La Chaux-de-Fonds

La Chaux-de-Fonds fills a broad valley of the Neuchâtel Jura, close to 1,000 metres up and without surface water: a site with nothing to suggest it would carry the canton's second commune, 37,600 inhabitants at the end of 2024. The plan can be read with the naked eye from the heights — long parallel streets laid along the valley flank best exposed to the sun, cut at right angles by cross streets. It is this drawing, and not a building, that earned the town its UNESCO World Heritage listing in June 2009, jointly with neighbouring Le Locle, under the name of watchmaking town planning.

The phrase means something precise: a town whose shape was dictated by a single trade. Watchmaking took hold here among farmers looking for extra income through the long winters, then became an industry in its own right with établissage, the division of labour between workshops credited to Daniel Jeanrichard. The buildings raised afterwards house dwelling and workshop in the same volume, with wide windows on the side of the light. The town gave Art Nouveau a local variant, the Style sapin, and it saw the birth of Le Corbusier, Blaise Cendrars, the car maker Louis Chevrolet and the sailor Laurent Bourgnon.

None of this would read as it does without the night of 4 to 5 May 1794, when fire took 52 houses, the church and its steeple, without a single death, and put 175 families on the street. The rebuilding followed the layout of the master engraver Moïse Perret-Gentil: perpendicular streets, a public square at the centre — today's place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville — then a grid extension carried on by the engineer Charles-Henri Junod. Karl Marx saw in this conjunction of town planning and single industry a “manufacture-town”.

Why this place is remarkable

The grid plan remains an oddity among Swiss towns, and it owes nothing to monumental intent: it was born of the 1794 fire and of the needs of one industry. Streets turned to catch the sun, buildings where the workshop shares the volume of the home — it is this layout, not a single edifice, that UNESCO listed in 2009 with Le Locle.

History and origin

Until 1656 the place came under the mayoralty of Valangin; that year it became a commune in its own right. The fire of 1794 erased the wooden village, and the town that replaced it grew with watchmaking until it demanded connections of its own: the canton's first railway line linked Le Locle to La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1857, then Neuchâtel in 1860 through the Loges tunnel, 3,259 metres long and at the time the longest railway tunnel in Switzerland. Recent history has its ruptures too: on 24 July 2023 a storm later classed as supercellular swept the town in minutes, with gusts measured at 217 km/h and many roofs torn away.