What Smart Cities REALLY Want…

Saudi Arabia's NEOM smart city project has gotten a lot of attention lately, but Japan has a handful of smart cities in development that are every bit as innovative and weird and... maybe problematic? Especially a project called The Woven City by Toyota. Let's take a look at them.

Here's Knowing Better's video on Company Towns, it's worth a watch:

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
3:36 - SSTs
4:36 - Akio Toyoda
5:43 - Woven City
6:49 - Hydrogen Fuel Cells
7:27 - Health Monitoring
10:00 - Progress and Funding
13:20 - Sponsor - Brilliant

[lunarpathwaygames]

"16 tons, and whaddya get? Another day older and a-deeper in debt." Company towns absolutely need a constant and continuous jaundiced eye on them, because when left to their own devices and governance, Tennessee Ernie Ford's song about the debt-slavery comes true.

[CRASS]

My Grandfather and my uncles were coal miners in Harlan, KY back in the 40’s and 50’s. They lived in company housing, which were shacks in a company slum basically. Also, the company required everyone to spend their money at the company store. Crazy

[RisingRevengeance]

I can't say I'm excited for a future where a single company owns your town. You could argue that it's already the case with some giant companies but it's generally not this wild yet.

[jonslg]

For the younger people, look up: Company Store
Was a huge part of basically turning employees into indentured servants, most especially in mining towns and manufacturing towns

[dylanross]

One of the biggest problems I always fined with these cities is they don’t take into consideration human psychology. We need randomness and variation in are living conditions. This is one reason people that live in the countryside tend to be happier, the green of nature and clean air are what we are built for.

[WilliamHaisch]

The “woven city” is kind of like how I made my cities in Sim City 2000 over 25 years ago: park in the middle, living space around the park, and a box road around the outside.

[theraven]

Fun fact, EPCOT was originally conceived as a high tech city. The name is actually an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

[jasondrummond]

As a 'senior'- my reaction to the idea of 'the company' stocking my fridge and supervising my food intake - it total and complete horror. No Effing Way! If I want pizza and beer for supper, that is MY business and I don't want some algorithm blocking my order, or my purchase. The whole scenario is the stuff of nightmares and has the potential for at least a dozen good scifi movies.

[timehaley]

Well Joe, I'll make the journey with you as long as I'm still around. I just turned 64 last month, and I retire the 1st of May, so I'll have a lot of time on my hands. I've been subscribed to your channel pretty much from the beginning and I've watched you grow and improve. I'm looking forward to my retirement, my daughters all grown up and working on her PhD in Chemistry, I'm so proud of her, and now it's time to help my wife in the garden. I worked hard all my life, have no debt, and everything is paid for, so please you people out there, don't blow it up.

[LGABC]

The "woven city" concept reminds me of the original plans Walt Disney had for Epcot. It was originally supposed to be a "city of the future" but ended up being scaled way back after Walt's death.

There are some pretty interesting videos about it here on YouTube.

[Arkantos]

Having my health and diet tracked by my corporate overlords sounds like dystopia to me.

[MichaelSHartman]

The absurdity, and failure rate of the hyper wealthy oil industry nations mega structures is high. Don't read too much into their projects.

[nrgk]

The Toronto-Google project was really impressive when it first came out. After the real work had started, it was clear that Google was completely out of touch with the reality on the ground, and how it would impact local residents.Kudos for saying Toronto correctly :D

[sideshowratt]

Love how the artists' renderings for these always include tons of beautiful foliage while the real things are just concrete, concrete and more concrete.

[seeksustainablejapan]

I actually applied for a job with woven city & was really excited to help choose the first 300 members of a diverse, sustainable community but with every interview I got the feeling it was going to be less of a functional community of the future & more a test center for Toyota tech. The people I talked with were really nice, but everyone & all decision making was based on what would work best for efficiency not the balanced & flexible needs of a diverse sustainable community.😅

[stevejohnson]

When people started building permanent settlements they tried to include all the things we like in concentrated form. Caves, cliff faces, little clumps of forest and an appearance of randomness like you find in nature. They do this by letting people do what they want with their little urban lots. There will different styles of architecture and a few streets that break the grid pattern. Planners hate this. They want sculpture but you can't live in sculpture and after a while, it gets old.

[EnnuinerDog]

I spent some time in Korea's smart city, Songdo, and I wouldn't want to live there. It was designed in the 2000's and early 2010's so the urbanism/walkability trend hadn't kicked off at the time. Songdo is actually incredibly car centric, much more so than I was expecting, and seems to be modelled on a North American suburb as those don't really exist in Korea. The planned nature of the city made it felt inorganic in how it forces you into a specific lifestyle which may or may not match your own (it seems to consist of driving everywhere and shopping for luxury goods at pricey stores and outlets with your nuclear family).

I'd much rather live in an old neighbourhood in Seoul than Songdo. The old neighbourhoods are much more walkable, diverse and have so much more character and life in them.

I wonder if other top-down approaches will be inorganic, forced and feel dated in ten years in the same way as Songdo. I'm not against planned cities either, there's been a lot of successful ones throughout history, I just wouldn't trust private companies with it.

[weedfreer]

The town I live in here in the UK and (along with a few more dotted around) it was one of the first towns, predominantly, built by the owner of the mill to house the workers of the mill.

What's more, they also used to issue their own money, so, you could only use it in the town itself to buy the products made available by 'friends' of the mill owner.

They were, indeed, somewhat insidious to say the least.

The town Im in was doing this from all the way back to the late 1600's too.

It also has a poor house down the bottom end of the town, which was basically enforced labour, with 'food' and board with families separated by male and female members.

So, if you were lucky, you worked at one end of the town in the mill, but, if you were not, it'ld be the poor house for you!

[ThalassTKynn]

I've read scifi where a space station is run by a goant AI who takes care of everyone and assigns work for residents, and knows everything that goes on within its walls... And while it's creepy AF, it's also like having a caring parent looking out for you. Of course if you go too far off the rails you get "reeducation" so yeah. Totally dystopian.

[aretoo-]

I loved the quick blip from "Soylent Green"...one of my favorite creeps from the early 70's. But what really grabbed me was your reference to 'corporate-run cities' - anyone remember the original "Rollerball"? I'm just sayin'...