Tucked away in the shadow of Mount Fuji about 70 miles southwest of Tokyo is Woven City. No, this is not a community made from fibers, but a living company town where Toyota and its partners are assembling a range of technologies and testing them on the residents. Woven City was initially announced at CES in 2020 on the eve of a global pandemic and phase one was completed five years later. Last week, Toyota flew us across the Pacific to find out just what they were stitching up in Woven City. The name of this new community is both a callback to the company’s origins as the Toyoda Automatic Loomworks and reference to what the automaker is trying to do. The place is multiple things at once, a town, a technological and psychographic proving ground, and an incubator for new ideas. One of the themes of Woven City is “kakezan,” a Japanese word meaning multiplication. All aspects of the city are being woven together into an ecosystem for what communities of the future might look like, attempting to multiply and create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The big unanswered question at this point is whether that whole will be a bold vision of what future safer, more convenient communities could become; a dystopian nightmare that Alex Karp could only dream of; or just Akio’s folly. Let’s take a look at what Woven City looks like. What is Woven City? Woven City sits on the site of the former Toyota Motor East Japan Higashi-Fuji factory. Between 1967 and its closing in 2020, the plant produced more than 7.5 million vehicles including the tiny Sports 800 sports car, Corollas and the Century luxury sedan. Of the original factory buildings, only the stamping plant survives which