Inside Toyota’s Woven City: Innovation, connectivity, and the questions no one’s asking

At the base of Mount Fuji in Susono, Shizuoka, Toyota is attempting something few automakers have dared to envision: building an entire city from scratch. Called Woven City, this ambitious project is not just an urban development but a real-world laboratory where technology, mobility, and sustainability will be woven together to test how people might live in the cities of the future. Announced in 2020 and officially breaking ground in 2021, the project has now completed its first phase of construction and is preparing to welcome its initial residents by late 2025. What makes Woven City remarkable is that it is not a prototype on paper—it is a fully functioning, human-centered environment designed to serve as a test course for cutting-edge mobility and smart infrastructure.

Toyota’s motivation for building Woven City stems from its transformation into a mobility company. Instead of simply manufacturing cars, Toyota envisions a world where mobility extends to the movement of people, goods, information, and even energy. Woven City is designed to bring this philosophy to life by enabling innovators to test new technologies in a real-world setting while residents, called Weavers, provide feedback on how those innovations impact daily living. Together with corporate partners, academic researchers, and startups—referred to as Inventors—this collaborative ecosystem will accelerate the development of technologies that could reshape how cities operate.

The construction of Woven City reflects both engineering precision and a bold urban design philosophy. The master plan, developed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, envisions streets and infrastructure woven into a seamless fabric. Unlike traditional cities that evolved over centuries, Woven City is purpose-built from the ground up with three distinct layers of mobility: pedestrian-only walkways, mixed-use streets for bicycles and personal mobility devices, and dedicated routes for fully autonomous vehicles. To keep the city uncluttered and safe, an underground logistics network will handle deliveries, waste removal, and energy distribution. This layered mobility grid is central to the experiment, as it allows Toyota to observe how autonomous vehicles and new forms of personal transportation coexist alongside human activity.

At its core, Woven City is also a sustainability experiment. The entire city is designed to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, supplemented by solar energy. Unlike battery-dependent smart cities, hydrogen fuel cells provide a cleaner, potentially more scalable solution for distributed energy generation—though their long-term economic viability remains debated. Buildings, many of which are constructed using robotic fabrication methods with sustainable wood, are equipped with solar panels and integrated with smart sensors to monitor air quality, energy use, and even individual health. In 2024, Woven City earned Japan’s first LEED for Communities Platinum certification, underscoring its status as a benchmark for environmentally conscious urban planning.

Technology does not stop at infrastructure; it extends into every aspect of daily living for future residents. Smart homes in Woven City are embedded with artificial intelligence and connected devices that adapt to the needs of individuals, whether that means adjusting climate controls, monitoring wellness, or automating household chores. The integration of greenery into architecture ensures that even highly connected spaces remain human-centered and biophilic. For mobility, residents will interact with fleets of autonomous shuttles and delivery robots that blend seamlessly into the multi-layered transport grid. The goal is not only to make transportation safer and more efficient but also to test whether cities can operate without dependence on traditional, privately owned cars.

Another cornerstone of Woven City is the digital twin—a virtual replica of the city where every building, street, and energy system is mirrored in real time. This technology allows researchers to simulate outcomes, test new services, and optimize systems before rolling them out physically. It offers enormous potential, but it also raises questions about who ultimately controls a city’s evolution. If decisions about how a city evolves are increasingly guided by algorithms and simulations, where does human unpredictability fit in? Cities have always thrived on their organic, often chaotic growth—something a digital twin might smooth out to the point of sterility.

The human experience, however, remains central to Toyota’s experiment. At launch, around 100 employees and their families are expected to move in, gradually scaling up to around 2,000 residents. These residents, or Weavers, are not passive occupants but active participants who will test everything from next-generation vending machines to pollen-free indoor environments. Through a network of shared spaces, such as invention hubs and communal courtyards, residents will interact directly with Inventors, providing continuous feedback that helps refine innovations. Yet here too, the model resembles a perpetual prototype: People’s daily lives become data points and their routines test cases, leaving open the question of how natural or comfortable this will truly feel over time.

Beyond the immediate scope of mobility and smart living, Toyota is also using Woven City as a springboard into broader frontiers. Its investment in Interstellar Technologies, a Japanese space startup, points to ambitions that extend mobility beyond Earth itself. In this sense, Woven City is not only about building better urban systems but also about rethinking the very nature of mobility in a future where terrestrial and extraterrestrial boundaries blur.

Yet, the question remains—what does Woven City really mean for the future of humanity? On the one hand, it offers a tantalizing glimpse of what cities could become: cleaner, safer, and more efficient places where mobility is seamless and sustainability is embedded into daily life. It promises to solve many of the urban problems that plague today’s megacities, from traffic congestion to pollution and aging infrastructure. If successful, it could act as a template for cities worldwide, demonstrating how technology and human-centered design can coexist.

But beneath this futuristic promise lies an undercurrent of uncertainty. Woven City is, at its core, a corporate-controlled experiment where residents are both citizens and test subjects. Their daily lives will generate data, and their experiences will feed back into technologies that Toyota and its partners seek to commercialize. The vision is ambitious, but it raises difficult questions: Can a city engineered by a single corporation truly reflect the diverse needs of human societies? Will residents feel empowered, or will they be living inside a perpetual prototype where convenience comes at the cost of autonomy?

In this sense, Woven City is less a blueprint and more a bold trial. It represents both the possibilities and the pitfalls of letting technology dictate how we live. For humanity, it may pave the way toward smarter, greener cities—but it also reminds us that progress must be tempered with caution. The future Toyota is weaving may be transformative, but whether it is one we truly want to inhabit remains an open question.