Toyota completes phase 1 construction of futuristic city
60 comments
·February 26, 2025qwertox
flustercan
Its Japan. I bet you will be able to eat off the ground in there years from now.
moltar
Maybe the garbage will be like in Sweden? In some city or neighborhood they have this modern setup where each garbage disposal chute is connected by pneumatic tubes to a central garbage dump in the area. So when garbage needs collected the truck doesn’t need to drive around the neighborhood stopping every 5 meters making a ton of noise and spreading garbage around accidentally. It enters this underground area and collects it in bulk out of the huge bins.
Edit: I think it’s this https://www.envacgroup.com/how-it-works/the-envac-system/
derektank
Makes me think of Pipedream Labs' concept of a network of tubes with an internal robotic conveyance systems for home/office delivery[1]. It seems like something that large new buildings could benefit from, even without a connection to a broader network. People don't love having to go down to a front desk to pick up packages, property managers don't like handling them, and delivery drivers don't like wandering around trying to find a random unit. Would be interesting to see if it's viable on a larger scale.
twelvechairs
Makes me think of the Paris pneumatic post system
nayuki
Half as Interesting: Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Trash System (5m44s) [2022-12-06]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfM4cjDoo6o
Kuinox
The underground are not tunnels but excavated with the road built on top, it's far cheapers than tunnels.
SideburnsOfDoom
> The underground are not tunnels but excavated with the road built on top,
Are you describing "Cut and Cover" ?
As in "Cut and Cover is a method of construction of shallow tunnels"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_construction#Cut-and-co...
It has been used for centuries, e.g. was used to dig the first parts of the London underground in the late 1800s
rat87
Reminds me of Roosevelt Island NYC pneumatic island trash shute
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539304811/how-new-york-s-roos...
bamboozled
If you saw how meticulous Japanese are about disposing of garbage you'd probably be less concerned.
wodenokoto
Shibuya 5 in the morning is pretty bad by any standard.
tho423j4j23423
I wonder if anyone has done a economic study of all the old-people being employed to keep all this (and other things) clean and working properly.
(It's all a bit sad though: I often see folks who look over 70 standing around for hours on end waving a warning stick and so on... Then there are all these nearly-disabled old-people who have no one to look after them.)
erulabs
It seems odd to me, abstracting a bit from society as is, that architecture isn’t the main occupation of nation-state level entities. It’s like the single most important defining feature of the cities and yet totally under explored. Anyways I’d love to visit (another) planned city. They’re always amazing and terrible in exactly the inverse of the amazing and terrible in (relatively) unplanned cities.
cmarschner
It‘s not under-explored at all. Millions of people work in architecture and city planning. Every city has several departments that deal with planning and construction.
It‘s just completely dysfunctional. Architecture professors have focused on “innovation” for 100 years and have achieved little. We still flock to the old, 19th century (or older) city centers and love it. We spend thousands to spend a week or two there on holidays.
Very few modern places exist where this is the case.
In survey after survey, 80% of the people prefer traditional over modern(ist) designs.
So the whole profession has failed, since about the introduction of the Bauhaus.
intended
This is some strange no? It looks like you are talking about city planning more than architecture when talking about city centers.
Modern designs are affected by supply and demand, while modernist designs have been supplanted by many other school.
Innovation has ranged from tiny homes, to livable homes, to new materials, to shipping containers, building heights, concrete types, designs and more.
I’ve seen architectural styles emerge and evolve from different countries, so it’s hard to read this and find the source of your opinion.
The creation of public spaces is highly dependent on the governance of those localities.
I was bemoaning the growth of self sufficient enclaves as a real estate solution in Mumbai, but I acknowledge that this is the market providing for its consumers what the government is yet to provide.
Is this primarily an attack on academia, under the assumption that everyone hates the combination of “innovation” “modernism” and “professors”?
smokel
There's a bit of survivorship bias in your reasoning. The extremely wealthy built beautiful things that we still enjoy. But the horrible places that common people had to call home in the 19th century are not treasured in the same way.
jajko
Aesthetically pleasing it is, but also way less practical and way more costly to build. Nice stone facades can't have any thermal insulation on them (and having it inside is less than ideal), in Europe this would be a big problems apart from very south regions. I think mcmansions are trying to find some middle ground, but they don't seem to receive much love (those are not so common in Europe so just judging from far).
