Since reunification, Berlin has been celebrated as both a creative, cosmopolitan "Open City" (the "new Berlin") and as a project for demonstrating the diversity and openness of the "new Germany." But this reinvention of urban space has heralded a selective vision that entails the willful forgetting and deletion of some marginal histories, at the very same time as other "sexier" urban identities and pleasures are promoted. This article explores these simultaneous processes of branding and erasure in relation to the symbolic cultural economy at play in Berlin as an aspiring "world city," and in the context of contested patterns of urban development, regeneration and gentrification. It also considers the possibility that practices of urban citizenship allow for new rights to the city to emerge from these contestations of space, while often masking other ongoing forms of dispossession.