Urban scholars are looking at ES theory and methods in the search for concepts, methods and applicable tools to support urban planning towards sustainable urban development. However, most urban ES research has been based on “green” aspects of cities, which only partly reflect the urban ES potential existing in urban environments. ES are the result of complex, non-linear interactions between natural, social, individual and built capital. Production and consumption, demand and supply of ES find their vortex of interactions in the urban environment, where their reciprocal linkages are spatiotemporally explicit and determined by built and social capital. While such complex interactions existing in the urban ecosystem make the future of cities mostly unpredictable, therefore challenging scientific approaches, such an urban future can be invented and implemented through urban planning measures (Batty 2018). Urban ES research requires to heavily include aspects of built and social capital, for what theoretical and methodological/operational approaches that consider cities as socio-ecological systems are yet to be developed. To advance in the framing of the ES science to be applied and useful in urban planning, theoretical as well as methodological advances are needed