Toyota leads the way with Woven City

The Corona pandemic and climate-change have prompted a rethink of how people move and live, and many global tech giants are looking to create technology-driven but sustainable and people-centred cities.

Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s biggest automobile manufacturer by volume, is eying to be a world leader in smart city technology with an extensive project to build Woven City, a fully-connected, human-centred city at the base of Mt. Fuji.

Toyota’s chief digital officer Hames Kuffner has reinforced the need to create technology that supports ‘happy, healthy’ life.

“Woven City is not meant to be a technology bubble where the technology stays only within Woven City. It’s really meant to be a place where we incubate it, test it, accelerate it, and then export it all over the world,” Kuffner said in a recent interview.

Countries like Japan face a pressing task to address the challenges of mobility and healthy living of the elderly members of the society. In Woven City, autonomous buses will transport people and smart homes with sensors will check the health of their residents.

The question of sustainability stares in the face of societies across the world. The need to meet UN’s sustainable development goals also hovers above governments. 

“If we can build something that has value in a place like Japan and the cities of Japan, I think it can be valuable everywhere,” said Kuffner, a former Google engineer who now serves as CEO of Woven Planet Holdings Inc., a Toyota subsidiary in charge of the project.

Woven City, which is under construction at a 175-acre site in the prefecture of Shizuoka, is said to be a ‘living laboratory’ for self-driving vehicles, delivery robot, small homes and artificial intelligence, according to Toyota.

With its partial opening slated for as early as 2024, the city will initially have roughly 360 residents such as seniors, families with children and inventors and the number is expected to increase to over 2,000 including Toyota employees.

The project allows people with innovative ideas to test new technologies ‘at scale’, get feedback from residents and improve them. Toyota has received over 4,700 applications from companies and individuals from areas including agriculture, healthcare and education. Toyota has been striving to transform itself into a mobility company, putting more focus on software in field of connected, autonomous, shared, and electric vehicles, or CASE.

Toyota plans to have the entire ecosystem in Woven City powered by hydrogen, and has agreed with Japanese energy company Eneos Corp. to work towards realising a hydrogen supply chain.

Tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Toshiba or Cisco are building smart cities in various parts of the world. Smart cities are urban areas based on sustainability, energy efficiency and the use of information technologies. Smart cities also focus on issues concerning urban development, the distribution of infrastructures, energy supply, accessibility and mobility, promoting alternative modes of transport other than cars and, when there is no choice but to use them, they encourage the use of electric vehicles.

Data management and the analysis by artificial intelligences are not only useful for making decisions regarding smart city governance but they are also a way of increasing the safety of smart cities in various aspects such as crime prevention, traffic safety, or controlling diseases and pandemics such as Covid-19. 

However, in any event collecting peoples’ data and using them must be done respecting rights to privacy. Furthermore, despite these advances, smart cities are not impenetrable. Cyberattacks against the city’s control centres that regulate the power, gas and water supplies, against the departments responsible for directing traffic or even against autonomous cars, which depend, to a large extent, on a computer, are the new threats that cities may face when they become ‘smart’.

Kuffner said Woven City would have ‘very well thought-out architectures’ to ensure good privacy and security, adding that trust goes hand-in-hand with transparency.

“Our dreams are big. We have a huge gap between the current reality and our dream,” he said. “But we are climbing the mountain and we have a beautiful Mt. Fuji to inspire us.”