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What can an intangible cultural heritage (ICH) approach focused on the imagined geographies of stakeholders and social organisations tell us about forms of community belonging? To answer this question, this article examines the case of watchmaking art in Switzerland and France, and particularly the elaboration of the “Craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics” nomination file for an inscription on the Representative List of the ICH of Humanity officialized in December 2020. The article conceptualises these imagined geographies as “scalar systems” used distinctively by groups and individuals from the watchmaking world, from government administrations and from the social sciences, within both countries, between stakeholders of the two countries, and at the scale of the transboundary region that links them; it then analyses the issues that underpin these geographies.