Toyota has turned Woven City into a 176-acre laboratory for testing new tech and ideas. Expect to see them play out in the car lots of the future.

Toyota’s Higashi-Fuji automotive plant once occupied the 176-acre site of Woven City. Now, it’s home to a new kind of facility. Woven City, located just south of Mt Fuji, is more than just a series of car lots. It’s a unique urban experiment.

The Woven City project was launched in 2024. It’s already home to 360 residents, including Toyota employees, their families, researchers, and retirees. Eventually, the automaker anticipates housing around 2,000 people.

What Is Woven City?

Woven City got its name from two sources. First, it serves as a metaphor for the city’s interconnected networks. Woven City is designed to serve as a hub for integrating mobility, infrastructure, and human interactions. However, it also references Toyota’s origins in the textile world.

It would be a mistake to think of Woven City as nothing more than a planned community or a smart city. Instead, Toyota conceptualized it as a complete urban operating system designed to act as a living laboratory for new technologies.

Woven City as Kaizen in Action

Toyota’s philosophy of continuous improvement inspires its automotive designs. The philosophy is known as kaizen, and it has also been applied to the Woven City. Kaizen acknowledges that workers are the source of all true innovation, which is part of why people live on-site.

Eventually, the city will replace Toyota’s industrial corporation in the knowledge age. Woven City’s designers anticipate that it will become the new fundamental platform for all innovation within the company.

Woven City Isn’t Just About Cars

While the primary focus of Woven City is to act as a testing ground for automotive tech, it’s not all about cars. According to the automaker, it’s intended to be a place where people can develop a wide variety of new ideas and products.

At Woven City, the residents are both inventors and willing participants in a variety of real-world studies. Inventors come up with ideas, and then they put them to the test in Woven City. The combination of inventors and industrial personnel living in the city will prime it for innovation.

Part of the reason that Woven City isn’t just about cars is that Toyota is making a move away from conceptualizing itself purely as an automaker and toward becoming a more generalized mobility company, with mobility defined as the movement of people, goods, and information.

Who Lives in Woven City?

There are two groups of people living in Woven City. Inventors develop, test, and validate ideas, while “weavers” collaborate with inventors to test products and share their passion for the expansion of Toyota’s focus on mobility.

Not everyone living in Woven City will be a Toyota employee. Partner startups and individual entrepreneurs who want to work on mobility projects will also send residents to live in Woven City.

So far, the resident list includes partner inventors from the HVAC, food and beverage, and education industries, as well as traditional automotive industry workers and designers.

The eventual plan is to expand the city to 2,000 residents and open it to visitors starting in 2026.