Ecological Succession Theory Offers New Diagnostic Lens for Sustainable Urban Economic Change

Why does a green transition that takes root in one city stall in another? A new conceptual analysis published in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities argues that urban economics has lacked a practical way to answer that question, and proposes an unexpected source of guidance: the theory of ecological succession, the framework ecologists use to explain how forests, grasslands, and microbial communities reassemble after disturbance. The study, authored by Shade T. Shutters of Arizona State University and the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology and J. M. Applegate of Arizona State University, develops what the authors call urban economic succession, a middle-range framework for understanding how the portfolio of activities in a city-region changes over time in ordered but non-deterministic ways.

The core problem the framework addresses is familiar to anyone who follows climate policy. Cities around the world must decarbonize, use resources more efficiently, build resilience, and broaden access to opportunity, yet the same transition strategy that succeeds in one metropolitan area can fail inexplicably in another with a seemingly similar economy. Growth theory, sectoral models of structural change, urban scaling laws, and economic complexity research each capture part of the picture, but none explains why a specific activity establishes itself in one city and not in another. Place-based strategies preserve local context but resist cumulative comparison. The authors argue that what is needed sits between abstract general laws and case-by-case description: a middle-range theory, in the sociological sense introduced by Robert Merton, with a bounded domain, separable causal mechanisms, observable indicators, and propositions that can fail.

Ecological succession supplies the causal architecture. In ecology, succession is not merely the observation that one group of species replaces another; it is an explanation of why that turnover occurs. Three broad conditions must hold: space or resources must become available, potential colonists must be present in the surrounding landscape and able to reach the site, and those arrivals must be able to establish and persist under local conditions. Interactions among organisms, historical legacies, repeated disturbance, and connections to nearby habitats then shape the realized pathway. Crucially, modern succession theory rejects a single universal progression toward a stable climax community. Outcomes depend on disturbance history, surviving legacies, arrival order, and chance, and trajectories may converge, diverge, stall, or reverse. Succession is itself a middle-range theory, offering a common causal vocabulary for explaining particular pathways rather than one universal path.

The comparison rests on more than metaphor, the authors insist. Both ecosystems and economies are complex adaptive systems: heterogeneous, partly autonomous elements whose local interactions generate aggregate patterns that feed back to change the elements themselves. Firms, workers, consumers, investors, and institutions adapt under incomplete information, interact through networks, and continually alter the environment to which they respond, just as organisms do in ecosystems. This shared classification makes a disciplined transfer of candidate mechanisms worth testing. But the authors are explicit that cities are not biological ecosystems. Economic actors anticipate, strategize, create formal rules, and deliberately redesign their environments, so an ecological mechanism becomes economically informative only when its variables can be redefined in observable economic terms, remain plausible under purposeful human action, and produce predictions that can fail.

The translation yields six economically observable components. Opportunity availability corresponds to the ecological opening for establishment: a market, technological, policy, or incumbent-exit opening, such as public procurement, emissions standards, or brownfield redevelopment. Activity availability asks whether the needed firms, founders, investors, technologies, and workers can be assembled locally or reached through migration, commuting, and intercity networks. Local capability fit asks whether an arriving activity can persist given local skills, suppliers, infrastructure, institutions, finance, land, and regulation, with relatedness analysis serving as an important but incomplete proxy. Three groups of conditions then modify these gates: interactions among activities, including facilitation through shared suppliers and competition for land and labor; historical legacies and feedback, through which early specializations leave labor pools, assets, and institutions that alter later opportunity; and extra-local connectivity, the trade, ownership, knowledge, and supply-chain links through which an open city-region can relax or externalize local constraints.

