Trade-offs in the City System

Cities must balance competing sustainability objectives, where progress in one domain may generate unintended consequences in another. This study develops and tests an integrated workflow for identifying and operationalizing urban trade-offs. First, a bibliometric and structured literature analysis of 28,999 publications maps patterns of interaction across urban domains, resulting in the Citypendence Wheel as a structured visualization tool. Second, survey (n = 60) and workshop data provide exploratory insights into how practitioners perceive and manage trade-offs. Third, a prototype case study in Nuremberg demonstrates how multi-objective optimization combined with clustering techniques can reduce large design spaces to a manageable set of representative alternatives for qualitative evaluation. The study contributes a replicable methodological framework for structured trade-off handling in urban planning and discusses its limitations, transferability, and implications for governance and decision-support.