Each year the World Architecture Festival awards twelve architectural initiatives that aim to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges.  These awards are solely for future projects in a sub-category known as the WAFX awards.

In the Smart City WAFX category, the 2021 winner is the Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG) for their work with Toyota on the Woven City project in Susuno City, Shizuoka at the foot of Mount Fuji, about two hours away from Tokyo.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda, grandson of the Toyota Founder Kiichiro Toyoda, announced the smart city initiative at the CES in Las Vegas in January, 2020.  The same event also unveiled BIG’s participation in the project.

In February of 2021, the groundbreaking ceremony was held at what will be the Woven City site, which previously was an auto manufacturing plant.

Toyota’s ambition with Woven City is to create a fully automated city that allows the car maker to further evolve their autonomous vehicles.  The 708,000 plus square meter site will be built with data sharing and automation at its heart from the ground up.

Data from sensors installed throughout the community will create a virtual city that allows the vehicles to spatially determine what is happening around them, allowing for safe navigation.  In April of 2021, Toyota’s investment holding company Woven Planet, purchased Lyft Inc’s self-driving unit for $500 million bringing into the fold more autonomous technology and 300 researchers to be integrated into the Woven Planet team.

Vehicles aren’t limited to automobiles as Toyota plans to release autonomous E-pallets; rectangular, transparent and driverless, container-like vehicles that can transport up to 20 passengers around the community and also be repurposed for material and goods transportation.

The entire ecosystem will be run on hydrogen power with Toyota recently announcing a partnership with ENEOS, a Japanese energy company, to work together and fuel the city.

While many architectural and technological hurdles need to be overcome for Woven City to be a success, another challenge could arise in the form of privacy issues surrounding the huge amounts of data that would need to be harvested for the smart city to function.

In May of 2020, Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs abandoned plans to create a 12 acre smart city project along Toronto’s waterfront.

Sidewalk Labs attributed the failure of the project toward the complications brought on by the pandemic however privacy advocates and the public were concerned not only about the amount of personal data the project would harvest but also that a corporation would control the said data.

Blackberry maker Research In Motion co-founder Jim Balsillie called the Toronto smart city project “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues”.

Once public sentiment turned against the project, the politicians lost their appetite for support which critics say was the real reason behind Sidewalk Labs walking away from the project and not the pandemic.

Whether Toyota’s Woven City will be able to wade through the sticky privacy waters in Japan remains to be seen.  Privacy issues haven’t seemed to tamper interest from potential residents and according to Toyota, they have received over 3,000 applications from across the globe for people hoping to be selected to live on site once construction is completed.

From these applications, initially about 360 visiting scientists, families, retirees and Toyota employees will be selected to give feedback on the smart systems as residents, a population that eventually is targeted to be in the thousands.

Further Reading:

Toyota Woven City Official Site

Bjarke Ingels Group Woven City Page