Crisis management to controlled recovery: The emergency planning response to the bombing of Manchester city centre

Fuelled by terrorist attacks on urban areas, emergency planning responses t o manmade disasters is a growing area of critical debate within the field o f urban management. The response of a major British city - Manchester - to the 1996 bombing of its commercial core, is examined in this paper. Pt focu ses on the transformation of the emergency planning response from dealing w ith the immediate crisis during the first week, to a stage of controlled re covery that still continues. The response to the devastation caused by the bomb was co-ordinated by the city council, which developed a range of short - and long-term initiatives, but the re-opening of the city centre could no t have happened so quickly had the council not worked in collaboration with other key organisations and agencies. Working partnerships were crucial to the immediate response and subsequent recovery, with such capacity for org anisational learning built upon existing co-operative arrangements within t he city, which had developed over the previous decade.