Just south of Mount Fuji, on a modest 176-acre site once occupied by Toyota’s Higashi-Fuji automotive factory, a groundbreaking urban experiment is underway. Launched in 2024, Phase 1 was completed last year and houses 360 residents, most of them Toyota employees and their families, as well as some researchers and retirees. It will ultimately be home to some 2,000 residents.

The name “Woven City” symbolizes both the city’s interwoven road networks and Toyota’s historical roots in the textile industry, capturing the fusion of mobility, digital infrastructure, and human interaction.

Woven City is neither a typical planned community nor a smart city in the usual sense of the term. It was deliberately launched to as an “urban operating system”—a real-world living laboratory or—designed to learn and refine itself through real-world data and resident feedback.

Kaizen in city form

Woven City can be seen as an extension of Toyota’s pioneering philosophy of continuous improvement or kaizen that sees workers as the source of true innovation. As the city comes to replace the industrial corporation as the fundamental platform for the knowledge age, Woven City empowers residents to actively shape and build their community.

At its core is the premise that residents are not passive users of predesigned systems but active cocreators of emerging ones. Woven City explicitly includes diverse demographic groups such as families, retirees, engineers, and researchers, ensuring feedback reflects a broad range of lived experiences, making the city more relevant and effective as an urban prototype.

To support this cocreation, Toyota built extensive feedback mechanisms into Woven City’s design—traditional ones, like participatory design workshops, behavioral surveys, and resident advisory panels, and sophisticated digital technologies that track behaviors. Activities ranging from strolling through public plazas to residents’ usage of pop-up kiosks provide continuous data, which is used to improve systems and services.

As Toyota moves from Software Defined Vehicles to the broader strategic concept of comprehensive mobility, Woven City provides a prototype of a Software Defined City. Additionally, Woven City extensively employs Internet of Things (or IoT) devices and digital twin technology, enabling urban planners to proactively simulate urban scenarios and optimize systems such as energy, waste, water, and lighting before deploying them in the real world.