Subdivisions within the district are Vanha Munkkiniemi, Kuusisaari, Lehtisaari, Munkkivuori, Niemenmäki and Talinranta.

Characterized by the relatively high proportion of Swedish speakers, around twelve percent, and a socioeconomic structure heavy on upper management and professionals, the district is appreciated as a particularly safe and well-serviced part of the city.

Munkkiniemi is one of many monk-related place names on the south coast of Finland, like Munkkisaari, Munkkala and Munkinmäki.

In the year 1351 the king Magnus IV of Sweden let Padise monastery, close to Tallinn, take over the parishes of Porvoo, Sipoo and Helsinge (Vantaa).

Munksnäs was probably a trading place for the lucrative fishing, and the catches were shipped as far as Tallinn and Stockholm.

On 27 March 1629, Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus gave large areas of land west of Helsinki (Munkkiniemi, Tali, Lauttasaari and Hindersnäs (Meilahti)) to rittmeister Gert Skytte.

[1] Charles XI of Sweden initiated the "Great Reduction" of 1680 in which much of the nobility's lands were transferred to the crown.

General Major Anders Edvard Ramsay was a high-ranked military officer in the Russian army and became noble in 1856.

He hired the architect Carl Ludvig Engel to rebuild the manor house to look like Haga Palace in Stockholm.

In the 1830s an English park was planted around the manor house and the farm buildings were removed away from the sea side.

[1] Despite the high demand for summer house properties outside Helsinki in the end of the 19th century, the Ramsays didn't sell land.

Eliel Saarinen's grandiose plans were presented to the public in the autumn of 1915 in the form of a book and an exhibition with models and drawings.

The plan covered 860 hectares in Munkkiniemi and Haaga that were supposed to be turned into a suburb from being countryside.

Detached houses and rowhouses were planned by Laajalahti Bay and the middle class was placed north of Huopalahti railway station.

The large middle part of the area consisted of rental housing regardless of social status.

Stenius company started to develop the community by arranging transportation, otherwise nobody would move to the area.

[1] Many suburban communities had been founded in Helsinge municipality outside Helsinki during the beginning of the 20th century, e.g. Oulunkylä and Pakila.

For this type of community the term urban district (taajaväkinen yhdyskunta) was made to arrange the administration.

Unusually, the Senate of Finland took the initiative to found Munkkiniemi urban district, not the land owner or the municipality.

The first building project was Munksnäs Pension in 1918 that was supposed to lure well off people to the area, who would then like it and by a property.

During the 1920s many condemned wooden houses from Helsinki were moved to Munkkiniemi, something that didn't exactly correspond to Eliel Saarinen's original plans.

[1] In the 1930s building regulations in Munkkiniemi had to be remade, because the new law didn't allow closed blocks anywhere else than in towns.

5 000 new housing rooms were built, especially around the avenue and by Laajalahti Bay and 150 million marks in building loans were issued in the municipality.

The City of Helsinki was at the same time negotiating to buy the company and refused to give permission to build a water pipe, because this gave them a great bargaining position.

After a dry summer and unsuccessful attempts to find more water sources a building ban was issued in Munkkiniemi in October 1938.

Stenius gave up and sold their stocks to the City of Helsinki that gained large areas of land in Munkkiniemi, Haaga, Leppävaara and Laajalahti.

Huopalahti wanted to get rid of Fredriksberg (Pasila) that was owned by Helsinki but the application was rejected.

In 1936 the state's investigator Yrjö Harvia came with his seven-year-long and a thousand pages long report and suggested the area of Helsinki to be expanded from 2 925 to 21 116 hectares, which included most suburbs.

Huoplahti was strongly against being incorporated with Helsinki, but because of World War II the decision was postponed, which was seen as a victory by some opponents.

In 1944, two weeks after the ceasefire agreement with the Soviet Union, the government decided that Huopalahti, Haaga, Oulunkylä and Kulosaari municipalities, as well as large areas of Helsinge would be incorporated with Helsinki starting from January 1946.