China's urban expansion, food security, and energy transition are in a critical situation. One solution is to tap into the green production potential of the built urban environment and explore new ways to save land space and alleviate ecological pressure through food and solar energy production. This paper differs from previous ecological compensation studies, which mostly focus on key ecological functional areas or fiscal compensation mechanisms, in that it innovatively establishes an ecological compensation mechanism within the urban space. In this paper, we propose the "green productive area" of cities as a way to measure the ecological carrying capacity improvement potential of cities from the perspective of urban ecology, and it is based on converting the green resource income of cities into the ecological footprint area they could save under the same conditions. First, a typological approach was used to establish a compensation strategy for green production. Second, a spatial inventory was taken of all elements of the built environment and an analysis of their green production potential was carried out. Finally, it was necessary to establish a unified accounting standard for the ecological land saving benefits of different green production options, which could be converted into green productive land area indicators. In the case of Xuefu Street in Nankai District, Tianjin, the available rooftops and idle land were used for green production, which supplemented the ecological carrying capacity provided by the natural land occupied by 12% of the buildings in the district.