Medieval castles can be very pretty to visit too, I wouldn't want to live in one if given modern choice regardless of wealth, even if ignoring all the red tape for any sort of change or even repair.
creer
Architecture has a generally modest cost, as compared to the more "as usual" construction. Except when you go nuts like trying to cross a desert.
So why "nation-state"?
Even the smallest country can and does make architectural and city-planning efforts. The american (not a nation-state) planned cities, usually built by average companies.
readthenotes1
You may find this interesting
https://www.historyandheadlines.com/east-st-louis-and-the-ol...
quitit
I've always been interested to see an EPCOT style city come to life, and it seems odd (as others have mentioned) that this isn't the focus of the state.
Similar to Toyota's thinking, EPCOT was originally meant to be a multimodal transport city that utilised new ways to move people about, but that all ended with Disney's death. Many of those transport technologies are simply used in the theme parks today.
DecentShoes
I'm very sorry to tell you Toyota, but the city of the future will have EVs in it
jajko
Near future? Maybe less than you would think, EVs are still financially unreachable and utterly impractical for most of the world. For me they are easily reachable but I just don't find the appeal, the limitations, range anxiety, everything proprietary and not fixable in normal garages, thats not how I run my cars in relatively low cost manner.
Buying car shouldn't be emotional decision but a rational one, its not a small investment, for many second biggest in their lives after housing.
Far future, certainly ICE cars will be mostly dead, what will come we shall see.
fragmede
Interesting POV! Because batteries plus a motor is so easy, electric bicycles and similar are the vehicle to look at, not cars. I know that in the Philippines, EV carts are slowly taking over on certain islands in places where a car doesn't make any financial sense.
gbalint
360 people are moving in? This sounds like a futuristic apartment block, not a futuristic city.
lostlogin
It’s going to house 2000 people.
This list of largest hotels ends at 28. The 28th largest has 3000 rooms.
perching_aix
How do you think cities form? People storm them by the millions?
gbalint
The final phase is going to be 2000 people, which is small even for a town, or even for a midsize real estate project inside a city. Calling it a city just feels ridicolous.
perching_aix
Cool, but that's not the argumentation you started off with.
This other argument I do agree with, and more importantly, it fails to qualify as one even according to Japanese administrative definitions (would need to have 50K+ residents). Which I think is the actually important bit, if we want to establish the labeling as misleading.
Apartment blocks are typically in the hundred to a few hundred resident range around the world, only really high density developments will crack the thousand residents bar. So to liken it to one is a bit disingenuous in its own right, just the other way around.
Refusing23
Looks a bit like "Aarhus Ø" in my city. a part of the city that is quite new.
https://aarhusoe.dk/media/owqjyq0b/dji_0091.jpg - the construction site in the corner is done now, its a very very tall building that looks similar to the one in the center - just... very much taller.
it's a terribly crowded place, and i hate it - but at least the apartment buildings look different than all the ol 'red brick cubes' from the 40s and 50s we have in the rest of the city (You can see some of them in the background in this picture)
insane_dreamer
doesn't look more crowded than what you find in a lot of big cities
insane_dreamer
> The city will have an underground passageway for deliveries and garbage collection.
This would be a great improvement over many cities, though definite drop in QOL for delivery and garbage truck drivers. Though I imagine having it underground makes it much easier to manage with autonomous vehicles.
veltas
Working as a regular delivery driver in sprawling futuristic underground tunnels sounds awesome, not going to lie. To each their own.
insane_dreamer
You make a good point. Away from the noise and traffic -- assuming quiet EVs which they would of course have to be. If it has nice lighting and ventilation.
hn_user82179
I wouldn’t enjoy the lack of fresh air, but I think the lack or traffic and (perhaps?) not having to worry about where to park while sprinting to drop off a package in a narrow road would really reduce the stress of that job
lazide
Just watch out for the C.H.U.D.s! [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.H.U.D.]
duxup
> The city will eventually be home to about 2,000 people.
