Visioning exercises in urban planning are critical participatory instruments for crafting desired future target states, providing direction for urban transformations. In order to address urbanization trends and capture sustainability challenges of cities, more systemic visioning exercises are required. However, existing studies show that today’s urban planning visions are not grounded in systemic thinking, which leads to urban-hinterland dependencies being neglected and introduces future visions without accounting for complex causes and dispersed effects. In contrast, research strands using the urban metabolism metaphor have strong interdisciplinary and systemic thinking roots and thus provide a good basis to enhance current sustainability visioning practices. Using a full-text, multivariate statistical analysis and a bibliometric review of peer-reviewed publications on sustainable urban metabolism, we investigated approaches to urban metabolism, the kind of knowledge they produce and their compatibility with principles of sustainability. Here we present findings that highlight innovative participatory approaches, from both the Global South and Global North, with solution orientation and future perspectives that include a variety of system understandings. We conclude with concrete recommendations for adapting participatory urban visioning exercises through methodical enhancements that may strengthen the link between systemic sustainability visions and transformative practices