The "Woven City" that Toyota calls is by no means a simple concept of a cool future city. It is actually a "living laboratory" with "people" as the core, specially built to verify the next generation of travel and living technologies. The project is located at the foot of Mount Fuji. It is a crucial step in Toyota's transformation from a traditional car manufacturer to a mobility company. As far as I understand, this ambitious plan uses real life scenarios to test autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, robots and new energy technologies. Its goal is to explore and solve various issues in future society.
How smart cities ensure safe operation of self-driving cars
The key to ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles is to create a physical and digital environment specifically designed for them. In the braided city, the roads have been reshaped and classified, and special highways for autonomous vehicles have been specially designated. This physical separation fundamentally reduces the most difficult uncertainty for autonomous driving systems to deal with, which is the random interaction with human-driven vehicles and pedestrians.
In addition to dedicated roads, another major pillar of safety is vehicle-road collaboration technology. Infrastructure such as vehicles, road lights, and sensors in the city exchange data in real time through high-speed communication networks. This shows that vehicles can "perceive" obstacles beyond sight or changes in traffic conditions, and then reach advanced decisions. Toyota's cooperation with telecom giant NTT is precisely to build this reliable, low-latency communication foundation.
How energy systems in smart cities can achieve sustainable development
The cornerstone of the Woven City is sustainable energy. The city has clearly proposed hydrogen energy as one of its main energy sources. Hydrogen energy is a clean energy source that only produces water when used. It is extremely critical to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality. The city will not only test hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but also plans to build hydrogen refueling stations and stationary fuel cell generators, extending hydrogen energy applications from transportation to building power supply and other fields.
Urban buildings themselves are also part of the energy system. Residential homes will be built with environmentally friendly wood and equipped with solar panels. This design is to maximize the utilization of renewable energy. More forward-looking, the project is testing a peer-to-peer energy trading system based on blockchain. In the future, the excess electricity generated by residents' own solar panels may be sold directly to neighbors, thereby building a decentralized, efficient and flexible community microgrid.
How smart cities solve logistics and “last mile” travel problems
The Weaving City, which adopts a three-dimensional diversion strategy, has completely reconstructed logistics and travel. It has moved the ground logistics channels underground and built an underground logistics network specifically for self-driving truck transportation. This not only eliminates the interference of large freight vehicles on ground pedestrians and traffic, but also significantly improves distribution efficiency. It can achieve 24-hour uninterrupted transportation regardless of the weather.
In terms of "last mile" travel on the ground, the city has provided a diverse set of personal mobility solutions. In addition to dedicated pedestrian lanes, there are also roads for bicycles, electric scooters and other slow-speed vehicles. Residents can flexibly choose these lightweight travel tools according to their needs and smoothly connect short-distance trips from home to public transportation stations or community service centers. This kind of design promotes green travel and makes urban streets safer and more livable.
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How smart city platforms process and utilize the large amounts of data generated
The brain of a smart city is data processing. Toyota and NTT have jointly built a "smart city platform". The core task of this platform is to securely collect massive data from all corners of the city, manage this data, and analyze this data. This data comes from a wide range of sources, including data from vehicle sensors, data from home smart devices, data from public infrastructure, and even data voluntarily shared by residents.
One of the key functions of the platform is to create a "digital twin" of the city, which is to build a digital copy of the city in the virtual world that is completely synchronized with the physical city. Planners can conduct simulation tests in the digital twin model, such as adjusting traffic light timing, planning the layout of new facilities, or simulating emergency evacuation plans, to predict the effects before implementation, thereby optimizing decisions and avoiding waste of resources.
How the design of smart cities affects residents’ daily lives and work
Weaving City is committed to breaking the traditional boundaries between work and life. It has planned open innovation workshops and shared office spaces in the city. These places encourage residents, including Toyota employees, researchers from cooperative companies, and invited entrepreneurs, allowing them to conduct cross-border exchanges and cooperation, and quickly transform inspiration in life into innovative projects.
In order to prevent the alienation of interpersonal relationships that may be caused by technological development, urban design pays special attention to the creation of offline social scenes. At the same time, artificial intelligence is responsible for many repetitive tasks, freeing residents from complicated affairs, allowing them to have more time to engage in creative activities and face-to-face social interactions. This concept of 'technology empowers rather than replaces humanities' is the key to making this project different from many purely technology-oriented smart cities.
How smart city projects collaborate with external companies and researchers
Describing the Woven City as an essentially open innovation ecosystem, Toyota has made it clear that it will invite external start-up companies, entrepreneurs, universities, and research institutions to participate through the accelerator program. Currently, more than a dozen companies from different fields such as energy, communications, food, and education have become partners, such as working with Nissin Foods to explore future food services, and working with educational institutions to develop new learning models.
The advantage of this open cooperation model is that it can carry out cross-industry and cross-technology integrated innovation testing in a real but controllable environment. Enterprises in different fields can verify the feasibility of their products and services in future urban life here, jointly solve complex social issues that are difficult for a single party to deal with, and step up the incubation and popularization of valuable ideas.
The value of a project like Weaving a Famous City lies not only in the verification of technology, but also in providing a paradigm that can be used as a reference for the development of global cities. The issues it raises about humanistic design, data ethics, sustainable ecology, and open collaboration are exactly what all cities moving towards smartness need to think about. In your opinion, what is the pain point in residents’ lives that future smart cities should prioritize solving?
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