What if the crowd was the point?

In Life Between Buildings, Jan Gehl identifies three ways we use public spaces.

He claims social activities are a byproduct of people being in the same place. And yet, despite being incidental, these social activities are incredibly important for us, even when we’re surrounded by complete strangers.

Part of the job of the modern urbanist is to encourage such activities. But, Jan points out that successfully doing so requires a “quality” space, a high foot fall and, importantly, increasing how long people spend there.

He gives this example. If 3 people stand outside for a full hour, or 30 people stand outside for 6 minutes each over the course of an hour, which street is busier? The answer is that both scenarios have the same number of people there at any one time (30 people x 6 minutes ÷ 60 minutes = 3).

Reading that, I put the book down to run a little thought experiment.

Let’s imagine a moderately busy pedestrianised block that has 5,000 people walking through it per hour. If the block is 50m long, and they’re walking at 4km/hr, how many people are on that block at one time?

To get an answer, first you’ve got to work out how long it takes to walk 50 metres:

If we substitute our numbers, we get 50m ÷ 4,000 m/hr = 0.0125 hours, or about 45 seconds. To turn that into the number of people on the street at any one moment is simple:

5,000 people per hour x 0.0125 hours = 63 people present at a time. To me, that result is surprising. I’d thought a street that busy would have far more people around, but that’s it.

Now let’s say that a circle show starts performing in the middle of the street. She actively builds her crowd for 30 minutes, during which time 2,500 people walk past. Despite her many years of experience, this crowd is tough, so she only manages to convert 5% of them — just 125 people — into audience members. So, for the final 15 minutes of her show there are 125 people watching.

For those 15 minutes, there are three times as many people on that stretch of road: 1 busker + 125 in the audience + 63 passersby = 189 people total.

Why does it matter that a busker can triple the number of people on a street?

Because a crowd is not just a crowd.

Increasing the number of people in a place is not inherently a good thing. A physical crowd is just co-presence. Commuters on a train, in an elevator or just walking up a street are good examples of this, as they actively try to avoid eye contact and treat others as obstacles.

A psychological crowd is when people come to see themselves as members of the same group, however briefly. This shared identity changes our behaviour, making us more willing to help each other and feel warmth toward strangers.

It’s a street performer’s job to transform physical crowds to psychological crowds: from people who were ignoring each other thirty seconds ago to ones who are now laughing in unison, making eye contact and sharing in each others’ reactions.

This is way more valuable than you might think. Indeed, the importance of psychological crowds was one of the topics talked about by one of the founders of sociology, Émile Durkheim, who looked at accounts given by Aboriginal Australians about their experience of participating in collective rituals.

They described heightened emotions, a feeling of unity and contact with something transcendental — what we might call being in an “altered state”. Émile was an atheist, and attributed these feelings not to a god but to the effect of the crowd acting on the individual.

His 1912 book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, argued that religion itself was invented to trigger what he called collective effervescence, that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself.

This wasn’t exactly science, this was more like educated guesswork. Émile came up with his theories in an armchair in Paris, reading secondhand accounts of the Aboriginal peoples’ stories. For this and other reasons, collective effervescence was largely ignored until half a century later, when it was taken up by a series of sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, all of them trying to explain what happens when humans congregate in groups.

In the 1960s, Victor Turner, an anthropologist, took Émile’s concept and developed it into the idea of communitas — that feeling of equality and togetherness that emerges between people temporarily moving through liminal spaces.

Our normal social lives are structured. You have an identity, a rank and obligations in your roles as an employee, a parent, a customer, a stranger and so on. This structure is a necessary part of life, but it’s also exhausting, and requires constant self-monitoring to ensure you’re playing your role correctly.

In liminal spaces (bus shelters, changing rooms, wedding parties etc), that hierarchy loosens. The usual rules about who you are and how you must behave are briefly relaxed. Communitas gives that self-monitoring machinery a rest: here, you can stop performing your role and just exist in the moment.

You're briefly reminded that other people are just people. The strangers next to you aren’t a threat or an irrelevance, they're in the same boat. In this way, Communitas helps us reset and recharge, because this temporary release, this letting go, makes the rigid structure of the rest of our days bearable.

