Squint Opera

The planned urban living experiment will be erected at the foothills of Mount Fuji Mere months ago, the Alphabet-backed Sidewalk Labs laid claim to developing the most ?innovative district in the entire world,? with its big plans for turning Toronto?s waterfront into an urban laboratory. It?s far from the only technology company clamoring to imagine the future of the city, and based on new plans from Toyota and Bjarke Ingels Group, it?s perhaps no longer the most ambitious.
At CES 2020, the auto company and architecture firm showed off plans for Toyota Woven City, a smart city that will sit at the foothills of Mount Fuji in Japan. The city will be designed as a city-scale laboratory where Toyota can test everything from autonomous vehicles to hydrogen-powered infrastructure to human-robot cohabitation, all the while humans are living, working, and going about their (semi) normal business. ?We have decided to build a prototype town of the future where people live, work, play and participate in a living laboratory,? said Akio Toyoda, CEO of the Toyota Motor Corporation. ?Imagine a smart city that would allow researchers, engineers and scientists the opportunity to freely test technology such as autonomy, mobility as a service, personal mobility, robotics, smart home connected technology, AI and more, in a real-world environment.?

Bjarke Ingels Group

Bjarke Ingels Group

We can imagine, and it sounds like it has...