Chiara Caravello

Before the field survey, we were suggested readings to learn about the history and culture of La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle, select key places and buildings to be visited.

As a way of observing and understanding the design of the urban fabric, capturing visual elements and constructing a narrative about the two sites and their relationship, we were asked to take photographs and draw sketches, while collecting written notes of our observations through the use of analytical language.

Finally, we were prompte to produce a retrospective reflection to draw connections between the various elements observed in situ.

In our field experience in La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle, the field-note diary reveale as an essential support both for jotting down notes - written on the spur of the moment about sensations or ephemeral details, which one does not remember at the end of a long day - and for sketching quick ideas and images, which flowed away immediately replaced by the next ones.

An initial feeling of 'scribbling blindly' was replaced in the post-production process by a sense of confidence, which saw those scribbles becoming firm footholds from which to move further in the investigation. One photo among many, a short text taken from a brochure or a quotation in a museum, assumed a revealing depth of a dense history, of intertwined dynamics and a geographic, urban and socio-cultural complexity that lies subtly and tacitly between the straight lines of La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle’s urban tissue.

Our explorations, the collection of images, symbols, narratives and impressions was certainly influenced - though neither in a positive nor negative connotation of the term - by the desire to jump into what we expected to find, based on the knowledge that everyone had gathered before our arrival.

Yet, we did not so clearly see, hear, nor perceive it. We wondered how, or above all why, such an important and so obvious topic, one that has managed to capture UNESCO's worldwide attention, could be so washed-out and unimpressive in the human and everyday’s dimension of the urban space.

We searched deeper, sharpened our view or, perhaps, followed more precisely what the tourist guidebooks suggested, and, so, many symbols gradually appeared, as if by magic, right there, in the place where we had been told we would find them.

The design approach to post-industrial regeneration implies not only a vision capable of simultaneously considering the architectural, urban and landscape scale, but also of integrating both a socio-cultural dimension - as clearly presented by Nina Rappaport during her presentation on the first day of the workshop - and an environmental perspective. From the intersection of these fields, less and less treated as separate sectors, an ecological approach emerges, where the focus is no longer merely on the humankind, but rather on the evolutionary processes of the human-nature relationship (ELC, 2000). In this sense, another level of knowledge, that of invisible and immaterial values, emerges in a cultural landscape, as the result of landscape transformation processes stratified over time (Corboz, 1983).

To clarify how I am linking this fieldwork, the texts and/or the various presentations and discussions during the workshop, with my doctoral research, I find it very useful - and quite spontaneous - to compare the case study of the workshop with that of my PhD research.

A comparison between the case study of La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle and that of La Montagne Saint-Pierre / Neercanne (case study of my PhD research) is here analysed using a double-entry matrix relating two binomials: visible/invisible and tangible/intangible. The matrix allows us to observe four possible situations given by the predominance of a combination of the four qualities: visible-tangible, visibleintangible, invisible-tangible, invisible-intangible.

The case of La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle, on the border between Switzerland and France, is welcomed in the UNESCO’s prestigious list as an exceptional example ‘of mono-industrial manufacturing-towns which are well preserved and still active 1 ’, also referring to a footnote in Marx's Das Kapital, which compares the productivity of the city of Geneva with the smaller and more remote La Chaux-de-Fonds, referring to the latter as ‘one single/unique watch manufactory 2 ’. This definition places the case in a mainly visible-intangible situation, where the production site and the product represent the visible, whereas the production process and the employed know-how are intangible.

The case of La Montagne Saint-Pierre / Neercanne, on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands, not recognised by UNESCO, is nevertheless an exceptional example of urban and landscape transformation process due to the limestone quarrying industry. But here, what remains of the extraction sites lies in the darkness below the surface, placing the case in a mainly invisible-intangible situation. The two cases undoubtedly share at least two decisive components: the presence of a strong intangible heritage linked to technical-industrial know-how and the lability of the boundaries, both geographic and socio-cultural, that bind this knowledge to a specific urban and landscape development.

Faced with two cross-border cases, it is interesting to observe the influence that international governance regarding policies on tangible and intangible industrial heritage has at various scales. Indeed, although geography and landscape testify to territorial continuity in both contexts, where clear evidence is given of the movement of labour and thus of the circulation 'from one part to another' of the know-how and technical expertise required for a specific industrial production, the discourses around its recognition and valorisation vary according to the economic and social interests of the respective sides.

Talking about how territorial governance can 'capitalise', i.e., manipulate for its own economic advantage, the intangible industrial heritage, particularly that associated with workers' technical knowledge, it is interesting to close this reflection by recalling a quotation from a text by Browne, a famous 19th century international traveller. By reading a third case study 'on the border' such as the city of Geneva - itself well-known for its large-scale watch production, as Marx's quotation anticipated earlier – Browne provides detailed evidence of the human scale that characterised - certainly at thetime, but I would not exclude today as well - the manufacture of watches as a human endeavour that was not so strictly dependent on the production site.

“The good watch-makers are obliged to lead regular, abstemious lives; for their eyes must be keen; their nerves steady; their minds unembarrassed; even their digestion perfect. Mental anxiety, a little dissipation, unfits them for their calling. With the best care of themselves they soon wear out and die of old age at five-and-forty. They are a sad, over-strained, over-worked class. They put all their life into their trade. They think, move, and have their being in a watch”.