More like a small town?
A hotel?
numpad0
Around 35.22N, 138.91E, right between Mishima and Gotenba in Shizuoka. Up to about 700k m^2 or 7500k sqft, max, about twice as big as the Las Vegas Convention Center or Boeing Everett factory. Used to be a smallish car plant next to a Toyota test track. Not at all an unpopulated area.
More or less an institute campus?
schiffern
2,000 people for $10 billion.[1] That's $5 million per person.
The future is expensive, but of course the intent is to advance early-stage (ie expensive) technology toward affordability. It sounds like they want to winnow down to the best option among alternate system architectures, so I expect there's a fair bit of infrastructure-level redundancy too.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/toyota-city-japan-ai-robotics-eee...
cloudbonsai
This "city" is actually more like a Disneyland park, except that their main focus is on to experiment with futuristic commercial ideas/concepts.
Here is the list of a few companies that co-invest with Toyota:
- Nissin (Instant food company) to "Create and evaluating food environments to inspire new 'food cultures'".
- UCC (Japanese coffee maker) to "Explore the potential value of coffee through futuristic cafe experiences".
- Daikin Industries (Air conditioner manufacturer) to "Experiment with 'pollen-free spaces'".
I don't know exactly what they are trying to test (I guess that they don't know either), but it's meant to be an industrial theme park than a real city with municipal authority.
justahuman74
Experiments always cost more than the at-scale product, perhaps they see it scaling down costs later
Barrin92
>The future is expensive
Although upfront cost for city construction is probably negligible compared to the operating cost over the lifespan of the city. If you have even modest labour, infrastructure and service savings every year for decades to come building smarter probably pays off.
minutillo
To be fair, 'Daisuke Toyoda, an executive in charge of the project from the automaker’s founding family, stressed it’s not “a smart city.”'.
robin_reala
Smallest official city in the UK is St. Davids, with ~1,750 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Davids
frosted-flakes
The UK definition of a city is arbitrary and unrelated to the usual meaning of the word. St Davids is objectively a small town.
walthamstow
Indeed. Southend was given city status in 2022 simply because their MP was murdered.
Croydon is twice the size of Southend and will probably never become a city.
blackeyeblitzar
It’s more like a small scale real life testing ground. Not a city but maybe meant to prove technology and design that can scale to a city. Toyota hasn’t had a great track record with alternative mobility historically - just some quirky experiments - so I’m curious what they’re working on that justified this big investment for this “city”.
UberFly
What happens if I move in and sleep on the park bench? Not trying to be snarky, just wondering.
petepete
I hope vacuum tubes are involved somewhere.
growt
Corporations building futuristic cities? We all know how that ends! We’ve seen the movies!
yareally
No need for movies. It happened in real life
sdesol
I didn't get the impression that the city was focused on creating housing for Toyota employees; rather, it seemed to be about understanding what will work and what won't. Toyota, like many Asian companies, has many different verticals, and I think whoever better understands the needs of the future will be able to stay relevant.
Having Toyota employees as residents just makes sense, since it will be much easier to set expectations.
samplatt
Don't even have to look outside America. Have a read of the history of Pullman, Illinois.
The wiki page is disappointingly free of all the racism and what would today be human rights violations that George Pullman implemented at the time.
lazide
Can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs (/s)
thinkindie
it feels more like a business district rather than a city people are willing to live. Soulless, with little green around. Concrete everywhere.
> The city will have an underground passageway for deliveries and garbage collection. It will test advanced digital technologies and autonomous robots.
The passageway for deliveries sounds like the best thing, but garbage maybe not so much. I have a feeling that over time it will degrade into a sewer-like environment (without the water) with foul smells, unless the garbage is really well sealed.
Edit: Then again, these underground passageways are way bigger than I expected (shown in the video). I thought those would be just big enough for some rail-based autonomous vehicles. But if people handle the garbage underground, I really wonder if the ventilation is superior as to create a worker-friendly environment. It really looks like some people will spend their day underground delivering packages or collecting garbage.