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This working paper identifies some key areas of policy intervention for advancing socially sustainable and fair solutions for freelancers working in the creative industries, who are among those have suffered the most from the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on those who work entirely on their own account, without employees (i.e. the 'solo self-employed'), and who undertake project-or task-based work on a fixed-term basis. While demand for some services (e.g. ICT services, software development, digital communication, media, medical translation and audiobooks) has grown, due to their digital nature or essentiality in the post-COVID reality, other types of creative work have suffered due to increased competition, decreased demand, or because they were entirely put on hold due to the pandemic. National government policy measures aimed at cushioning the impact of COVID-19 on workers' livelihoods proved necessary but insufficient to guarantee long-term protection. This is because the eligibility criteria for such support measures exclude many freelancers in the creative industries. Moreover, those who have been guaranteed access to national government support are often confronted with the complexity and length of the administrative proceedings which accompany the implementation of these measures. Finally, career development and employability are vulnerable areas for freelancers due to there being a lack of (or insufficient) national funds dedicated to these areas.

This article explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected platform workers' work and life experiences in Poland and how they have responded. These workers have been exposed to substantial fluctuations in demand during the pandemic, magnifying the distortions existing in an unregulated asymmetr ical employment relationship that diverges from the standard employment relationship. Findings illustrate how workers have attempted to reduce the disruptions underpinning this relationship by adopting different strategies, which resemble Hirschman's typology of exit, voice and loyalty. The authors explain workers' choice of strategy by different levels of access to resources and institutional capabilities, as well as by variations in workers' orientations.

An important issue in the development of European cities is the design and renovation of the urban public areas. Typically, a broad variety of approaches (sociological, ecological, environmental, physical, etc.) is needed and earlier studies have shown the necessity of the transversal multidisciplinary approach in this issue. In order to study the acoustical dimension, the concept of soundscape needs to be proposed and elaborated. The soundscape approach differs from the classical statistical noise analysis in the evaluation of a context-related noise and in the extrapolation of environmental sounds in its complexity. Nowadays, even by using recently developed sophisticated acoustical and psycho-acoustical measurable and quantifiable parameters, it still remains difficult to grasp the complete meaning of a soundscape in words only or by numbers only. Our hypothesis is that the description of the city soundscape might be successfully done by combination of acoustical numbers and words.

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