Defining resilience for mass gatherings

This brief proposes a heuristic for what constitutes resilience for a mass gathering: safety, accessibility, sustainability, and community engagement. Resilience is an important metric for municipalities, states, or territories to understand about mass gatherings hosted within their borders because it may impact their own planning and response capacity in the event of a disaster. The proposed heuristic is agnostic to the kind of mass gathering in question, making it applicable to a wide variety of activities including emergency response interventions (e.g. evacuation camps, post-disaster temporary housing, vaccination sites), arts and cultural events (e.g. concerts, festivals, sporting events), community or religious gatherings, and political demonstrations. Specific metrics for mass gathering resilience may be developed from this framework that incorporate local priorities for capacity-building in resilience and emergency preparedness, especially as communities seek to fortify themselves against the impacts of climate change.

Introduction

Mass gatherings include a wide variety of activities: concerts, sporting events, festivals, political demonstrations, religious services or pilgrimages, refugee camps, evacuation camps. By definition, they involve the presence of a large number of people at a specific location for a specific purpose for a defined period of time. Some definitions of mass gatherings highlight the risks associated with the convening of a large number of people.

The term resilience is now applied widely across disciplines. A seminal 1973 paper by ecologist C.S. Holling defined resilience as a “measure of the persistence of systems and their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.” Lisen Schultz, acting deputy science director at the Stockholm Resilience Center, more recently describes resilience as “a capacity to persist, adapt or transform in the face of change in a way that maintains the basic identity of a system.”

As applied to cities and disaster preparedness, the concept of resilience has shifted approaches to disaster risk management. Historically, preparedness emphasized risk assessments and subsequent safety planning related to specific hazards. While this is still an important part of preparedness efforts, resilience adds a focus on how to enhance the performance of a system in the face of a disruptive event, even if the event itself is unpredictable. It encompasses the building of capacity to confront not only shocks– typically “short-term deviations that have substantial negative effects on people’s current state of well-being, level of assets, livelihoods, safety or their ability to withstand future shocks”– but also stresses– longer-term pressures that destabilize and increase vulnerability within a system.

Defining resilience for mass gatherings

Recent efforts have developed resilience frameworks for ecologies, cities, organizations, communities, and individuals. Here we propose a heuristic for four qualities which constitute resilience for a mass gathering, namely:

• Safety – Planning and mitigation efforts to support the life, physical, mental, and emotional well-being of all participants
• Accessibility – Adopting inclusive practices and accessible design principles which enable the event to be experienced by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for improvised one-off accommodations/solutions.
• Sustainability – Designing an event to 1) minimize the generation of increased waste streams into the surrounding community; and 2) persist or adapt even if centralized energy sources are unavailable or disrupted.
• Community engagement – “The process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the well-being of those people” during the event design process. [4]

Crucially, this heuristic is designed to be agnostic to the kind of mass gathering in question. Many kinds of emergency recovery sites are mass gatherings themselves (or at least share with mass gatherings the management of temporary infrastructure and large groups of people): for example, evacuation camps, post-disaster temporary housing areas, vaccination sites, and warming or cooling shelters. Our resilience framework for mass gatherings is as applicable to these interventions as it is to music festivals, sporting events, and political demonstrations.

Why it Matters

The greater the resilience of a mass gathering, the lower the likelihood that that event will cause strain or other negative impacts on the surrounding community, emergency incident responders, or response or recovery organizations in the event of a disaster within or coinciding with the time of the mass gathering. In fact, a highly resilient mass gathering actually adds to the community’s disaster response capacity because its resources, skills, infrastructure, and communications networks could likely be usefully redeployed towards response and recovery efforts in the event of an emergency.

Conclusion

The development of a consistent cross-sector criteria for resilient mass gatherings creates a lever to significantly increase resilience both on the scale of individual mass gatherings and on the scale of the community. It provides a mechanism for the identification of skills, resources, infrastructure, and communications networks throughout the community which may be usefully redeployed for crisis response and recovery. Specific metrics for mass gathering resilience may be developed from this framework that incorporate local priorities for community capacity-building in these areas.

Footnotes

1. World Health Organization, “Emergencies: WHO’s role in mass gatherings.”
2. Choularton, R., Frankenberger, T., Kurtz J. & Nelson, S. (2015). Measuring Shocks and Stressors as Part of Resilience Measurement. Resilience Measurement Technical Working Group. Technical Series No. 5. Rome: Food Security Information Network.
3. For example, the 100 Resilient Cities project organized by the Rockefeller Center.
4. “Principles of Community Engagement: First Edition.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: CDC/ATSDR Committee on Community Engagement, 1997.
5. World Health Organization, “Emergencies: WHO’s role in mass gatherings.”
6. Soomaroo, Lee and Virginia Murray (2012). “Disasters at Mass Gatherings: Lessons from History.” PLoS Currents.