(6 Jan 2020) LEAD IN:
Japan's Toyota Motor Corporation is best known for cars, but at CES in Las Vegas, the company has unveiled an ambitious new venture in urban planning.
Toyota says it will build a futurist new city on land in the shadow of Mount Fuji, and it plans to use the prototype town to test A-I, autonomous vehicles, and new forms of 21st century living.

STORY-LINE:
It's Toyota's vision for the city of the future, and the company says construction will start as soon as next year.
The company is billing the project as the "Woven City", a Hydrogen-powered, hyper connected prototype town that it says will initially house 2,000 people.
At a slick presentation of its plans at the CES in Las Vegas today (6 January 2020), the company said it was already seeking expressions of interest from aspiring residents.
And while Toyota's President and CEO Akio Toyoda admits the proposal is a bit of a departure from the company's bread and butter he says Toyota still very much has the future of cars on its mind.
"Everyone wants to know: when will cars truly drive themselves? When will they know what I'm thinking? When will they fly? And more importantly, when will cars actually transform into giant robot? Now, we might not be working on a Toyota transformer, but we are focussed on the future of connectivity, autonomy, shared mobility, and electrification - or CASE, as we call it," he says.
The "Woven City" would be a "living laboratory" that the company says would serve as a home to full-time residents, as well as researchers.
The city would be fully sustainable, and would be constructed around a a grid-like plan of streets and laneways.
Toyoda says his vision is for a town where commercial and academic researchers could collaborate and experiment.
"Imagine a fully controlled site that would allow researchers, engineers and scientists the opportunity to freely test technologies such as autonomy, mobility as a service, robotics, smart-home connected technology, AI (artificial intelligence), and more, in a real world environment," he says.
Toyota is stressing it's vision is for other companies to also use its new "Woven City" testing site too, which the company says will be built on a 175-acre site it owns at Higashi-Fuji in central Japan.
It's commissioning Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to design the urban form itself.
Ingels says the opportunity to design an entirely new city to test out emerging technologies and to create an enviable living environment is unique.
A key innovation: re-thinking the purpose and layout of city streets.
"So basically today the typical street is a mess, with everything and nothing everywhere," he says.
"So we started by splitting the typical street into three separate forms of mobility. The first type is for faster transportation, and every vehicle is autonomous, with zero emissions, and street trees create the necessary distinction between people and vehicles. The second type will be an urban promenade, shared by pedestrians, and slower personal mobility. And the final type of street will be a linear park, with paths for pedestrians only. So imagine walking from one part of town to the other, moving only through a park."
The "Woven City" will be powered by hydrogen, and buildings will be built mostly of wood to minimise the project's carbon footprint.
Traditional Japanese timber joining techniques will be used in construction.
The rooftops of the city's buildings will be covered in photo-voltaic cells that generate solar power, while underground there'll be a network of tunnels for autonomous vehicles to make deliveries and process waste.

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