Manchester stands united: Place-based identity facilitates resilience in the aftermath of a mass emergency

Understanding community resilience to disasters is fundamentally important in a world characterized by increasing political and environmental instability. The Social Identity Model of Collective Resilience has examined how the shared identity that emerges among neighbourhood residents affected by disasters can facilitate and coordinate effective collective responses, but has yet to examine impacts on community members beyond those directly affected. This is particularly important given the role of social identities in creating shared vulnerability and resilience to collective trauma among those indirectly affected, as well as evidence that neighbourhood identification can provide residents with collective resilience to a range of shared socio-economic and environmental stressors. The present study addresses this gap through an exploration of residents' accounts of the occurrence and aftermath of a terrorist attack on Manchester, England in 2017. The thematic analysis of retrospective interviews with 18 city residents indirectly affected by the bomb revealed that two key aspects of Mancunian identity - diversity and endurance of the city - were used to interpret the event and reported to facilitate coordinated coping and collective recovery. The implications are that identifying and enhancing local norms of cohesion and endurance can play a part in providing communities with resilience to future disasters.