Japan: Toyota launches “Woven City”, its connected city
Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda and Danish architect Bjarke Ingel announce the creation of the “Woven City” in Las Vegas on January 6.
AFP - ROBYN BECK
Text by: Dominique Desaunay Follow
3 min
In Japan, Toyota kicked off its program to develop a fully connected city on Tuesday, February 23.
Called the "Woven City", that is to say the woven city, this experimental district is developed at the foot of the famous Mount Fuji.
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Toyota officials organized an
inauguration ceremony
on the 175-hectare site reserved for the construction of the future city where one of its factories was once located.
The “
Woven City
”, that is to say the
Japanese “
woven city
” will be inhabited first by 360 permanent residents, then by 2,000 when the district expands.
It will welcome the researchers and employees of the group who will thus become the experimenters and the consenting guinea pigs.
The accommodations will be made of sustainable wood using traditional Japanese technique.
Three categories of streets will allow city dwellers to wander.
Those intended for pedestrians will bathe in greenery.
Paths will allow only scooters and bicycles to move.
The roads are reserved for exclusively autonomous and non-polluting vehicles.
Environmental sensors, houses, home automation, high-speed communications between neighbors and electronic surveillance, all the city's systems will be interconnected using 5G networks.
Connected cities projects are multiplying
Connected city projects are multiplying around the world.
The most advanced achievements are currently found in North America and Asia, particularly China.
Each region of the world is developing its own vision of smart and connected cities that combine energy transition and the quality of life of their inhabitants.
“
Smart city
is above all a connected city that will bring a new use case to fellow citizens, making it possible to improve their urban mobility and their energy consumption,”
specifies Hatem Oueslati, co-founder of the company IoTerop, specialist in remote management of connected objects deployed in Smart Cities.
For example, there are very interesting use cases that are being deployed
in the United States
where we are going to set up microparticle sensors, pollution sensors connected by GPS that will make it possible to measure pollutants and to inform about daily air quality.
If we can save the electricity that is consumed by public lighting and by public buildings, if we can avoid wasting water when it reaches homes, if we can build networks, this type of connected solution will improve the quality of life in cities.
"
IT security in question
The biggest weakness of ultra-connected cities is the IT security of their systems - what will happen when our future megalopolises fall victim to ransomware?
The millions of devices connected to each other to automatically manage critical infrastructures such as the distribution of electricity, gas or transport traffic, will inevitably attract the greed of hackers.
Currently, 57% of these devices, estimated at 22 billion worldwide, have little or no protection against attacks.
A glaring lack of security that risks plunging the inhabitants of Smart Cities into a cyber nightmare.
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