If you heard a car company intended to design a smart city, you would think it would include countless highways with automobiles zipping back and forth—an entire community full of marketing potential for cars. But instead, Toyota’s planned city at the foot of Mount Fuji will focus on the entire experience of residents with green spaces, special lanes for bikes and motorized wheelchairs, and smart technology woven throughout. And the design isn’t just good for humans: Toyota intends to build the city with sustainable wood and strives to populate the city with solely zero-emission, automotive vehicles. The company plans to break ground next year, striving to prove a uptopia balancing humans and technology is possible.
Japanese automotive giant Toyota is planning to create a “smart” city at the foot of Mount Fuji. Ground will be broken on Woven City next year. The 175-acre site is a former Toyota car factory, but only autonomous cars will penetrate the prototype city, which will also be a test-bed for mobility-as-a-service, in-home and on-street robotics, and connected technologies.
Building on early 20th Century ideas of the “Garden City,” Toyota town will feature extensive greenery and pedestrian-friendly plazas. Despite Toyota being a car maker, Woven City will not be car-centric. This is a far cry from the futuristic cities as imagined by automotive companies in the 1940s and 1950s when it was assumed motor cars—often autonomous to boot—would dominate. (“Futurama,” a General-Motors-sponsored exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair featured automated highways and vast suburbs—visions that soon came true, but which many now consider to be dystopian.)
Revealing the company plans on January 6, Toyota Motor Corporation president Akio Toyoda said:
“Building a complete city from the ground up, even on a small scale like this, is a unique opportunity to develop future technologies, including a digital operating system for the city’s infrastructure.”
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