The German Future City competition seeks new procedures to enable engagement of the broader citizenship within urban vision-making processes. To support Dresden´s ‘Open City’ project within the competition, we have created a visual tool and method set that supports the collection of ideas from the citizenship, and their qualification into visionary concepts. For all stages of Dresden´s Future City project, we have schemed distinct visual instruments. The hypothesis for the exploratory work was that the visual display and re-arrangement of concepts paves a way towards future city strategies. The visualisations not only served as means of communication, but formed a set of think tools for systematic ‘Urban Visioneering’. For this end, a logical framework was devised that categorizes ‘opinions’, ‘ideas’, and ‘visions’ by their level of ambition as well as by their potential for implementation as “living labs”. The think tools were tested, validated and applied independently from each other, while conceptual linkages were maintained from the start. Measures span from activities targeting at maximum public participation in ideation games (‘Future Vision Tram’) over tools for identifying public key issues (‘Visionfinder’, ‘Pathfinder’) towards comprehensive strategy-building for the real-world implementation of envisioned futures (‘Vision Builder’). The key challenge was the identification of powerful visionary concepts within a large body of ideas and opinions generated in public events. Another challenge was the mapping of identified visions onto strategic guidelines of the BMBF Ministry of Education and Research, and Dresden´s development roadmap. In regards to scientific approach, the paper is of explorative nature. For the creation of urban future visions, few instruments and methods exist apart form conventional means of urban design, participatory planning, and strategic management. On the one hand, vision-oriented procedures usually lack the involvement of citizen opinions on broad scale. On the other hand, existing participatory methods rarely lead to visionary concepts with a capacity for implementation. Against that background, the systematic process and toolset developed for Dresden allows both broad participation as well as ambitious vision making. It´s visual descriptions and information structures make complex concepts edible, accessible and understandable to experts and non-experts alike. The tool and method kit can be used by any city administration, managers, planners and policy-makers. Application is meaningful in any setting where the following procedures or activities are needed: 1) Easy collection of citizen opinions, 2) Identification of lead ideas with potential visionary impact, 3) Translation of visionary ideas into comprehensive strategies, 4) Mapping of visionary strategies onto political and administrative frameworks.