More than just another crowd, we need a waiting line instead

Abstract

The Shanghai World Expo attracted over 73 million visitors from May to October 2010 making it the most popular international exhibition in history. Aside from its many spectacular features, the Shanghai World Expo also became famous for its waiting lines, averaging over four hours for the most popular pavilions. This paper proposes an examination of those slow, too slow, human gatherings. From classical crowd psychology to the recent political theorizing of multitudes, the bulk of reflections carried forward on crowd phenomena have mainly paid attention to the (hyper)active, noisy, protesting crowds. In this article, I will use the example of these exceptional queues holding many thousands of longing visitors on the site of the 2010 World Expo in order to assert the need for an examination of the stagnant, inactive, and at times bored crowd. Another set of actors come into play: instead of riot control forces, Molotov cocktails, gas masks, barricades, and demonstrators, we have security guards, hats, umbrellas, water bottles, guardrails, watches, VIP passes, and customers.

Keywords:

• crowd dynamics
• crowds
• entertainment
• Gabriel Tarde
• management
• queues
• Shanghai
• world's fairs

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Peiying Mo who granted me permission to use her pictures of the crowd at the Shanghai World Expo. I also had the great chance to discuss this research at a session of the Political Ecology Working Group at Harvard University, and I am particularly grateful to Neal Akatsuka, Andrew Littlejohn, Andrea Murray, and Juno Parrenas for their critical remarks. I also thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers. As usual, Tatjana Barazon's comments greatly improved the quality of this article. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

Punk rock fans will likely recognize in the title a reference to the chorus line of Operation Ivy's song ‘The Crowd’: ‘More than just another crowd, we need a gathering instead’.

See for example Pitt-Rivers (1993) on the spectacle of bull-fighting, Tambiah (1996) on ethnic violence, Parkin (2007), Taussig's (1999) discussions of Canetti, as well as the numerous examples of events that appear in Schechner's performance theory (1985; 1995). Marcel Mauss, while ultimately rejecting the paradigm of the crowd in social analysis as an instance of a normalization of the pathological, seems nonetheless to be asserting the relevance of the concept for the study of pre-modern societies:

All the people are merged in the excitement of the dance. In their feverish agitation they become but one body, one soul. It is then that the corporate social group genuinely manifests itself, because each different cell, each individual is closely merged with that of the next, like the cells which make up an individual organism. In such circumstances – circumstances which in our society can never be realized, even by the most overexcited crowd, though elsewhere they have been found – a feeling of universal consensus may create a reality. (Mauss 2001, 164)

This is further reasserted in the definition of the nature of sociology proposed by Mauss and Fauconnet in which the crowd as a social form is characterized as particular of societies in a pre-institutional phase (Mauss 1969, 151). On the Chinese context, see Hsu (2010) on the Tienanmen demonstrations and Hertz (1998) on the excitation around the Shanghai Stock-Market. Also worth mentioning is the para-anthropological or meta-anthropological literature and its interest for sacrifice (Girard and Williams 1996) and the ‘politics of effervescence’ (Richman 2002, 135 ff.) in the works of Bataille and Caillois at the Collège de sociologie.

McClelland's (1996; 2010) discussions of Canetti shows little interest for this particular issue.

In this respect, sociological work has been done on the social control of active crowds (Durrheim and Foster 1999), but much less on the social control of passive gatherings of clients.

According to Fuller: ‘is not a crowd; its potential for becoming something else is redirected into the serial linearity of a queue’ (Fuller 2007, 1).

As Latour (2006, 71) reminds us, the bombastic statements that one might find in the introduction or the conclusion of a science article are rarely on a par with the complexity of the contents.

However, see Pollak (2000) on the social contingencies of extreme situations.

‘As crowd management and crowd control are interrelated, a well-conceived crowd management plan hopefully will eliminate the need for extensive crowd control’ (Abbott and Geddie 2000, 269).

Contemporary waiting spaces in post offices and airports are now being redesigned and commercialized as they are perceived to be unproductive, too time-consuming, and not commodity-consuming enough (Sayeau 2010; Pellegrin-Genel 2010).

A secondary role of the Bureau International of Expositions in Paris whose mandate is the regulation and supervision of international exhibitions is the centralization of information collected in the previous experiences of organizing world expos.

The design of the infrastructure of the Urbanian Pavilion was awarded to the Dutch design studio Kossmann.dejong. It used the Ed Plato software from INCONTROL Simulation Solutions in order to simulate scenarios of visitors flow. In this software: ‘Each individual pedestrian is modeled as a single entity that flows through a queuing system and has its own characteristics such as origin, destination, preferred walking speed and routing’. This work implies the definition of the quality of experience which is thought to be ‘the key performance indicator’, measured here with the value of the density of bodies per square meter, with the minimum desired as 2 square meters per person. The simulation for the Urbanian pavilion can be seen at http://www.incontrolsim.com/en/ed-plato/demo.html.

On national variations and similarities regarding queue cultures, see Ehn and Lofgren (2010).

The posters can be found in Liu (2007).

This is symmetrically mirrored by the very recent skyrocketing industry of ‘Doing business in China’ manuals about good manners for conducting business in China. Norbert Elias’ civilization process is venturing into new directions.

This political tradition of promoting a civilizing process in China on the back-drop of representations of Western modernity can indeed be traced back beyond the Reform era, notably with the emergence of cinemas in Beijing (Kerlan 2012).

Airports are also the exemplary case of time segregation with its special channels for diplomats and first-class ticket holders (Graham and Marvin 2001).

New technologies are widely being adopted to allow favored, rich and highly mobile travelers to pass seamlessly and quickly through ports, airports and rail terminals, whilst other passengers face traditional, and in many cases intensifying, scrutiny. Through the US Immigration and Naturalization Service Passenger Accelerated Service System (INSPASS), for example, frequent business travelers and diplomats travelling between the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and other advanced industrial nations can now obtain a smart card that is programmed with the unique biometric signature of the geometry of their hand. By swiping the card at Immigration and placing their hand on a scanner they are allowed ‘fast track’ routes through airports. (Graham and Marvin 2001, 3)

As designer John Thackara puts it:

A system that accesses information in real time should be able to deliver accurate information about dynamic services. Fluid Time works with the unpredictable nature of events, constantly updating users with the most recent, most accurate time information on the availability of services such as transportation, delivery, or health. (Thackara 2005, 47)

See Boullier (1995). His work on emergencies at the Gare du Nord in Paris describes an ideal of order that is never reached but approached through the massive mobilization of devices.

Gabriel Tarde Archives (GTA 23, ‘Sur Le Bon’, June [2003] 1895). On the divergent relations of Tarde and Spencer to Darwinism, see Tort (1989, 525–35).

Gabriel Tarde Archives (Notebook 3, 1878).

The instability of the crowd as an object leads Boullier (2010) to talk about quasi-publics and quasi-crowds, as one can turn into the other if given the right circumstances.