": "Fővárosunk. Irta Táncsics Mihály. Hasonmás kiadás - Budapest Főváros Levéltára forráskiadványai 8. (Budapest, 1976)

On „Our Capital" by Mihály Táncsics

absolutism was abolished and the empire was transformed into a dual monarchy, which created a nation-wide demand for a capital not less beautiful than Vienna, the seat of the emperor. In the 1868 act of the right to expropriate private territory and houses was codified as a precondition of the rearrangement of the city, and in 1870 a body following the pattern of the Metropolitan Board of Works in England was set up on the initiative of Prime Minister Count Gyula Andrássy. Called the City Council of Works, it had as a task the development of rules and programme for the replanning of the city. Finally, with 36. Act of 1872, Pest, Buda and Old Buda became united for ever. These factors together with public administration concentrating here, and commerce and industry increasing rapidly as a result of developing capitalism made the three small provincial towns with 280 000 inhabitants a modern metropolis of one million within a short time. An enthusiastic follower of the ideas of Owen, Fourier, Cabet and Weitling, and the first to popularize the phalanstery in Hungary, Táncsics followed the plans of the sixties from the gaol with keen interest, speculation and land jobbers not escaping his attention either. He drew up a sharp leaflet expressing public opinion as well against the council of Pest for the building up of the lower embankment of the Danube and for selling the municipal ground plots. Ha demanded the alteration of the plans for commercial, financial, aesthetical and sanitary reasons, and the creation of a promenade similar to the Linden Allée in Berlin. However, his manuscript, smuggled out of prison, found no publisher and the author was to learn soon that the development of the lower embankment was launched by the original plans leaving out of consideration the sentiments of the public. It was then that he decided to write down his ideas of the future Budapest. „The rate at which you make the capital grandiose determins how mighty our fatherland becomes." This was the epigraphy Táncsics gave his book appearing after many failures only after his release from prison. His vision of future Budapest gave a broader social conception of townplanning, „with a wonderful clear sight", as those of some professional municipalists. Many of his suggestions and plans got realized in the decades following the Compromise, even if not on his initiative. Such were for example the setting up of a body for a uniform replanning of the city, the unification of the three capitals and the elaboration of a uniform programme of town-planning, the fiscal immunity of the new houses, new bridges on the Danube, the new arrangement of the Town Park and the Inner Town, building and modernization of the thermal