In 2025, a robot city known as the “Laboratory of the Future Society” is about to be born in Japan. Recently, Toyota Motor Corporation announced that its planned “Woven City” project will welcome its first batch of residents in 2025. This plan aims to create the world’s first fully operational smart city, with robots, artificial intelligence, and hydrogen energy at its core, to achieve a deep symbiosis between humans and technology.
This robot city is located at the foot of Mount Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, covering an area of approximately 70 hectares. The original site was an old factory of Toyota. Toyota officially started the construction of Woven City in 2021 and positioned it as a long-term experimental field to test a number of future technologies, including autonomous driving, service robots, smart homes, intelligent transportation, and medical monitoring.
According to the latest official announcement from Toyota, the infrastructure of the first phase of Woven City is about to be completed. It is expected that the first batch of approximately 360 residents and researchers will move in to live and work before the middle of 2025. These early residents will interact with the urban infrastructure and support the continuous optimization of the city through the practical application of data. The ultimate goal is to accommodate over 2,000 permanent residents and researchers.
The concept of Woven City was proposed by Akio Toyoda, the former president of Toyota. He once said, “This is our bold attempt to challenge the future lifestyle of humanity.” In this city, roads are meticulously classified into three types: one is the high-speed passage specifically designed for self-driving cars, another is for pedestrians and slow-moving personal vehicles (such as electric scooters or bicycles), and the third is the ecological passage reserved only for pedestrians and greenery. This multi-level transportation system will provide a new paradigm for the spatial optimization and safe passage of future cities.
The core of urban operation is data. Every building, every vehicle, and even every street lamp will be connected to a network by sensors, collecting real-time information including energy consumption, pedestrian flow, environmental quality, and traffic flow, and processing it in the cloud through AI algorithms to optimize the operational efficiency of the city. For instance, service robots can automatically deliver items based on residents’ daily routines or issue alerts and call for medical staff when an elderly person falls, demonstrating the humanistic care of intelligent living.
Furthermore, Woven City will also extensively utilize hydrogen energy as a clean power source and be equipped with a complete hydrogen storage and energy supply system to support the sustainable operation of the city. Toyota hopes that through this project, it can further verify the practical application capabilities of hydrogen energy in daily life scenarios and promote the global energy transition.
At the living level, every housing unit will be equipped with an intelligent sensor system, which can not only automatically adjust lighting, temperature control, and security, but also monitor the health conditions of residents in real time. For instance, the restroom can detect changes in sugar content in urine to warn of the risk of diabetes. The kitchen stove can recognize the user’s habits to adjust the heat or recommend recipes.
In addition to hardware facilities, Woven City is also committed to creating an open and co-created ecological environment. According to Toyota, the city will open its technology testing platform to the public, welcoming various technology companies, start-ups, and university research teams to conduct experiments and jointly participate in the incubation and testing of the next generation of urban technologies. This means that whether it is autonomous driving systems, medical assistance robots, or energy distribution networks, they may all experience accelerated maturation on this land.
Experts generally believe that Woven City will become a model for global smart city construction, especially having profound demonstration significance in urban digitalization, sustainable development, and human-computer interaction. Shigeru Ishii, a professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo, pointed out: “This is more of a huge and complex operating system than a city.” Its experimental results will influence the construction logic of future world cities.
However, this project also faces many challenges. The complexity of technology integration, data privacy protection, residents’ adaptability, and the stability of intelligent systems all need to be continuously refined and adjusted in actual operation. Furthermore, how Toyota extends the experience from this closed test city to the outside world will also affect its global influence.
Despite this, Toyota’s vision demonstrates a rare forward-thinking approach. At a time when the world is contemplating how to move forward in the “post-urban era”, Woven City offers the world a visual answer: A smart city that is people-oriented, technology-assisted, and driven by green energy will no longer be an unattainable imagination.
It is learned that Toyota has established a subsidiary, Woven by Toyota, which is specifically responsible for urban operations and technology research and development. The company plans to further expand the Woven City model to other countries and regions in the future. It is widely expected that if the pilot is successful, Toyota may replicate this model in more regions, including Southeast Asia and Europe, accelerating the deployment of the global smart city ecosystem.
As the completion date of 2025 approaches, global urban planners, technology companies, and academia are all paying close attention to the latest progress of Woven City. This is not only the beginning of a robot city, but also a cutting-edge preview of the future urban form.
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