Finland has been known for its excellent PISA results in educational outcomes throughout the last decade. The country has boasted a rare combination of high overall level, as well as uniquely good outcomes of the bottom performers. However, the latest PISA results and the recent sociospatial developments within the Finnish cities challenge this nationally celebrated balance in schools and urban social structure. Until now, research evidence has demonstrated that in the Finnish context with a powerful, universalist welfare state and a highly educated, homogenous population, differentiation increases mainly by the growth of an elite. Our analysis of large datasets from schools and neighbourhoods in Helsinki suggests that this development has been overturned in the local level: segregation has begun to increase and appears to operate through the trends of middle-class avoidance and the decline of the underprivileged groups in urban schools and neighbourhoods.

Starting from the polarisation (Sassen) versus professionalisation (Hamnett) discussion, the paper presents an analysis of the development of the Helsinki Metropolitan Region, the capital district of Finland. The analysis of new urban differentiation shows how modern ITC-based 'informational development' (Castells) seriously challenges the egalitarian basis of the Nordic welfare regime. The bimodal urban differentiation is not, however, regarded as a sign of polarisation, but rather as a new phase in economic development linked with a structural shift in the demand for labour that can result in very different outcomes in different cities and welfare regimes. In other words, both polarisation and professionalisation are interpreted as different versions or outcomes of a more fundamental structural shift combining both.

The Finnish HIV outbreak is restricted socially to a very marginalized IDU population, and spatially to local pockets of poverty. In low prevalence countries, prevention programs should be targeted early at high-risk areas and populations.

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The contingent of large housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s accounts for almost a half of all high-rises in Finland. The primary ideology in their genesis was to combine industrially prefabricated urban housing development with the surrounding forest landscape-together with a policy of spatial social mixingto prevent social disorder and segregation. These policies seemed to work as intended until the early 1990s, but have since proved to be insufficient. With Western integration and new information and communication-based economic growth, new trends of population differentiation have emerged. As new wealth has moved out to the fringes of cities, the large housing estates have declined socioeconomically and have been enriched ethnically. This differentiation is structurally produced, works through the regional housing market and, as such, is beyond the scope of the preventive policies pursued. Recent attempts at controlling the regional markets and new forms of spatial social mixing have so far proved difficult.