Peer-to-peer conusltation between cities was the topic of an event on 30th of June at the World Urban Forum in Katowice organized by Connective Cities with contributions from GWOPA and the utility platform. One example of fruitful peer to peer consultation on community level is the utility partnership between the Ukrainian utility Lvivvodokanal in Lviv and the German utilities Stadtentwässerung Dresden, Berliner Wasserbetriebe and Stadtentwässerungsbetriebe Köln. The partnership exists since 2019 and showed its real value when the Russian attack in Ukraine started. Volodymyr Bylynsky, deputy chief engineer at Lvivvodokanal explained during the panel discussion: „Within two weeks after the war we received five big trucks with e.g. Diesel generators from our partner utilities in Dresden, Berlin and Cologne. This meant we could supply firefighters and citizens with water even after our power supply was destroyed.“ Matthias Brune from the partner utility in Cologne added: „We were quite surprised when our Ukrainian partners wanted to continue with our online meetings even after the war started, but now we are glad to support them and continue our joint work.“

Moderator Sabine Drees, manager of international affairs at the Association of German Cities concluded: „Sometimes cooperations happens faster from city to city than from government to government.“