The framework is deliberately falsifiable. The authors state five propositions, each paired with the observation that would discriminate it from simpler accounts. The first holds that entry should depend jointly on opportunity and access, with the marginal effect of each approaching zero when the other is below a pre-registered threshold; if the two instead have stable additive effects, the joint-gate interpretation fails. A second proposition holds that relatedness should matter most for activities extending an established trajectory and least for pioneering activities, which should depend instead on external connectivity and policy support. A third claims that entry sequence matters even after the current portfolio is controlled: cities matched on present composition but differing in how they acquired it should diverge in subsequent entry probabilities. A fourth holds that entry probability depends on the configuration of the whole portfolio, not just pairwise similarity to each incumbent. A fifth proposes that repeated entry reorganizes production and resource flows, measurable in input-output link density, reciprocity, cycling, and import leakage, along recurrent, context-dependent trajectories.

The empirical machinery is specified in unusual detail for a conceptual paper. The authors sketch an event-history design in which the entry of a green activity into a metropolitan area is defined as employment exceeding a pre-registered minimum and location quotient in two consecutive years, with all predictors measured before the first qualifying year. Opportunity would be measured through activity-specific demand or policy openings, access through the prior stock of relevant firms and occupations in connected regions, and fit by comparing the activity’s national occupation vector with the city’s pre-entry industry-by-occupation portfolio. Complementary log-log models with activity, city, and year effects would test whether opportunity and access operate as joint gates rather than separate additive causes. On the contraction side, the framework distinguishes within-activity transformation, functional absorption, managed exit, and unmanaged collapse, insisting that contraction should not be treated as the preferred sustainability outcome in stable or growing regions.

The practical payoff is a diagnostic workflow modeled on how restoration ecologists diagnose stalled recovery. Rather than asking which related industry a city should subsidize, the succession-based diagnostic asks why an apparently feasible activity has not established. Is there an economic opportunity at all, or does the city hold the right skills while nobody is buying? Can relevant firms, workers, and technologies reach the city? Can the activity perform locally given suppliers, finance, and permitting? What interactions will the transition create with incumbents, and what sequence of interventions is required? The authors illustrate with a circular construction economy: a city might impose procurement mandates for reused materials before grading standards, deconstruction capacity, and exchange infrastructure exist, causing demand to be met by imports and local entrants to fail, whereas building those establishment conditions first allows early reuse firms to form linkages that procurement then expands.

The framework’s boundary conditions are stated with equal care. Cities are radically open, drawing labor, capital, and knowledge from distant places, so a local absence need not be a functional absence. Political power and distribution matter: a pathway may be feasible and profitable while remaining socially undesirable, and the framework does not settle whose objectives define the target state. Greater internal cycling or linkage density is not automatically sustainable; a more interconnected economy may remain carbon intensive, shift environmental burdens elsewhere, or deepen inequality. Strategic resistance by incumbent firms and coalitions must be coded according to the specific gate it alters, whether suppressing an opening, restricting access to land or finance, or raising entrants’ costs, rather than dismissed as undifferentiated history.

What the authors ultimately offer is a comparative research program rather than a universal recipe. Prior work tracking 938 U.S. urban economies through the Great Recession identified six response archetypes, from stasis to rapid shifts followed by stabilization, suggesting that responses to a common shock form a small set of recognizable pathways. Urban economic succession aims to explain which causal constraints select among those pathways and when they recur, building a library of bounded models linking recurrent configurations to mechanisms, outcomes, and policy levers. For cities racing to decarbonize, the message is sobering and useful in equal measure: the same green technology may require entirely different policy portfolios in different city-regions, and the diagnostic question that matters first is not what to build, but what is actually binding.

Subject of Research: An ecology-informed diagnostic framework for sustainable urban economic transformation

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

Article References: Shutters, S. T., & Applegate, J. M. (2026). Economic succession: an ecology-informed diagnostic framework for sustainable urban transformation. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 8, Article 1953866. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.1953866

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2026.1953866

Keywords: ecological succession, urban economics, sustainable cities, economic complexity, green transition, circular economy, path dependence, urban scaling, economic diversification, complex adaptive systems, decarbonization, urban metabolism