Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

"When I suggested planting rows of trees in the city, one of the elected municipal officials asked if 1 had taken up gardening.

To the idea of lighting the streets they responded by assuring me that drunks can always prop themselves up by the walls.

And what other purpose would a lamppost serve, anyway?” (Céciie Tormay, The Old Home)

Rates falling due, road surfaces torn up where a pipe burst, service suspended at the least expected times. These are the only occasions on which the proverbial person in the street is alerted to the existence of public services; after all, modern infrastructures have long been taken for granted. The major public utilities ensure that the private customer is supplied with electricity, gas and drinking water, and that sewage and stormwater are properly drained.

During the siege raised against the Turkish occupiers of Pest and Buda, all the dual cities’ water conduits were destroyed with very little wastewater drainage and no public illumination being in place at the time to begin with. After the liberation of Buda in 1686, drainage and street lighting were provided by the royal chamber, these services later to be taken over by the municipality. Set up in 1808 and sponsored by Palatine Joseph, the municipal Beautification Committee drew up an overall plan of urban development, which comprised the implementation of drainage and water-mains systems, and the tidying up of the riverbanks as well as regulation of the street plan, and approval of the designs of newly planned buildings.

The city's first architectural policies drawn up after the great Pest-Buda flood of 1838 enacted strict regulations meant to provide for the protection of Pest. The rules thus laid down prescribed the instalment and specified the dimensions of "domestic canals” to be dug with newly constructed buildings, and proscribed the use of cesspools, which were only allowed in "exceptional cases” where drainage was unavailable. Due to the faster rate of industrialisation and urban development witnessed by Pest, municipal lighting, water mains and drainage were felt to be a more pressing urgency on the left bank of the Danube than on the other side of the river.

In preparation for the official unification of Pest, Buda and Óbuda, Act X of 1870 provided for the establishment of the Capital City Board of Public Works. The law stipulated that plans to be submitted to the newly-founded body, which was, in spite of its name, a governmental organisation, were to include all designs for the paving of streets, the digging and maintenance of cesspools and drainage canals, and the implementation of water mains and lighting systems for streets and public enter5