If the future had an address, it might very well be Ülemiste City. At first glance, it looks like a sleek business district; shimmering glass buildings, cafés filled with young professionals, electric scooters humming between offices. But step inside its streets and shaded courtyards and it becomes clear that Ülemiste isn’t just another commercial hub. It is a living laboratory for what work, health and community can look like when a district is designed with intention.
Kristjan Mitt, the head of services at Ülemiste City, describes it not as a campus but as an ecosystem. With close to 400 companies, 18.000 daily users and more than 260.000 square meters of developed space, Ülemiste is already the largest business district in the Baltics. Yet the sheer size isn’t what makes it remarkable. It is the philosophy woven into its foundations: people perform better when they feel better.
That philosophy is visible everywhere. The district’s health model, developed over five years with the University of Tartu, has become a blueprint for how workplaces can transform wellbeing. Instead of treating health as an individual responsibility, Ülemiste builds it into the architecture, the routines, the social life and even the commuting habits of its inhabitants.
Walk through Ülemiste on an ordinary day and you’ll find people taking meetings outdoors along a two-kilometer walking-meeting trail, a quiet ribbon of greenery tucked between glass towers. In summer, startup teams work from rooftop terraces; in winter, workers stop by indoor padel courts or the MyFitness club with its pools, volleyball courts and open training zones. Kristjan likes to point out that the campus has become a place where exercise is not a hobby squeezed into the margins of the day but a natural extension of it.
But Ülemiste’s take on wellbeing is not just about movement. It is about community. Nearly 100 events take place here each year, from table tennis competitions to mass cycling challenges led by Estonia’s Tax and Customs Board, whose thousand employees have turned biking into a company-wide ritual. A biannual health conference brings together a few hundred participants to explore new ideas. In May, cafés and restaurants redesign their menus for Health Month, offering lighter dishes and free workshops. The campus feels less like a business district and more like a village that just happens to be incredibly productive.
Even the placement of buildings seems to encourage connection. Outdoor office stations allow people to work with laptops under the trees; courtyards host pop-up yoga sessions; wide paths invite spontaneous conversations between employees of different companies. Ülemiste seems to understand that creativity rarely emerges from isolation. It grows in the spaces where people collide unexpectedly.
“... people perform better when they feel better.”
Then there is the medical district. Ülemiste houses more than 35 health service providers, with a new building opening soon that will host an innovative elderly care center. This might be one of the boldest ideas in the district: placing senior living right in the heart of a high-tech business campus. It challenges the traditional separation between generations and hints at a more humane urban model where the elderly remain part of the rhythm of daily life rather than tucked away on the outskirts.
Despite the strong push for active living, Ülemiste doesn’t pretend that change happens automatically. Engagement varies across the 400 companies. Some businesses allow employees to exercise during working hours; others expect activity to happen after five. Some encourage cycling with free lunches for riders; others still rely heavily on car parking. Kristjan is honest about this: building a culture of health is slow work, shaped by leadership attitudes as much as infrastructure. Yet even modest participation multiplies over time. One team joins the table tennis tournament. Another tries the bike-to-work challenge. Habits spread like stories.
The district’s strategic location accelerates its growth. Standing at the edge of Tallinn Airport and soon next to the Rail Baltica terminal, Ülemiste is becoming one of the most connected business neighborhoods in Northern Europe. Talent can fly in and walk to the office in five minutes. Goods move quickly. Ideas move even faster. That connectivity is one reason Ülemiste already accounts for one-third of Estonia’s ICT exports, an astonishing fact for a district built in just over a decade.
And still, Ülemiste continues to evolve. Residential developments are rising around the campus, signaling a future where people will not only work here but live here, play here, raise families here. Kristjan’s long-term vision is not a business park but a complete urban district where health, sustainability and productivity coexist naturally. A district where the boundary between work and life dissolves not into burnout but into balance.
What makes Ülemiste inspiring is not that it has all the answers, but that it is asking the right questions. What if the design of a place could nudge people to be healthier? What if companies shared responsibility for wellbeing? What if cities embraced movement not as an extracurricular activity but as part of daily infrastructure? And what if we stopped talking about work-life balance and simply built places that support it?
In Ülemiste City, these questions aren’t theoretical. They are lived every day by thousands of people walking meetings, cycling to the office, joining lunchtime workouts, attending health workshops or simply choosing a shady bench outdoors instead of a fluorescent-lit desk.
The world has no shortage of business districts. But Ülemiste has dared to become something else: a district that invests in the human beings inside it. A district that knows wellbeing is not a perk but an advantage. A district that has chosen, very deliberately, to move.
Kristjan Mitt head of services @ Ülemiste City