Protesters use city data to gather effectively in street networks
BeWater: Effective Protesters Navigate Watersheds in Street Networks
Multiagent Systems
Summary
During protests, people often need to meet up without being able to talk much or knowing much beyond what they see nearby. The authors created BeWater, a way for people walking in a city to use simple details like street length, number of restaurants, lane counts, and street names to find each other. Using just one of these details doesn’t work well, but combining them helps protesters gather in larger groups. They tested this method using map data from real cities.
What this means in practice
- •For urban planners: Design better pedestrian flow strategies by simulating group gathering behaviors based on street features and local urban data.
- •For emergency response teams: Coordinate crowd movement by predicting gathering points using street and urban features without relying on direct communication.
Authors
Guillaume Moinard, Matthieu Latapy
Abstract
During social movements, protesters need to gather with limited communication means and limited knowledge other than what they observe in their direct surroundings. We propose BeWater, a fully distributed walking protocol that achieves gathering thanks to city information like street length, number of restaurants, number of lanes, or street names. Even though using only one of these observables performs poorly, we show that combining them in more advanced tactics rapidly leads to groups of significant sizes. To do so, our work leverages OpenStreetMap data to perform experiments on several real-world cities.