What cities will look like in five years

China adopted cell phone technology much faster than Canada did, primarily because they didn't have the infrastructure that we have vested under the ground with all of our telephone lines, he explained.

Transportation technologies in South America and other parts of the world are also being adopted very quickly because they don't have older systems already in place, he said.

Cities will definitely become hotbeds of communicable disease, but it is a chaotic phenomenon, according to Wright. Knowing which neighbourhoods will be affected next is like trying to predict climate, he said. "You can know patterns, but it's really hard to predict a specific event," he said.

But Wright does expect buildings will become more intelligent, react to existing conditions and use ambient technologies that are user-aware. "That's definitely beginning to happen, and there are examples in the City of Toronto that have these systems build into them," he said.

Transportation will also become more efficient, but "it depends on how you calculate how energy consumption takes place," he said. It takes a lot of energy to make a bus, he pointed out. While he anticipates more electric cars and bikes in the future, batteries remain "a sticking point."