An app at Züri Fäscht
An 'app' for safety? How ten years of app data have shaped crowd management at Switzerland's largest public festival.
Every three years, Züri Fäscht turns the inner city into a stage for around 2.5 million visitors. Stages, intersections and Opernplatz are suddenly used by more people than Zürich has residents. For crowd management, medical services and waste disposal, that is a complex situation — and just as critical for a successful festival experience.
For ten years, we have been using app data to understand exactly this situation. The official Züri Fäscht app delivers anonymised location points and favoured programme items. From this we generate a live heatmap of visitor density, a forecast of particularly popular programmes, and an information loop between crowd spotters on the ground and the situation map in the operations centre.
What started in 2013 as an ETH project has, across multiple editions of the festival, defused hotspots, triggered programme changes (more fireworks, a drone show) and made the festival site safer.