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. Parkour is a spectacular and highly mediatized new way of movement that challenges conceptions of acceptable or appropriate behaviour in urban public space. This article will examine the potential of parkour to “loosen” urban spatial texture by applying recent thinking on loose and tight space by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens to data gathered through in‐depth interviews with parkour practitioners (traceurs) in two Finnish cities. When practising in urban public spaces, the traceurs we interviewed often caused confusion among other people. We explore how they negotiate their right to public space in the face of these reactions, either by evasion or with a combination of legal and moral arguments. We argue that parkour is not only a playful and confrontational practice with a potentially subversive character, but that the process of loosening space constitutes a complex dialectic, which may also involve a certain degree of tightening in the public space for other unexpected or unintended activities.

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In recent years, there has been growing interest in questions of gender, sexuality and space in geography and within this field of enquiry prostitution has been acknowledged as an important subject for geographical research. This article explores street prostitution in the Finnish context, where it has only been a widely known phenomenon since the 1990s. The subjective and intersubjective images attached to the issue will be interpreted through an analysis of two types of data: newspaper articles and in-depth interviews conducted among local residents and social workers. In addition to the subjective/intersubjective dimension, a narrative of the changing social geographies of prostitution will be reconstructed. The article focuses on the spatial strategies of women, (hetero)sexualization of the street and the process of 'othering'. In Finland the expanding sex industry caused a huge stir in the media because prior to the 1990s prostitution had played a largely invisible role in society. Due to economic and social changes in the 1990s, the notion of Finland as a homogenous welfare state began to break down, and marginal groups became more visible in public space. The change was so sudden that no political or cultural practices to deal with these issues had been established, as the article shows. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

The small-scale research presented in this paper was conducted as part of the Geo-Capabilities project. Though originating in the Anglophone world, the project attempts to address the purposes and values of geography education internationally. Using the idea of "powerful disciplinary knowledge" the project asks what geography has to offer that helps young people develop the human capabilities they need in order to live a life that they consider valuable. In this paper we explore the challenges and opportunities presented by GeoCapabilities in several European national contexts. We asked selected teachers and teacher educators in four different countries (Finland, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden) what role they thought geography plays in enhancing students' "human potential". Despite marked differences relating to the legal and structural background in each country we found major similarities in teachers' and teacher educators' curriculum thinking in relation to geography's contribution to the future well-being of their students.