Recently, Toyota released plans to develop an extremely high tech city from scratch called the Woven City at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan starting in 2021 (Poon, 2020). They designed homes to be full of AI assistance to monitor the residents’ health or features of the house. Additionally they will make buildings out of wood to consume less fossil fuels than concrete buildings do in production, and everything will be powered by hydrogen fuel as opposed to fossil fuels. For transportation, there would be autonomous shuttles that also contain elements of retail stores for shopping. The designers envision 3 kinds of roads: those for autonomous vehicles, those for small vehicles, and those for pedestrians. Such types of autonomous cities are being attempted by many tech companies looking to create futuristic communities. The first set of residents of Toyota’s creation are expected to be 2,000 people involved with the company and industry professionals. However, even if the city is to be created, one possible challenge could be populating the city to its natural capacity. When South Korea attempted a futuristic city in Songdo, only ⅓ of the city’s residential goal was met leading to an eerie and lonely feeling for inhabitants. I believe that this kind of city will take decades to develop due to the challenges that designers could face, but could set a precedent for non-tech companies and governments around the world to start incorporating more technological advances into existing cities.
Source:
https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/01/toyota-woven-city-smart-technology-cities-of-the-future/604741/
This post is really interesting to me and just goes to show how advanced some of our technology is that I really had no idea about, but I think it would be really cool to live in a futuristic community like this. I believe that if we can build communities that are futuristic and also less harmful toward the environment then communities like these should be developed all around the world. My one concern with this idea of a completely smart city is the idea of all of your personal information being connected to the internet in some way via your house or any other stuff. While it would be extremely cool to live there, I feel like not too many people will end up being apart of it due to the possible lack of privacy, and the fear of many things being autonomous. If the city does begin to gain followers and run smoothly, then I definitely believe that we should start implementing this kind of technology into other cities around the world as well.