Toyota’s Woven City is described as a “living laboratory” where the company will use green energy and AI technologies to build the city of the future. The 175-acre experimental complex has been under construction for three years and is now ready to welcome its first residents, although the first “demonstration tests” won’t begin until 2025. Projects like Woven City have been criticized for their reliance on hydrogen at the expense of investment in other green energy technologies.
The United Nations estimates that by 2050, nearly 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. And while cities are the greenest places for people to live due to their sheer density, they are far from meeting the net-zero emissions goals of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For the past three years, Toyota has been building a “living lab” at its former Higashi-Fuji plant at the foot of Mount Fuji to explore the best technologies for some of its future megacities. Dubbed “Woven City,” the 175-acre urban experiment incorporates the latest technologies—hydrogen energy, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, even robots—and the company recently announced that the city’s first residents are beginning to move in.
Woven City is a place for co-creation. The city combines Toyota’s expertise in hardware and software to stimulate innovation while providing a unique environment for co-creation among inventors, residents and visitors, and significantly accelerates the pace of invention and development.
According to Toyota, the entire project cost about $10.13 billion and will include housing, shops, plazas, and other amenities — basically, everything you need in a functional city. Unlike other silly, billionaire-funded utopian projects, Toyota says Woven City will “accelerate technological and service innovation,” so it will have a purpose beyond simply building a city from scratch. The name is a tribute to the company’s founder, Sakichi Toyoda, who invented the automatic loom back in 1891.
While the first phase of construction is scheduled to be completed this summer, it will be another year before Toyota begins some of its “demonstration tests,” according to IFLScience. These will include remote communications technologies, as well as smart logistics services linked to delivery services. In other words, it will be an urbanism lab that will hopefully lead to ideas that make existing cities safer and greener.
But Woven City is not without its detractors. Some experts argue that Japan’s singular obsession with hydrogen, which sometimes hurts investments like wind and solar power, has been a “complete failure.” One of the main criticisms is directed at Woven City itself, since it uses portable hydrogen tanks to power things inside and outside the home. The Institute for Renewable Energy, a Japanese environmental think tank, argues that hydrogen is best used in heavy industries like aviation and steelmaking, rather than generating electricity for individual homes and vehicles.
Investments in hydrogen would be quite successful if other areas of the green energy transition did not lag behind, but in late 2023, Bloomberg reported that Japan was lagging in these sectors, even going so far as to say that the country was “the country the energy transition forgot.”
