ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the way in which the image and narratives of Shanghai as a city combine to produce a complex place-brand which, despite the obvious success of Shanghai as a global city of the world's imagination, has a number of inconsistencies. The small potatoes in Shanghai's story have been witnesses to its rapid contemporary transformations and, as we have suggested, are guides to both its past topography and the shape it may assume in the future. Infrastructure development in connection with Expo is unprecedented, and is positioning Shanghai for world competitiveness in several areas. The research of Xiao Hong-gen and Heather Mair demonstrates that China's paradoxical image is due to contrasting perceptions of the changing and the unchanged in representational narratives, and that this motivates a different basis for brand conceptualization and imaging. Shanghai's perpetually changing nature means that whole buildings and areas change their form, and those that don't disappear become recontextualized.