Estonia’s Hundipea Releases Free Neighbourhood Playbook
A new phase of urban regeneration is taking shape in Tallinn, where a former industrial port area is being reimagined as a vibrant, mixed-use neighbourhood designed around people rather than infrastructure alone. Once defined by its closed and industrial character, the area is now evolving into a community-oriented district that integrates housing, workspaces, public areas, and cultural life.
At the center of this transformation in Estonia is the Hundipea project, an ambitious long-term development reshaping urban regeneration in Estonia. The project seeks to balance economic feasibility with social and environmental responsibility, setting a new benchmark for sustainable development in Estonia. Rather than treating urban development in Estonia purely as a technical or financial exercise, the initiative emphasizes the importance of relationships, shared identity, and long-term resilience. To support this transformative vision in Estonia—and to guide similar initiatives across Northern Europe—the project team has released the Hundipea Neighbourhood Playbook, a powerful free e-book designed to serve as a practical and inspirational guide for building sustainable communities in Estonia and beyond.
A Practical Guide for Building Better Neighbourhoods
The Hundipea Neighbourhood Playbook offers a structured framework for shaping lively, adaptable, and inclusive neighbourhoods. It distills global urban best practices into 18 actionable strategies that address both the physical and social dimensions of development. Rather than focusing solely on architectural design or engineering efficiency, the playbook highlights empathy, creativity, and long-term thinking as essential components of successful urban planning.
The strategies are designed to be flexible and transferable. While rooted in the specific context of Tallinn and Northern Europe, the principles can be adapted to a wide range of cities facing similar redevelopment challenges. By translating complex planning concepts into clear and accessible language, the playbook aims to bridge the gap between professional planning documents and the everyday experiences of residents.
International Expertise Behind the Initiative
The playbook is co-authored by Christian Pagh and Mattias Malk, two urban thinkers with strong international backgrounds. Christian Pagh, a Copenhagen-based urban strategist and former director of the Oslo Architecture Triennale, brings extensive experience in cultural and architectural discourse. His work has long emphasized the role of culture and community in shaping meaningful cities.
Mattias Malk, an Estonian urbanist and researcher working between Munich and Tallinn, contributes both local insight and international perspective. Together, the authors combine Scandinavian approaches to participatory urbanism with practical knowledge of large-scale development processes. Their collaboration ensures that the playbook balances visionary thinking with actionable guidance.
According to Pagh, contemporary urban development often becomes overly technical, prioritizing metrics, infrastructure, and short-term returns while overlooking the cultural and social life that enables neighbourhoods to thrive. The playbook, he explains, seeks to create a shared language that integrates empathy and long-term social value into planning processes. The goal is not only to construct buildings but to cultivate relationships and lasting community bonds.
Leadership Emphasizing Future-Proof Design
Markus Hääl, CEO of Hundipea, highlights the importance of future-proofing urban design in a rapidly changing world. He argues that integrating social infrastructure, flexible design principles, and inclusive thinking early in the development process helps mitigate economic volatility and long-term risks.
Urban development projects are often guided primarily by financial models and spreadsheets. While these tools are essential, Hääl emphasizes the need for complementary frameworks that account for human experience and adaptability. The playbook serves as a document that can stand alongside financial planning materials, enriching them with social and environmental considerations.
By embedding social infrastructure—such as community spaces, local services, and shared amenities—into the early stages of planning, developers can create neighbourhoods that remain resilient over time. Flexibility in design ensures that buildings and public spaces can evolve alongside changing demographics, technologies, and economic conditions.
Bridging Development and Lived Experience
One of the playbook’s central ambitions is to close the gap between technical development documentation and the lived urban experience. Traditional planning documents often focus on zoning, density calculations, and regulatory compliance. While these elements are necessary, they rarely capture the qualities that make a neighbourhood feel welcoming and alive.
The Hundipea Neighbourhood Playbook organizes its framework around themes such as social infrastructure, meaningful streets, abundant nature, and placemaking. Each theme is supported by practical strategies that encourage developers and planners to think beyond physical construction.
Meaningful streets, for example, are not simply transport corridors but social spaces where daily life unfolds. Abundant nature is not treated as decorative landscaping but as an essential component of well-being, climate resilience, and biodiversity. Placemaking is framed as an ongoing process of cultivating identity and a sense of belonging, rather than a one-time design intervention.
By addressing these dimensions, the playbook positions neighbourhood development as a holistic endeavor that integrates physical, social, cultural, and environmental factors.
The Growing Role of Neighbourhood Playbooks
In Estonia, neighbourhood playbooks remain a relatively new concept. However, in several Scandinavian countries, such frameworks have become key coordination tools for large-scale urban development. They help align multiple stakeholders—residents, municipalities, developers, investors, and designers—around shared goals and values.
Mattias Malk notes that internationally, especially in Nordic contexts, neighbourhood playbooks have proven effective in creating clarity and collaboration among diverse actors. By articulating common principles and expectations, they reduce misunderstandings and encourage long-term cooperation.
The Hundipea initiative seeks to introduce and normalize this approach within the Estonian context. By offering the e-book free of charge, the project team aims to encourage experimentation and knowledge sharing across the region and beyond. The open-access format reflects the project’s collaborative ethos and commitment to collective learning.
Mutualism as a Core Principle
At the heart of the playbook lies the concept of local mutualism. This model of neighbourhood-making envisions communities as interconnected ecosystems where people, spaces, and functions reinforce one another. Rather than operating in isolation, residential, commercial, cultural, and civic elements are designed to support shared prosperity.
Local mutualism encourages collaboration among residents, developers, municipalities, and investors. It recognizes that long-term value emerges when stakeholders see themselves as partners in a shared environment. By fostering reciprocal relationships—between businesses and local customers, between public spaces and private developments, and between nature and built form—the neighbourhood becomes more resilient and adaptive.
This approach shifts the focus from short-term gains to sustainable growth. It prioritizes community well-being and shared identity as drivers of economic vitality. In doing so, it redefines urban development as a collective project rather than a purely transactional process.
Inspiring Broader Change
Although rooted in a specific redevelopment site in Tallinn, the Hundipea Neighbourhood Playbook aspires to have a broader impact. Its 18 strategies are intended to inspire planners, architects, policymakers, and community leaders across Northern Europe and other regions facing similar post-industrial transitions.
By combining practical tools with a human-centered philosophy, the playbook demonstrates how urban regeneration can move beyond technical compliance toward meaningful place-making. It offers a reminder that cities are not just systems of infrastructure but living environments shaped by relationships, creativity, and shared values.
As Tallinn’s former port area transforms into a new urban district, the Hundipea project stands as both a local experiment and an international case study. Through its freely available playbook, it invites others to rethink how neighbourhoods are imagined, planned, and sustained for generations to come.
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