This article sheds light on the advent of online platforms and the way it is reshaping urban enviroment, breaking down traditional axes of both social interaction and commercial power, shifting the structure of traditional services. The platform revolution is radically transforming an array of many functional cities’ areas, like transportation, accommodations and personal services. Thus current concerns as strong urbanization, industrialization and world population growth, enable sharing economy firms to flourish as a reaction against the frictions of urban life exploiting such exacerbation, in order to fulfill demand for appropriate services. After a critical analysis of these issues, the article deepens innovative transportation services, moving on to illustrate the Italian rulemaking process as a chance to provide a solution to the ongoing problem of striking the right balance between competing priorities, such as market access and preservation of sustainable mobility. It suggests to reflect upon the best approach able to face the complexity of urban transport systems, in order to break in a new culture for urban mobility, comply to EU legislation too.

The essay critically approaches the current state and directions of changes in the university education. We see the critical point in the unconditioned endorsement by the university of the market values of intense competitiveness of global economy and the cult of the pro-market education which is its inevitable result. We would like to argue that although the university must respect economic conditions and limitations, nevertheless we fear that the ongoing process of corporatization of the university with its management strategies such as cutting costs, scanning environments for competitive purposes, re-engineering highly competitive efficiency criteria for the staff will bring about a neglect of the humanist values rooted in intellectual and social sensibility and hence undermine the social mission of the university which, apart from professional skills and research, must cultivate intellectual pluralism by providing space for intelligent conversation, sharing critical views of the present state of things thus fostering social criticism and the spirit of responsible dissent.

Present study examines nonfinancial support granted for older people in Poland and other European countries in order to understand the relationships between family structures and that support and to diagnose the challenges that the Polish population may face in this respect in the nearest future. The analysis is based on the data from the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The study attempts also to answer the question about the need for informal support in future generations of older Poles. The study is focused on the population of individuals aged at least 50+, because they will decide about the situation of older people in the near future. The author considers, in addition to personal care, help in running a household and help with paper work. The most frequently received type of support is the help in running a household, received primarily from neighbors and family members, which reduces the need for institutional care. Personal care is provided to the minority of the examined population, even in the highest age group, and, apart from household members, it concerns usually biological children.

The paper deals with the issue of financial efficiency, measured by the arithmetic rate of return, of indirect financial investments in the area of strategic raw materials (hard coal, copper, crude oil). Two forms of indirect investments were analyzed: shares of natural resources companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and futures contracts for strategic commodities: hard coal, copper and crude oil.

The time of the analysis is the first 6 months of 2019 and 2020. The year 2019 was regarded as an analysis of the period of economic growth, and the year 2020 was the analysis of the period of economic crisis. The comparisons were made in two dimensions. Firstly, it whether indirect commodity investments show the characteristics of efficiency resilience to the time of the economic crisis was checked (by comparing the achieved rates of return in the two analyzed periods). Secondly, which of the analyzed forms of investment (stocks, contracts) gives better investment results during economic growth and economic crisis was compared.

As it was shown in the paper, indirect commodity investments do not show an above-average rate of return neither during economic growth nor economic crisis. The achieved rates of return on shares compared to changes in the WIG20 index in the analyzed first half of 2019 were negative. Only one company showed a positive and significantly higher than the market rate of return. Very similar results were achieved by the analyzed companies in 2020.

On the other hand, the analysis of prices and rates of return on commodity futures contracts showed that in the period of economic growth it is effective to take a long position on crude oil contracts and a short position on hard coal contracts. In a period of economic crisis, the opposite position is profitable due to the observed growth in hard coal prices and a significant drop in crude oil prices.

The answers to the research questions posed in the paper do not provide indications for recommending indirect forms of investment in commodities as an alternative to analogous forms of other sectors of the economy. The analysis shows that the impact of the economic situation on the efficiency of commodity investment is most noticeable for crude oil, and the least (among the analyzed commodities) for indirect copper-based investments.

The paper presents a review of concepts for the development of city centres in response to social and culture processes, economic, technical and environmental developments taking place at present on those areas. This review proves that concepts tend to change over time from those based on economic dynamics to those based on collaborative commons and on governance. On the example of a few city centres situated in the Silesian Region an analysis was carried out of the concepts being presently applied and with the use of which projects Silesian cities strive to maintain and strengthen the dynamics and vitality of city centres.