This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geography's contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educational settings and its highly disparate expression as a research discipline in university departments. The project also hopes to contribute to the development of a framework for communicating the aims and purposes of geography in schools internationally, because here, too, there is great variety in definitions of national standards and even of disciplinary allegiances (including, e.g., the social studies, humanities, and biological sciences). GeoCapabilities does not seek to flatten such divergences, for one of geography's great strengths is its breadth. The long-term goal is to establish a secure platform for the international development of teachers’ capacities as creative and disciplined innovators. The project encourages teachers to think beyond program delivery and implementation and to embrace their role as the curriculum makers.

The article is based on research conducted with young people who spend their free time hanging out in a shopping mall and its surroundings in the city centre of Helsinki, Finland. ‘Geographies of hanging out’ is understood here as an interaction between the location and young people: the space offers affordances to the young people and thus affects their ways of being. At the same time, they give new meanings to the space by hanging out and thus take part in the production of that space. Empirical material gathered in the project includes the researcher's observations, in-depth interviews conducted with young people, youth workers, the police and the management of the mall and the photographs taken by the young participants. In this article, hanging out is interpreted as a process where ‘looseness’ and ‘tightness’ of space are negotiated and re-defined. Shopping malls are seen as spaces where boundaries between public and private are often blurred. The presence of young people can make these commercial spaces tighter or looser and thus change the nature of urban space not only for the young people, but for other urban dwellers, too.

The small-scale research presented in this paper was conducted as part of the GeoCapabilities 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.

Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores visual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The findings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students' drawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities between drawings from the four countries, the majority showing a ‘big, busy city’ representation with skylines, traffic and shopping areas. There are also distinctive characteristics for each set, for example Finnish students tended to emphasise environmental and social issues more than in the other countries. In relation to methodology, we conclude that drawings, supported by contextual information, are a useful source to understand young people's representations of cities. Further, this research supports thinking about how to merge young people's experiences and imaginaries with the teaching of urban geography.