Economic succession: an ecology-informed diagnostic framework for sustainable urban transformation

Cities around the world face the difficult task of transforming their economies to decarbonize, use resources more efficiently, strengthen resilience, and broaden access to opportunity. Yet a transition that progresses in one city may stall in another, and urban economics offers limited practical guidance for explaining why. To address this gap, this Conceptual Analysis develops urban economic succession as a middle-range framework for ordered but non-deterministic change in an urban economy's portfolio of activities. It translates the causal architecture of ecological succession into six economically observable components: opportunity availability, access to potential activities, local capability fit, interactions among activities, historical legacies and feedback, and extra-local connectivity. The framework brings together insights from sectoral transition, urban scaling, relatedness, economic complexity, production networks, and urban metabolism, while distinguishing changes in economic composition from judgments about what counts as sustainable. Five falsifiable propositions and a seven-step diagnostic workflow show how it can identify different barriers to green industrial diversification, circular production, low-carbon buildings, resilience, and other sustainable transformations. The framework does not treat cities as biological ecosystems, assume that urban economies follow a universal sequence, or equate greater internal cycling with greater sustainability. Instead, it offers a comparative research program for identifying recurrent transition pathways, explaining why cities depart from them, and matching interventions to the specific constraints operating in particular city-regions.