The automaker-turned-mobility-company announced last week it wants to build a living, breathing urban laboratory from the ground up in Japan.
If Toyota’s ambition sounds familiar, it’s because the company is not the first to propose building a “real,” breathing city—from scratch—that will also a showcase some of their technology of the future. Disney had that same idea when it built EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) in the ‘60s, and more recently, tech giants Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company), Facebook, and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates have proposed or begun building their own high-tech communities. Even rapper-turned-entrepreneur Akon has aspirations to build a smart city backed by blockchain technology in Senegal.
Toyota’s plan suggests the appetite is growing for tech developers to experiment in “petri dish” environments, says John Jung, founder of the Intelligent Community Forum, a think tank that focuses on the social and economic development of modern cities. “Toyota and these other companies are looking to take advantage of what technology will be able to do for city building,” Jung says.
The upside is that such environments give innovators a blank slate to fast-track the research and development of big ideas without being stalled by all the regulatory hurdles of an existing city. “It would be a chance to collaborate with other business partners and ... scientists and researchers to come work on their own projects [for] however long they please,” Toyoda said.
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