Sustainable Smart Town Provides Better Lifestyles as the Entire Town

The initial concept for a Sustainable Smart Town (SST) goes back more than ten years. As business currents continued to take production to many sites outside of Japan, the use of former plant sites throughout the country was beginning to become an issue. Some of Panasonic's younger employees wondered if there wasn’t a better way to leverage the sites to lead to development for the community and business, instead of simply selling them. This idea prompted further discussion during their study sessions that led to an urban development proposal to Fujisawa City.

Behind this idea was our founder’s philosophy that we should contribute to the development of society and invigorate local communities through our business activities, and based on his philosophy, we wanted to continue to give back to the community that had given us a home for so long, even if we were no longer able to maintain a plant there. Urban development is one field in which Panasonic can take on new challenges by creating solutions that leverage our technologies and overall capabilities, leading to experience and knowledge that can be shared with society at large. These efforts also provide an arena for co-creation with all kinds of different partners.

To achieve urban development that extended beyond the experimentation and testing phases, Panasonic decided to aim for a sustainable smart town, placing an emphasis on sustainability and letting the implementation of smart technologies and systems follow that goal.

Conventional smart city designs start with smart infrastructure from which the town designs and spaces are based. This way of doing things has often proven unsustainable. As a manufacturer of home electronics, Panasonic has a history of creating electronics and appliances based on their value in the context of a customer's lifestyle. This approach based on actual lifestyles begins with asking what smart life will look like 10, 20, and even 100 years from now. From there, we start thinking about how to build the spaces, infrastructure, and services that will help make that vision a reality. Panasonic is unique in our ability to offer this type of urban development based on actual lifestyles that focuses on sustainability.

To make a town truly sustainable, we need to involve its residents in building a community. With the participation of partner companies that implement advanced initiatives, innovation through co-creation among industry, government and education along with residents will be generated. One example of such an initiative is the Fujisawa SST Town Parent Project, which involves cooperation between 18 different businesses, universities, local government agencies, and local resident organizations. The town's development is moving forward with cooperation from a variety of different partners, and, when validating new services and technologies, residents will be able to participate in monitoring and will have opportunities for exchanging opinions during town meetings.

Launched in 2011, the project began with setting a series of numerical targets and guidelines for the entire town. We started out with environmental and energy-related targets, deciding to reduce CO2 emissions by 70%, reduce water consumption by 30%, and have renewable energy usage account for at least 30% of total energy as some of our key targets. We also set a safety and security target of establishing lifelines that would last for three days in the face of disasters.

This approach to urban development is made possible by five smart services provided by Panasonic: energy, security, mobility, wellness, and community. Fujisawa SST has generated a wide variety of initiatives that are leading to solutions to challenges of the community through these services.

Fujisawa SST has been the subject of much attention, both from within Japan and around the world since it first opened in 2014. More than 25,000 people have already taken the tours for business stakeholders, and recently, one in four visitors has been from outside Japan. The reason for this turnout is a general growing interest in sustainable urban development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Panasonic's work in this area predates the SDGs, and this project alone contributes to the achievement of eight of the 17 goals included in the SDGs. Goals 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) and 17 (Partnerships for the goals) are the two that are most especially relevant to our work on this project. Our efforts with Fujisawa SST have been met with high praise, including the selection of Kanagawa Prefecture as both SDGs Future Cities (one of 29) by the Cabinet Office and as a Local Government SDGs Model Project (one of 10) which is in particular a pioneering case, in 2018.

Fujisawa SST has also served as a test case for a broad range of technologies and initiatives, including housing, facility, and B2B solutions. Three key factors enable us to work cooperatively and consult with many different businesses and local government organizations: 1.) living spaces and mobility, essential elements for towns, are one of our strategic areas of business; 2.) we have the technology and ingenuity, beyond lifestyle needs, by developing B2B co-creation in a broad range of business fields; and 3.) the strong philosophy of our founder form the backbone of this project.