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Paper short abstract

The proposed project investigates Toyota’s Woven City smart city as a site of data extraction and knowledge production, situated within the sociotechnical imaginaries articulated in Toyota’s PR discourse and the Japanese government’s agenda for a “super-smart” Society 5.0.

Paper long abstract

In 2016, the Japanese government, in cooperation with Keidanren, Japan’s big business lobby group, presented a hyperbolic vision for a radical transformation of Japan into a “super-smart”, “ideal” society, in which physical space and simulated cyberspace become one and in which individuals are constantly connected, and their data extracted as a crucial resource. The aim of this vision is to overcome Japan’s economic stagnation, a wide range of societal and demographic issues, as well as global challenges such as climate change. While Society 5.0 is rather a vision rather than a coherent set of technology policy, Japanese smart city projects are the very first sites of experimentation with Society 5.0 connectedness, data extraction, and knowledge production. Woven City was inaugurated as recently as September 2025 and is a corporate smart-city project in Shizuoka prefecture operated by Toyota. From its inception, the city’s population is preconfigured into two classes: the “inventors” – primarily Toyota engineers and scientists – and so-called “weavers” who test the inventors’ products and services while their data are extracted. This clear-cut societal bifurcation is similar to the Taylorist separation of “engineers” and “operators” in the early twentieth century. Unlike other corporate smart cities, data extraction in Woven City does not primarily serve the operation of the city itself but rather the development of products and services for the world market, most notably Toyota vehicles. As a result, knowledge production in Woven City follows a strictly techno-solutionist and data-driven rationale. As a preliminary analysis of Toyota PR material indicates, citizenship in Woven City is markedly underdeveloped and remains unaddressed almost entirely. While foregrounding sustainability, diversity and “human-centered” “co-creation”, inhabitants are subjected to technocratic rule, an approach that closely mirrors the government’s Society 5.0 discourse. This presentation highlights first results of a multimodal discourse analysis of Toyota PR material to investigate how sociotechnical and corporate imaginaries are mobilized to legitimize technocratic forms of knowledge production and to gloss over several contradictions pertaining to sustainability, diversity, and human-centeredness.