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4.4 Implementation of Society 5.0 – Toyota

Toyota, the automobile producer, planned a project for a ‘’city of the future’’ for 2,000 people, which aims
to create a city to test smart technology, autonomous vehicles and robot-assisted living. The project plans
to be established in the Woven City, at the foothills of Japan’s Mount Fuji. It is a new concept, different
from just a ‘’smart city’’, a living laboratory created to be studied and researched by engineers and
scientists in order to test emerging technologies in a real-life environment. The name of the city, Woven
City, references to the verb weabe (synonim of knit), and it is perfectly represented by the streets that
appear as they were woven, forming an orderly, flexible and strong urban mesh. The project is fully
sustainable, with rooftop solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells. Therefore, the transport vehicles are
planned to be only zero-emissions, autonomous vehicles (Holland, 2020).

The main difference between this project and a regular smart city is that the project does not pretend to
be a smart city, but an experiment that aims to raise the idea of how such a city could be and look like.
Moreover, it measures the ability and capacity of reproducibility of the innovation created by researchers.

Toyota defines the city as „a living laboratory with full-time residents and researchers who will be able to
test and develop technologies in a real environment”, becoming a huge incubator of innovations in
robotics, environmental innovation, artificial intelligence and sustainable mobility, among others (Toyota,
2020).

Source: (Titov, 2019)