Fierce competitiveness between established and emerging major cities, such as Berlin, London, Shanghai and Sydney, has led to a pressure to excel as desirable locations for business, cultural activities, highly skilled migrants and tourists. At the same time, the transformation of settled and new migrant communities creates complex urban borders and variegated representations (academic, cinematic, popular, official) of the city. While cities increasingly deploy cosmopolitan images portraying the diversity of past and present populations and activities, this continues to coexist with parochialism as a mood and mode of cultural formations and a reflection of local specificities. This volume brings together cultural analysts, social scientists, and media and film scholars to explore the ways in which core cities generate competing claims on, and visions of, their use and their future, and thus have engaged with the necessity to brand their image for international consumption and for internal coherence.

1. Introduction: Processes of Cosmopolitanism and Parochialism  Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Eleonore Kofman and Catherine Kevin 2. Strangers as Neighbors in the Cosmopolis: New Migrants in London, Diversity and Place  Panos Hatziprokopiou 3. Conflicting Mobilities: Cultural Diversity and City Branding in Berlin  Kira Kosnick. Branding the City: Selling Contradiction for Global Advantage 4. London's Chinatown: Branded Place or Community Space?  Rosemary Sales, Alessio d'Angelo, Xiujing Liang and Nicola Montagna 5. Living and Making the Branded City and its Contradictions: Skilled EU Migrants in Manchester  Paul Kennedy 6. Understanding Cultural Quarters in Branded Cities  Simon Roodhouse.  Idea of the City: Cinematic Futures and the Grounds of the Present 7. London Undead: Screening/Branding the Empty City  Christoph Lindner 8. Branding the Modernist Metropolis: The Eternal City and the City of Lights in Cinema after World War Two  Mark Shiel 9. Nantes's Atlantic Problem  Bill Marshall.  Family Histories: The Remembered City 10. Stripes and My Country or, On Not Being at Home  Stephanie Hemelryk Donald 11. Cosmopolitanism with Roots: The Jewish Presence in Shanghai before the Communist Revolution and as Brand in the New Metropolis  Andrew Jakubowicz 12. A la Mode: The Cosmopolitan and the Provincial  Yi Zheng.  Coda 13. Cosmopolitanism, Branding and the Public Realm  Jeff Malpas