> Oslo has about twice the population today as it had in 1950.
That's a weird supporting argument. Can you name any urban centers that have not seen significant population growth since 1950?
That's a weird supporting argument. Can you name any urban centers that have not seen significant population growth since 1950?
But the answer your question: Vienna. Vienna has smaller population today than it did in 1910.
You're missing the more germane point that the relevant metric for "built" in this context are roads, not living accommodations. More people live in Oslo than in the 50s, but the roads and city blocks within ring 3 are what they are from prewar times, i.e. tons of small 1-way streets and the like.
Case in point : many, if not most, of the apartment buildings in "Gamle Oslo" (literally "Old Oslo" - the downtown area to the east of the railway station) were built in the 1980s or later, but the roads around those new constructions are still narrow 1-way prewar streets.
To my mind the parents point was pretty clear - Oslo is an older city, particularly from an American perspective, and you have to travel pretty far out from the city center to find an urban infrastructure that accommodates cars in the way the younger and generally more modern cities in the US (outside the northeast) do. This is 100% related to the city center being built before the dawn of ubiquitous private vehicles, and not to choosing some arbitrarily different urban planning "path".
Another comment mentioned the underground highways that have in fact done wonders to move traffic away from the over-congested city streets, which only reenforces the idea that the city proper was not designed to accommodate even a modest volume of car traffic.
> But the answer your question: Vienna. Vienna has smaller population today than it did in 1910.
That's interesting, but it's noteworthy that it has a higher population today than it did in 1950, so yours is an incomplete answer. The geopolitical reasons for Vienna's population in 1910 are unique, what with being the capital of a sprawling trans-national empire that ceased to exist.