ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the changing materiality of identification and urban levels of identification and control and draws migrant groups, their predominant districts and sites in the city as well as municipal policies towards them. The materiality of identification in nineteenth-century Central Europe was addressed by legal, social, migration, and gender history. While religion ceased to play a decisive role in municipal policies of identification in Vienna and Budapest by the late nineteenth century, it did not disappear altogether. Vienna's and Budapest's populations were the products of migration from the vast regions of East, Central, and Southern Europe. The combined body of scholarship on urban history, migration, and municipal poor relief reveals that not only were the two tracks intricately interrelated but also that there was a more sinister side to each of them. While many were granted their request, the refusals reveal once again that social status and political affiliation were the main criteria of the municipal policy.
