Paul Townsend

Paul Townsend is one of the world’s leading experts in people flow analytics, pedestrian modelling and crowd behaviour.

Paul leads the Crowd Dynamics team that offer world class services in mobility, pedestrian strategy, crowd safety, crowd management and visitor experience.

Paul has a unique understanding of the movement and dynamics of people, having analysed, designed for and managed crowd movement in different contexts such as buildings, cities and events across the globe. His contributions to designing and planning for pedestrian movements and behaviours in the public realm, education and cultural sectors, and for large scale events are implemented by many experts to design for people flow.

Consistently striving to go beyond the current state of the art, Paul has pushed the boundaries of what is possible through cutting edge research and development. This includes pedestrian/traffic interaction, collaborative event planning, highly dense crowds, real time evacuation systems for stadia and cruise ships, and smart cities for better mobility and people flow

Through his philosophy towards optimising levels of crowding appropriately for the space, he has transformed thinking around visitor management from not only understanding patterns and behaviours and forecasting how this applies to future demand and new venues, to showing how to create the desired safe and efficient crowd flow that results in the optimum visitor experience.