ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that crisis management must reinvent its foundations to be truly operational, particularly to address the role of emerging groups in the process of recovery from catastrophic events. Lalonde (2004) pointed to emergence of new leaders at the level of local community as a disaster unfolds over time. The framework for assessment of resilience is deduced from the phenomenon of self-organization in complex, chaotic environments. The chapter first examines the complexity of cities and their operation in interdependent subsystems and sub-subsystems. It describes the disaster process as directly interlinked in a cyclical phenomenon to development. It views the complexity of disaster and emergency management, where intra-organizational collaboration is essential and dependent on the cognitive ability of the organizations.
