Publication
Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds were inscribed in the World Heritage List in 2009 under the label “watchmaking town planning”. The contribution aims at developing a few questions linked to this heritage site. To what extent the “outstanding universal values” recognized by UNESCO allow to identify a specific type of industrial urbanism? Are these two cities representative of the transformation of production space in Switzerland? Do they perhaps offer a counter-example - as Marx famously argued in The Capital - of spatial and social articulation of industrial production? Which kind of relationship exists today between the territorial transformations affecting them and the diffusion of a set of shared public narratives about the urban past? Finally, beyond this UNESCO recognition, which urban memories have shaped the two cities in terms of space, identity, and economy?
Florence Graezer Bideau, Huishu Deng