From Urban Visions to Transformative Change and Sustainable Development: Critical Attributes and Challenges

Cities have emerged as the central arenas for delivering sustainable development solutions on a global scale. Currently home to more than half the world's population, urban areas are projected to accommodate 68% of humanity by 2050. Urbanization strongly drives economic growth, knowledge innovation, and social vitality, but at the same time, it can exacerbate issues such as energy consumption, environmental pollution, housing shortages, and unequal access to public services. Urban visions are increasingly recognized as critical instruments for navigating the complexities of sustainability transitions, yet the causal mechanisms linking these normative narratives to tangible transformative change remain theoretically fragmented. Synthesizing multi-disciplinary literature and utilizing large language models (LLM), this review distill key transformative attributes of more than 200 urban visions and more than 250 rural visions from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment database. We examine how vision types and attributes are associated with the likelihood of systemic change across different stages of urbanization. We argue that effective visions catalyze transformation not merely through aspiration, but through three distinct operative mechanisms: (1) spatially explicit, which reconfigures territorial identities and land-use priorities; (2) multi-stakeholder alignment, which coordinates fragmented governance across sectors; and (3) sustainability anchoring, which addresses the trade-offs between long-term ecological or environmental targets and short-term economic benefits. By contrasting these theoretical mechanisms with vision typologies extracted via LLM, we observe that explicitly sustainability-oriented visions are essential for systemic restructuring, yet frequently operate in tension with short-term economic imperatives. In addition, the impact of urban visions on transformative change is not uniform across all urban contexts; rather, their effectiveness depends on urbanization levels. Specifically, as urbanization increases, the impact of urban visions becomes increasingly positive and powerful. Conceptually, this finding positions urban visions as conditional catalysts—their success depends on structural readiness. Rural visions, conversely, act as universal enablers grounded in human-nature ethics and community cohesion, which transcend spatial context. These findings are beneficial for not only drive transformative changes but also offer concrete policy insights for urbanizing regions.