La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchatel (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss watchmaking centres of La Chaux-de-Fonds/Le Locle was the scene of a celebrations in the street Saturday night after the news was announced that theit is one of 11 new Unesco World Heritage cultural sites. Italy’s Dolomites in the north of the country, near Switzerland, were named one of two new natural sites, and, for only the second time, a site was remove from the list. Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley has lost its title because of a four-lane highway being built through the centre of the site.

The description of La Chaux-de-Fonds, from the Unesco list:

La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle watchmaking town-planning (Switzerland) consists otwo towns situated close to one another in a remote environment in the Swiss Jura mountains, on land ill-suited to farming. Their planning and buildings reflect watch-makers’ need of rational organization. Planned at the start of the 19th century , after extensive fires, the towns owed their existence to this single industry. Their layout along an open-ended scheme of parallel strips on which residential housing and workshops are intermingled reflects the needs of the local watch-making culture that dates to the 17th century and is still alive today. The site presents outstanding examples of mono-industrial manufacturing-towns which are well preserved and still active. The urban planning of both towns has accommodated the transition from the artisanal production of a cottage industry to the more concentrated factory production of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The town of La Chaux-de-Fonds was described by Karl Marx as a “huge factory-town” in Das Kapital where he analyzed the division of labour in the watch-making industry of the Jura. two towns situated close to one another in a remote environment in the Swiss Jura mountains, on land ill-suited to farming. Their planning and buildings reflect watch-makers’ need of rational organization.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.