Marie Bertrand

This notebook being a symbol of observation and therefore of "study in progress", I was careful to emancipate myself from it. This object embodies the difficulty of a balance in the positioning of the interlocutors.

One experience highlights this reflection on the researcher's posture and his relationship to the object or subject under study in the field. During a meeting in a workshop-boutique, I extracted myself from the discussion that had been woven with the project leaders, and by doing so, I believed in the human relationship that allowed the acceptance of scientific investigation in this place, to observe the clothes that were offered for sale. Until then, we had been interested in the intangible heritage as conceived by these young people in order to understand their history, that of their project and what it revealed about their relationship to the city.

My change of posture, both scientific (moving towards observation as a method and clothing as an object of study) and human (turning my attention towards inanimate material objects to the detriment, perhaps perceived, of conversation) appeared to me as the risk of altering the relationship of trust that was being built and that was doubly precious to me (as a person and as a researcher). To my great surprise, it seemed that my attention to the products on sale seemed to improve the human relationship: my object of study was then less the person but an object (the garment) in the vernacular sense of the term. Indeed, my request to try on a shirt, a conventional request of any potential customer, allowed the founders of the place to resume their usual role as creators and sellers of clothing. The tangible object allowed the sharing of a common interest, the embodiment of the discourse of those who are not used to delivering it. My persistent hesitation to paste pieces of these material objects into the notebook illustrates my persistent difficulty since this act would be tantamount to reducing these elements to research samples. It will be necessary for my thesis work and future fieldwork to work on clarifying the different postures.

The relationship between the two actors is based in 2003 on a place, a set of disused and unused slaughterhouse halls on the outskirts of the city, when a hall is rented as is to an association to establish a covered skatepark. Although the site is not directly included in the dynamics of heritage protection in 2009 by the UNESCO label, it is impacted by the desire to "enhance the cultural life of La Chaux-de-Fonds" (https://www.q-g.ch/historique/), which is the mission of the association Quartier Général (QG), which will create a museum of contemporary art there in 2015 with funding from the City.

It is here that the processes of patrimonialization are distinguished by the notions at work here of investment as well as that of appropriation and patrimonialization, illuminated by the concepts of symbolic appropriation and urban recycling proposed by V. Veschambre. On the one hand, the association has created an international influence on the places entrusted to it via its underground community of skateboarders and by a financial investment by citizens (in kind through volunteer work and in capital through crowdfunding), thus constituting a strong heritage because it is intangible (its community around the project), tangible (a bowl built by a recognized designer conceived in accordance with the history and the imaginary of skateboarding), and both are mobile (the community but also the bowl conceived so that it can be completely removable).

The city's decision seems to be based on a financial strategy: it rents a property that is only worth (in the venal sense of the term) the low rent that the association will pay. And it is indeed the investment of the association which, through its action, will create a demand for the place (that of the QG association, of a micro-brewery, of potential private tenants) and in that a tangible value for the City which undertakes a strategy of valorization of this place here taken as financial assets. Although the slaughterhouses were created to feed a potential demographic growth linked to the expected boom of the industrial watchmaking activity, the place has not been included in the collective narrative proposed to the UNESCO labeling. It can be questioned whether, through this project to rent out the site in 2022, the City is implementing a real policy of virtuous reuse (or recycling) of this industrial heritage.

The strong resentment in the skateboarding community towards the community, which does not recognize the value of the heritage created by the community ("there were still bloodstains when we got it [the hall] back"), is a possible illustration. This example thus echoes the process of patrimonialization as the production of heritage and the transmission of associated narratives in its financial dimension as the financial valorization of heritage as the dominant model. It is very interesting for my research to have highlighted the confrontation of collective imaginary founded in parallel and which meet accidentally that crystallizes in the conception of the urban heritage.

The initial partnership will of actors is a necessary condition for citizen participation as a governance model. This case study is therefore for me an edifying counter-example of the disintegration of the conditions of this collaboration. In a deleterious social context, a deserted place emerges as an opportunity for a common project of a city without many means and inhabitants. It is possible that it is the lack of knowledge of identities (the inhabitants are a community with codes extracted from the history of skateboarding) and of respective considerations (uniqueness of the bowl) that the trust necessary to a sincere collaboration ends.

I bring this situation closer to the democratic issues to which hybrid forums wish to respond (Callon, Lascoumes, Barthe, 2001 and 2005). These innovative forms of expression question the division between specialists and laymen on socio-technical subjects and, moreover, the disconnection between the citizen and his political representative by making room for the plurality of knowledge and by calling for new social configurations to allow a renewal of democratic procedures. The concept of controversy explored by the hybrid forums highlights that the complexity is then as much social as technical because having for object "the elaboration of scenarios about the world, but also the composition of the social and the definition of the collective choices". Such an approach is interesting for thinking about the conditions for the renewal of democratic practices. In the case cited as an example, but also in the field that I am considering for my research, such an approach would thus require an analysis of the way in which local heritage is conceived and constructed, and what this may imply for the individual and collective relationship to the territory and the projects linked to its development.

In La-Chaux-de-Fonds, this lack of discussion will, in my opinion, even jeopardize the strategy of heritage (in all the dimensions explored here of the term) of the City. Indeed, the interdependence of the two projects seems to be denied: by underestimating the tangible heritage (the bowl that will be dismantled and moved) that it consciously renounces, it also involuntarily renounces the intangible heritage that is the trust and the collaboration between two actors that are in themselves rare and essential heritages for the regeneration of this urban territory.

In the experimentation on which I am currently working to verify my hypotheses, the citizens will be a priori the only ones (by expression and sharing framed by adapted deliberation methods) to collectively define the elements of the identity and the heritage of the territory. This definition was a priori envisaged only as a stage of the process of citizen participation to apprehend another object (e.g.: the development of a given geographical area). I wonder if the construction of a collective heritage is not a product in itself, although it is necessary to make sure (to guarantee an adhesion to the process) that it arouses an interest for the citizens.