BIG has drawn up the masterplan for the “Toyota Woven City”, which will transform a 175-acre former factory site in the city of Susono in Shizuoka into a new smart city that will be fully “dedicated to the advancement of all aspects of mobility”. Bjarke Ingels and Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda presented the prototype town at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday.
Currently scheduled to break ground in early 2021, the multi-phase project features a flexible network of streets dedicated to various speeds of mobility, which allows for safer, pedestrian-friendly connections, BIG says. It will also incorporate solar energy, geothermal energy, and hydrogen fuel cell technology. Plus, the city's hidden infrastructure will include a goods delivery network called the “matternet”.
Woven City splits the typical road into three street types. The first is a street optimized for faster automated vehicles, with logistical traffic underneath.
The second is a recreational promenade for more personal micro forms of mobility, like bicycles, scooters, and more. Residents can meander at slower speeds with increasing amounts of nature and space.
The third type is a linear park just for pedestrians, which offers a trail surrounded by flora and fauna that's ideal for leisurely strolls in a more natural environment.
These three street components are woven into 3x3 city blocks, with each block framing a courtyard that is accessible via the promenade or linear park.
Mass timber construction will be used for the buildings of Woven City, and a mix of housing, retail, and business will be built primarily of carbon-sequestering wood with PV panels installed on the roofs. Toyota's R&D spaces will feature robotic construction, 3D-printing and mobility labs, and flexibly designed offices will comprise workstations, lounges, and indoor gardens.
Homes will use sensor-based AI technology to perform tasks like automatic grocery deliveries or trash disposal. And residents will get to test new technologies like in-home robotics to help with everyday living.
“As a replicable framework, the Woven City can serve both as a prototype for future cities and as a retrofit to current cities,” Bjarke Ingels said in a statement. “By simply ‘reprogramming’ existing streets, we can begin to reset the balance between people, mobility, and nature.”
If all goes smoothly, Toyota Woven City will be BIG's first project in Japan. Toyota announced plans to populate the city starting with 2,000 people and will eventually add more as it expands. The company added that their employees and their families, retired couples, retailers, visiting scientists, and industry partners will have the opportunity to move into Woven City.
Check out diagrams and the project in action in the video below.
17 Comments
there's something elegant and very much related to contemporary japanese architecture in this. i'm impressed - this is more atmospheric and charming than many previous BIG projects. He is growing up :)
You guys? I'm...I'm starting to think that 20 years ago we were all jerks and Per was right.
i never understood what he said. can someone be right who is incomprehensible?
Per was a curious fellow who thought the future would be filled with 3d structures made from slices of a solid object cut in 2 directions. The idea was always fine, the problem was that per didnt want to do the work to make it viable, and only answered questions with very energetic attacks that were strangely charming. The structure BIG is using here is not that system exactly. It is not such a leap here and I have seen similar structures in Japan. The country still uses timber frame construction in everyday construction (not 2x4) and it is now just a matter of time before LVL and similar tech is made part of the building code. When that happens I expect a lot of construction companies will start building like this as a normal way of working. It makes so much sense for Japan.
corporate campuses are so sexy
@donna, this is the architecture grad school at Keio, designed by prof Yasushi Ikeda in 2000. He was project architect for the campus, working with Fumihiko Maki, and when he became a prof a few years later the campus asked him to build with wood instead of concrete and steel.
He made a graduate student mini-campus inside the campus with 4 timber buildings, using glu-lam rather than LVL, but the approach is similar. The cool thing about these buildings is that instead of making one large building he made several small ones in the middle of the forest. Each studio/lab is contained in a single building. It's a fantastic place to study. I like that student go outside when they visit each others studios. BBQs on the front porch are also super cool. I can't think of anything comparable that I have seen as a place of education.
Japan's "mundane" architecture has some real gems.
I would only add the experiences of being able to get food yourself within the fabric of the city. Not just deliver. for these reasons. it is a big part of enjoying the hum of the city and "get out" all together. in a shared humanity. I lived in Tokyo for two years and enjoyed living between two parks and loved my neighborhood Yoyogi Coen.. Coen means garden.. Every neighborhood in Tokyo had a little "Ginza" or market street on the way to the subway and there would be open air stalls where you could fo some of your food shopping.. sometimes traditional food, sembi, or noodles and sometimes other stores, there would be also stands and kiosks near the subway yakitori or mochi, nice smells On the platform of the trains were udon noodle soup counter to enjoy especially in the cold dry winter. Tokyo has this enjoyable mix of cosmopolitan and simple life of gathering your food as you move about the city.... :)
+++
One of the really bad things happening in Japan (like pretty much everywhere else) is corporatization that is destroying the very fabric of community. Small shops and pedestrian shopping avenues are dying thanks to massive discount stores that carry everything.
This is the tech version of that with automatic grocery delivery where you don’t even get to go the market and pick out your own food. WTF are the pedestrian walks and parks for if you never have to leave your pad? Human interaction not required or desired, just corporate service. That’s what they are providing “enhanced mobility” for.
FAIL
My partner asked the other day about Amazon grocery delivery since it was "free" and came from whole foods. I was vehemently against it.
Nothing is free. When something is free (like delivery) the associated costs are built into the product. Or YOU are the product and your dataset is sold for profit. Likely both. aside from the fact that ravenous giant monopolistic corporations are the very antithesis of 'free'dom.
it is good for people who are not as mobile. lots of people aging in place would make that kind of delivery service a great thing. Convenience stores are doing that already in Japan (the food at japanese convenience stores is not amazing but is not all junk). As for the large shops killing the small ones, yes that has happened in Japan to varying degrees. The pattern is not altogether black and white negative/positive however. I'm in Toronto right now and buying food day to day, and find it easy enough to live without a car at all. The thing I do notice is that groceries are sized for the car, with huge cereal boxes and bags of milk and all the rest of it. That is very annoying since I don't want to buy in bulk. Bjarke's plan with Toyota works in Japan because it is possible to live a simpler life already. To expand it to other countries requires a rethinking of how people live, and adapting to that. IF everyone is buying in bulk then maybe the delivery of food is the most reasonable thing of all...
Japan doesn't need Bjarke for that, and I am of the opinion that his participation will be a net loss for the possibilities of any project in Japan.
As someone working for decades to reduce the size of motorized vehicles for near trips, I’m pleased to see Toyota doing this. When I started developing my Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (now GEM owned by Polaris), the major problem was having to many larger cars / SUVs on the street, which made people driving my vehicle feel less safe. Now with Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) coming online, users can switch vehicles / modes very quickly, should everything be well positioned. In 1992 my partners and I began to work with Disney Celebration, later Playa Vista and other large developments. But the local mobility elements where always an afterthought. Just as the automobile created the suburbs, new mobility paradigms offer to enable new urban forms again - and now better ones. This is the right thing to do, to help Americans even substantially reduce our 270 million car fleet. And while I applaud this project, it’s interesting to see Toyota’s most compelling new mobility vehicle (proposed some years ago) being left out of this design. I get a sense neither Toyota or BIG have actually explored what new mobility solutions are actually possible in this development all that deeply. I am scratching my head a bit :)
I would very much like to see a large city institute PRTs.
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