Questioning public histories of urban planning: an investigation of ‘urbanisme horloger’ narratives in the Unesco site of Le Locle/La Chaux-de-Fonds

The recent, joint inscription of Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds on the World Heritage List (2009) offers an interesting example of public use of planning history within the context of a heritage-making process. The notion of ‘watchmaking town planning’ that was coined for the Unesco campaign of these two Swiss cities suggests that a fundamental unity existed between their planned spatial organization in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and the social organization of their industrial communities. The paper questions this narrative by discussing the interpretation of a specific planning document – the 1835 scheme for La Chaux-de-Fonds drafted by Ponts-et-Chaussées inspector Charles-Henri Junod – that seems to play a central role within the conceptual framework of ‘urbanisme horloger’. The analysis aims to suggest that there are both difficult challenges and promising intellectual opportunities to be taken by closely observing the ways in which planning histories are publicly disseminated and appropriated by a plurality of social actors.