Administrative-territorial changes and their impact on urban development in Austria and Austria-Hungary (second half of the 18th - beginning of the 20th century)
Authors: Tarasovych O. 
Published: November 2023

The article analyzes the causes and consequences of administrative and territorial changes and their impact on urban planning in Austria and Austria- Hungary (second half of the 18th - beginning of the 20th century). It is noted that in the XVIII-XIX centuries. urban planning activities in the Austrian Empire were regulated by various normative legal acts, which included legal and bylaws. The main sources of legal regulation of urban planning activities in the Austrian Empire at that time were the Constitution of Charles VI of Habsburg, the Law on City Rights (Stadtrecht), the Civil Code (Allgemeines burgerliches Gesetzbuch) of 1811, the Construction Law (Bauordnung) of 1829, the Building Statute of 1882 (Budownicza ustawa), Laws on city rights, etc.

It is shown that in 1784 the Austrian government began to organize urban planning activities by carefully classifying settlements. The need for such a classification was determined by the need to add an index to a detailed map of the country. The division of settlements into cities/towns/villages was to be carried out by the circular offices themselves as a result of the order of the court decree dated October 28, 1784. In the new governor's order on this matter dated December 13, 1784, it was noted at the very beginning that the circular offices, despite clear instructions governorates, qualified settlements as cities, towns and villages only on the basis of their location, size, number of inhabitants, buildings, and therefore not on the basis of proper attributes. The province also ordered that a city (Stadt) should be considered a settlement that has the privilege of being a city. When settlements did not have this privilege, they were to be considered villages (Dorfer). The classification of settlements was to be based solely on their privileges and no other considerations could be taken into account; therefore, only the historical criterion was applied, and as a result, all the privileges from Polish times were accepted in those clauses of their provisions that recognized the settlement as a city or town.

It was established that the qualification of the suburb (Vorstadte) had to be considered differently. Here it was necessary to take into account: 1) distance from the city; 2) the judicial authority to which they were subject; 3) privileges. However, if the district office had certain doubts about the qualification of the settlement on the basis of the above instructions and felt compelled to qualify it in another way, then after consultation with the district commission (Werb-Bezirks-Kommando) it had to proceed as follows: appoint the authority and the local community ( Obrigkeit und Ortsgemeinde) and in the presence of the commandant of the recruitment commission to determine: 1) reasons for current qualifications and 2) reasons for changing qualifications for the future. All this classification of settlements, as emphasized by the order of the viceroyalty, was only intended to familiarize with the essence of these settlements, and in no case was intended to turn burghers into peasants or peasants into burghers.