Oh What a Feeling, Says Toyota as It Opens Its Very Own Smart City
24th February 2021
Toyota on Tuesday broke ground on “Woven City”, a smart city project in Japan that doesn’t permit private cars and where your robot might stock your fridge.
The master-planned community, named as a reminder of Toyota’s origins as a maker of looms, sits on 700,000 square meters of retired manufacturing plant at the base of Mount Fuji. The repurposed plant is marketed as a “living laboratory” for mobility-related technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, smart homes, and sustainability. The city’s design includes energy-efficient wooden buildings partly made by robots, plus power from solar energy, geothermal energy, and hydrogen fuel cells in a nod to Japan’s carbon-neutrality ambitions.
Woven City features three sets of “interwoven” streets to form a repeatable grid of nine blocks, each framing a local park or courtyard. The design attempts to remove the typical transport hierarchy experienced in city traffic by allotting individual streets to automated driving, pedestrians and personal mobility devices.