Le Locle/La Chaux-de-Fonds: Public histories and industrial heritage in contemporary cities

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?