Measured Poises, Crowd Noises

In the occasion of the launch of the Footfall Almanac 2019, a walk was organised to try and observe traces of Footfall systems together with others. In this case, we tried to track the system set in place by the OPERA group of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in the occasion of the yearly christmas market “Plaisirs D’Hiver-Winterpret”, in the center of Brussels.

While people counting has been first developed within the fields of retail and marketing, very similar systems have been transported from shopping centers to the streets and squares of many European cities, with the supposed application for public safety reasons. In Brussels, they have been first used by ULB’s Opera group in close collaboration with Proximus.

In this occasion, the boxes were not seen directly, even though their presence was signalled by the recognizable signage. Nonetheless, an impressive display of surveillance was observed, such as a customized police vehicle for overseeing crowds of Christmas shoppers.