> What cities haven’t radically changed in the last 100 years, with nearly everything being replaced with something better than they could have conceived of?
You’d be surprised. Almost all of the German cities were destroyed in WW2 (meaning their downtown area). The same goes for Polish cities, or further East cities like Kiev, Odessa or Kharkiv. WW2 was also quite brutal for Western cities like Rotterdam or London. WW1 obliterated most of the cities in Northern France and South-West Belgium. The streets of Madrid saw active and intense fighting in the Spanish Civil War. And many of the cities that escaped the wars relatively unscathed had to contend with the modernist movement of the 1960s and the 1970s, which saw many interesting buildings demolished because they didn’t look modern or functional enough (Athens being a prime example for this).