Toyota To Build Prototype City in Japan
Toyota's Woven City prototype city in Japan is one of the most ambitious urban experiments ever announced. In collaboration with the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Toyota revealed plans to build this 175-acre living laboratory at the base of Mt. Fuji, designed to test and develop future technologies at a full urban scale.
What Is Toyota's Woven City?
Woven City is not a concept on paper. It is a real settlement where residents, researchers, and commercial partners will live and work while participating in large-scale technology trials. Toyota's vision is to create a sustainable, connected urban environment that functions as a testbed for everything from autonomous vehicles to artificial intelligence-assisted home systems.
Urban Design and Road Network
BIG carefully planned the urban layout to include a three-tier road network separating fully autonomous vehicles, personal mobility devices such as e-bikes and scooters, and pedestrians. Each tier is designed to allow parallel testing without conflict. This infrastructure makes Woven City one of the most advanced autonomous vehicle testing grounds in the world.
The city will also explore alternative-powered transport infrastructure, including hydrogen fuel cells, and aims to become fully carbon-neutral through the use of locally sourced timber construction, in keeping with Japanese architectural tradition.
What Will Be Tested?
The Woven City experiment covers a broad range of technologies: AI-assisted home appliances, robotic delivery systems, smart energy grids, mobility-as-a-service solutions, and health monitoring. Toyota positions it as the most comprehensive urban experiment ever undertaken by an automaker, with the scale to generate meaningful data over time.
What makes it particularly compelling is its replicability. The urban model is designed to be transferable, meaning lessons learned at the base of Mt. Fuji could inform city planning globally. This positions Toyota not just as a car company but as a shaper of 21st-century urban life.
Why This Matters for the Future of Mobility
Woven City sits at the intersection of urban planning, clean energy, and autonomous mobility. It is the kind of experiment that could validate or challenge the assumptions behind projects like the XPENG X2 eVTOL flying car and autonomous passenger drones such as the Ehang AAV, both of which represent the next generation of urban transport currently available through TheArsenale's aero collection.
For anyone interested in what cities of the future look like in practice, Woven City is the clearest answer yet to emerge from the automotive world. It is an invitation to rethink how people move, live, and interact at a city scale, powered by the same curiosity that drives personal aviation and electric mobility forward.
Explore the full range of future-focused vehicles and personal mobility technology at TheArsenale Tech collection.
