The journal Nature Cities has published the article “The role of tech workers in ethnicity- and class-based urban segregation” by Janis Zālīte, Kadi Kalm, Kadri Leetmaa, and Tiit Tammaru (https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00420-4).
The article is the result of collaboration between two Estonian centres of excellence in research: the Centre of Excellence in Well-Being Sciences (EstWell) and the Centre of Excellence in Energy Efficiency (ENER). The development of data infrastructure enabling detailed register-based analyses of the entire Estonian population has taken place over more than 20 years. Since 2016, this work has been carried out within the Estonian Research Infrastructure Roadmap project “Information Technology Mobility Observatory” (IMO and IMO2.0), in close cooperation with Statistics Estonia and with support from the Estonian Research Council.
The study contributes to understanding how residential segregation is being reshaped in the digital age. It examines the residential patterns of Estonian- and Russian-speaking IT workers in Tallinn, with a focus on managers and professionals. This group represents a higher-income segment with greater flexibility in residential choice. While ethnic and socio-economic segregation often overlap in urban settings, the findings show that minority IT managers and professionals are more likely to reside in similar neighbourhoods as their occupational peers, rather than in less affluent areas with co-ethnics. At the same time, this process is associated with increasing isolation of other minority groups, who tend to remain concentrated in neighbourhoods with lower status and more affordable housing. Many cities around the world face similar dynamics as the share of IT workers continues to grow. Understanding the residential choices of highly skilled IT professionals helps shed light on how the socio-spatial structure of cities is being reconfigured in the future.
