Toyota has built a fully functioning Japanese city to use as a laboratory

Woven City is a groundbreaking urban experiment located on a 176-acre site in Japan, launched by Toyota in 2024, with the goal of creating a sustainable and innovative community. The city is designed to be a real-world living laboratory, where residents can provide feedback and help refine the city's systems and services. Woven City is home to 360 residents, including Toyota employees, researchers, and retirees, and will eventually house around 2,000 people. The city's design is centered around the concept of continuous improvement, or kaizen, which is a core part of Toyota's philosophy. Woven City includes diverse demographic groups to ensure that feedback reflects a broad range of lived experiences, making the city more relevant and effective as an urban prototype. The city features extensive feedback mechanisms, including participatory design workshops, behavioral surveys, and resident advisory panels, as well as sophisticated digital technologies that track behaviors. Woven City is a prototype of a Software Defined City, employing Internet of Things devices and digital twin technology to simulate urban scenarios and optimize systems. The city's infrastructure is designed to support testing and innovation, with features such as autonomous vehicle testing grounds and underground tunnels for delivery and waste management. Woven City's approach can be distilled into three fundamental principles: start small, iterate fast, validate ideas through limited real-world trials, and engage residents as active cocreators. The city's approach offers useful insights for communities of all shapes and sizes, from new cities to existing downtowns and suburbs, and demonstrates a smarter path to urban development by starting small, involving residents, and staying flexible.