Hamburg with the quantity of about 18 mlns m2 is, alongside with Berlin and Munich, the biggest office centre in Germany. The large-scale planning and urban operations with the aim of location this function in the centre have been carried out since the beginning of the '60s. The policy of deployment the ofiice sites has beez modified since then, from isolating the monofunctional area of the Modernism's spirit, to multifunctional structures interplaying with the other sites when it comes to activities' potentiality with the expansion of the large-scale urban structures. Many recent realisations abound with significant buildings that bring the avant-garde approach to the idea of an office building. The high level of building technology and the importance of ecological aspects are the important distinction. The mentioned realizations has been noticed by the architectural critics and mentioned in professional press. The pride of place belongs to the works of BRT (Bothe-Richter-Teherani), that has created many innovatory office buildings.

The Hamburg’s policy, as part of the ‘Leap over the Elbe River’ strategy, is an example of the current direction of the city’s renewal, falling beyond classical revitalization. Improvement of quality and refinement of urban structures require an unconventional approach in the problem areas, both in the phase of setting the target standards and at the stage of solution implementation. The districts located in the fork of the Elbe river, Hamburg’s left-bank post-habor areas, were given the IBA (International Building Exhibition) Hamburg status in 2006-13. The area of Wilhelmsburg has become the place of implementing an innovative urban strategy, under the slogan of a renewable city, which has prepared the Island for a modern policy of compact city model development. The conclusions from the analysis of the renewal process that had been carried out within the framework of the IBA Hamburg, described in this article, have been summarized with regard to the Polish conditions represented by the example of the revitalization process in the Nowy Port district in Gdańsk.

The goal of the article is the description and analyze of the exclusions of the maritime carrier’s liability, regulated in international conventions, known as the Hague-Visby Rules and the Hamburg Rules. Their construction is basically different and indicates, that their creators had quite the opposite approach in the way of regulation of the negative scope of maritime carrier’s liability.

In the article it has been compared each exclusion of liability in both conventions, especially with the consideration of the genuine differences with the carrier’s scope of liability. It has been analyzed the examples of the real cases, that have been ruled on the grounds of the maritime carrier’s liability. It has been also take a try to evaluate if the court’s sentence would be the same on the grounds of both conventions, or rather would be different.