JPMorgan Chase’s new multibillion-dollar New York headquarters at 270 Park Avenue rises nearly 1,400 feet and occupies an entire city block. It’s organized around a large public plaza with restaurants, retail outlets, and green space. The new headquarters of Pfizer and of BlackRock in Hudson Yards—two sculptural towers—sit atop a dense mix of transit, retail, and public space. One Vanderbilt, another supertall multibillion-dollar tower, is connected to Grand Central Terminal and creates a vertical neighborhood of restaurants, lounges, terraces, and meeting suites. Across the Atlantic, Google, Meta, and Universal Music have turned former rail yards near King’s Cross in London into a thriving hub for technology, media, and creative firms.

At the very moment when corporate headquarters were expected to fade away, they are being reinvented—at extraordinary scale and with unprecedented investment—as a new kind of urban campus, woven into the fabric of a city and drawing on the energy of urban life. We call this new model for corporate location the knowledge campus. It has more in common with a university campus than with a traditional office tower. It supports the full rhythm of daily life—work, meetings, learning, socializing, and movement—within a single, highly connected place. And because these campuses are often connected to major transportation hubs, they improve workers’ productivity and overall life satisfaction by reducing commuting time—a notorious drain on both quality of life and workplace performance.

What’s more, the shift to knowledge campuses is not limited to the world’s superstar cities. Variations are appearing in cities of all sizes, as well as in suburbs and even rural areas, as places move away from single-purpose office districts and residential-only development toward more dynamic environments that better integrate work, daily life, and connection.

Drawing on a detailed survey of professional knowledge workers and our analysis of major downtown business districts in 13 global cities, in this article we explain how and why place has become a key factor in talent attraction and workplace productivity. We then outline four elements of this new model, using two of Tokyo’s leading districts as a starting point. Finally, we lay out the core principles that business leaders can use to think more deliberately about location—not as a real estate cost or as a marker of status but as a central element of strategy and a driver of competitive advantage.