Also in the 60s, the sociologist Erving Goffman argued that everyday encounters — coworkers nodding at each other in a hallway, church services, a sports crowd doing a Mexican wave — all have a kind of ritualistic structure. When participants direct their attention toward a common purpose or object (which he called “focused interaction”), unspoken rules script these moments, ensuring that they flow smoothly.

In the 1980s and 90s, a sociologist called Randall Collins expanded on Victor’s work, arguing that emotional energy is generated during these rituals. Emotional energy is that sensation you have when you’re buzzing, happy and want to do things, and is the basic fuel of social life. Consider the emotional energy you get when you watch a band perform live VS on a live stream, and you’ll understand what he means: we charge each other up when we’re all together in a crowd.

Émile, Victor, Erving and Randall were all working from observation and deduction, making claims that were evidenced in practical studies, but were scientifically unfalsifiable in the strictest sense. Then in the 1990s, new technologies enabled neuroscientists like Robin Dunbar to find chemical evidence backing up these theories, showing that synchronised activity in groups, like exercising, dancing and drumming, releases endorphins, a chemical in the brain that reduces pain and anxiety, increases joy and creates warmth and trust towards others.

Then in 2016, neuroscientists Yan Mu and Shihui Han discovered that oxytocin — a brain chemical that is released in synchronised group settings, which referred to as the “love hormone” or “cuddle chemical” — facilitates “neural synchronisation”, causing the brainwaves of people engaged in coordinated activity to literally align.

In other words, what Émile called collective effervescence, what Victor called communitas, what Randall called emotional energy — these weren't just poetic metaphors for something ineffable, they were descriptions of a measurable biological event: strangers, through shared attention and synchronised behaviour, temporarily become a single pulsing system, supported by neurochemical changes designed to make us feel at one with each other.

I’m sure you’ve already seen where I’m going with this. Buskers generate psychological crowds enjoying a form of collective effervescence. This is partly because they create temporary liminal spaces, enabling focused interaction among strangers watching the show. This produces the emotional energy audiences get from being in united crowds, and offers continuous opportunities for synchrony, through clapping, dancing and laughing as one, which releases endorphins and oxytocin, bonding us together in moments of neural synchronisation.

Buskers don’t just entertain, they briefly manufacture a communal identity from nothing. And according to decades of research and social theory, stretching back all the way to the original sociologists, this is a fundamental human need, vital for creating the "society" we're supposed to live in.

I’ve talked several times about how much I’m in love with the work of Robbie Ho and Wing Tung Au from Hong Kong, who’ve published some of the best-researched papers I’ve ever read on street performance, demonstrating that street audiences aren’t dumb, that people definitively do not mistake buskers for beggars, and that good pitches make shows better.

They’ve also studied the way street performers change people’s perceptions of a place, finding that buskers can make a place feel “more visitable, more restorative, and more preferable”, meaning people are more likely to feel welcomed to a place, enjoy their time there and to come back in the future.

However, this paper — and the hundreds of other articles, papers and books I’ve now read that mention street performance — is written from the perspective of how the busker’s show impacted their audiences.

But, perhaps how funny the busker is, or how inventive they are, or how beautifully they’re singing, is less important than how many people they can gather together in one group. Perhaps the biggest impact a popular street performer has is by creating the kind of psychological crowds that the sociologists and anthropologists mentioned above so admire.

Buskers build crowds to make money. But what if the crowd itself was the point?

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News, stories and gig opportunities from around the world that I’m not writing about elsewhere. This week includes: the Netflix series Hijack gives the worst depiction of a busker I’ve ever seen, Olivia Dean’s past as a busker, and “the Godmother of Drumming” takes to the street.

🇬🇧 This article from Birmingham, about the council being open to compromise, after passing a complete ban on busking, has a single sentence talking about the street shows enjoyed by people pre-ban: “some people were playing recorded music or banging a saucepan for money for 12 hours a day”. The former shouldn’t be a crime, and the latter is a crime. Also, as repeated in this article, the council says the compromise they’re willing to make is to have a permitting scheme, as long as it’s run by a third party.

🇺🇸 If you’re a street performer in Santa Monica, maybe you’d like to reach out to the office of Oliver Chi, city manager, and offer your support. The Third Street Promenade has been struggling to bring in the crowds. Maybe a street performer festival would be a fun and inexpensive way of encouraging people to come and see the buskers year-round?