynamics are drastically different in case of a panic, emergency
evacuation, or peak rush hour which has been dealt with in a few researches beyond the scope of
this review. Further work still needs to be done in this field as the human behavioral movement
is a complex subject. The interaction and movement dynamics of a liner corridor have yet to be
explored, be it the green belt between a double road, a buffer green zone between a highway or
river and residential area. The physical space of linear dynamics confines people and drawing
from the work mentioned above, a more follow-the-leader dynamic evolves which conserves
energy and maximizes the attraction element. Almost like the bottle neck the confined width
brings people together challenging their personal “sphere”.
For pedestrians the connection between ‘places’ is important and successful public places
are generally integrated within local movement patterns. The motivation to travel is indeed the
destination. But the travel from point A to B can never be completely predicted. In most cases
the influencing factors can be assessed and a generic behavior pattern can be predicted. On the
basis of which a space can be optimized for public use.
1
Other works of Helbing on similar themes include “Self-Organization Phenomena in Pedestrian,” Environment and Planning B:
Planning and Design volume 28 (2001): 361 -83. “Crowds Traffic and related self-driven many-particles systems,” Reviews of
modern physics (October 2001
Ahmed
Works Cited
3
D. Helbing and P. Molnar. "Social force model for pedestrian dynamics." Physical Review E, 51
(May 1995):4282–4286.
Daamen, W, & Hoogendoorn, SP . " Experimental research of pedestrian walking behaviour,
Transportation Research." Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2003.
Henderson, L. F. "The statistics of crowd fluids." Nature (February 1971): 229:381–383.
Transport, Ministry of. Traffic In Towns: A Study of the Long Term Problems. London:
Ministry of Transport, 1961.
Wiberg, M. "An Architecturally Situated Approach to Place-based Mobile Interaction Design."
Location Awareness & Community workshop at the 9th European Conference on
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work . Germany, 2007.