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Green transformation has become the epoch-making needs of Chinese cities to break through the bottleneck of development. Drawing lessons from the urban development experiences of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces in China, this paper provides a practical reference for the urban green transformation in Northeast China. According to the theory of urban metabolism, the paper systematically develops a measurable framework of urban green transformation that covers social, economic and environmental dimensions, and uses a super hybrid model with a window analysis to estimate the dynamic efficiency of urban green transformation. The results present opposite trends between Southeast and Northeast cities in China. Afterwards, the generalized method of moments is used to analyze the impacts of spatial agglomeration and science and education supports on the efficiency of urban green transformation. By contrast, a self-weakening trend of urban green transformation occurs in Northeast China, where the urban size is too small to optimize the industry layout by means of urban value chain, and the return on the investment in science and education is not significant enough, which leads to the lack of impetus for a continuous urban transformation. Therefore, the urban development strategy in Northeast China should center on the urban value chain, and then promote urbanization and industrial restructuring and integration, improving the talent adsorption effect, as well as achieving urban complementary advantages and a differential development. • The coexistence of low speed and poor quality is the main situation of current urbanization in Northeast China. • The Matthew effect of sustained self-weakening in the Northeast is significant. • City scale and brain drain become the fetters of the development in Northeast China. • The key to solve the problem in Northeast China lies in reintegrating the city value chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]