Abstract
The comparative type of research on Vienna's and Budapest's urban development during the second half of the 19th century is a popular topic among urban scientists. The two capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy underwent a large-scale development in nearly half a century, which is praised by many historiographic literature on the topic as a huge success in the cities' urban politics. But how can the performance of a 19thcentury urban policy be interpreted scientifically? Most of the literature on urban history gives us a detailed picture of the quantitative results of the cities' socio-economic and infrastructural development as an answer. However, we can find much less information about the evaluation of contemporary urban governance's performance in a complex way, even if we take into account the modern literature on urban governance. Based on this argument, this study aims to demonstrate an individual case of circumscribing urban governance's performance by examining the construction of urban water and canal systems from multiple perspectives. On one hand, the research examines different types of statistics to reveal the efficiency of the development of these infrastructural elements and their territorial inequalities in both cities. On the other hand, the study also takes into account the budgetary items of water and canal systems, giving us a complex picture regarding the financial background of the construction of these infrastructural objects. Then the main findings of the statistical examination are interpreted in the context of urban autonomy and the main elements of the cities' urban development throughout the 19th century. The results of the empirical research showed a significant connection between urban autonomy and the performance of urban development since Vienna with greater jurisdiction could build the necessary water and canal systems in its enlarged territory with more efficiency than Budapest which was more dependent on the Hungarian state and had more complicated urban governance system.
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