Prof. Čedo Maksimović on a nice walk in Karlstad, Sweden.

Professor Čedo Maksimović has nicely invited me to visit his department at Imperial College in London and in November I will finally go there. I met Čedo in the urban drainage conference in Malaysia last year and we came to talk about interesting topics concerning how we build our cities in a new and more sustainable way. Čedo is a person with many good ideas and I am looking forward to meet with him and his fellow researchers in the Urban Water Research Group. I can definitely learn a lot from these people and I hope that I also can contribute a little with ideas from my own work. Čedo and I both find it very important to integrate the urban water systems more in the city. This holistic view seems obvious, but in the same time challenging, to me. As the rain falls over the whole city, it is clear that the stormwater solutions must be integrated in the city planning for all of the urban areas. As we know from floods around the world, we cannot hide the water from the city – it is impossible. Water should be seen as a great resource. With some new thinking we can combine interest like water, energy, aesthetics, food and even joy in the same solutions and thereby win a lot.