This city profile on Leicester focuses on the representation of ethnical diversity in city branding. Through a historical approach, the paper discusses how the local authorities have taken advantage of the arrival of different migration flows into the city, in order to redefine its post-industrial identity in terms of multiculturalism, tolerance and inclusivity. In so doing, the paper emphasises the combination of deliberate marketing communicative activities, the provision of services for attracting and retaining foreign businesses and the creation of an open urban milieu where various ethnic groups are free to express and celebrate their own cultures through festivals and events. The paper identifies the alignment between place communication and place 'offerings' development as the crucial element underpinning Leicester's model for multicultural cooperation and critically assesses the recent challenges that are being posed to the sustainment of a multicultural city image.

This paper focuses on the agency exhibited by municipal governments in modifying or resisting neoliberal policies, by investigating their efforts to manufacture favorable competitive urban identities. In particular, this paper emphasizes how national ideologies are (re)articulated at a local level by medium-sized cities placed within different national contexts and, thus, exposed to different orientations toward neoliberal principles. By performing historical urban research in Leicester (UK) and Reims (France), this study identifies different expressions of local agency through which cities present their identities on a global scenario, by responding to similar pressure of deindustrialization and urban competition from mid-1970s. If the discursive strategies of both cities reproduce signs of respective national ideologies, findings highlight two trajectories whereby cities negotiate and rework the main narratives underpinning those national ideologies. The concepts of active and passive deflection are offered in order to capture the role of local agency and conceptualize how national ideologies are appropriated locally by medium-sized cities in the attempt to engage with perceived increasing world-level forces.