Lessons of a temporary city
The Maha Kumbh Mela, an eight-week Hindu festival held every 12 years in India and the largest human gathering on the planet, ended three weeks ago. Already, the tent city that had sprung up to accommodate millions of pilgrims is beginning to disappear from the sandy banks of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, where the faithful had gathered. But back in Cambridge, the real work of understanding the vast temporary city has just begun. Through January and February, nearly 50 Harvard professors, students, doctors, and researchers made a pilgrimage of their own to the festival, which housed roughly 3 million people for its 55-day duration and drew as many as 20 million visitors on peak river-bathing days. Now, those researchers are beginning to analyze the data they collected there, from thousands of patient records at clinics and hospitals to water samples from the Ganges to measurements of the pop-up city’s grid and...