Following the appalling "Kreativwirtschaft" symposium in Linz, I was all the more interested when I started seeing announcements about the "Creative Cities" symposium organized by Armin Medosch and Ina Zwerger in Vienna. Since I was able to go, this time I was not disappointed. First of all, I think it was important that the "Creative Cities" symposium was held at ORF, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, that it was streamed and so much accompanying information broadcast via ORF. It is one thing to bring together such an impressive line-up of speakers with interesting and complementary, rather than repetitive perspectives, but then it is all the more important for those perspectives to be conveyed to an audience that needs to hear them. I imagine that quite a few people may have been expecting something quite different, but all the better. Unlike Geert Lovink, who has written a summary of the symposium on his blog, I didn't take notes, so I can only write now about the subjective impressions I am left with after a week of work in between. Although I was sorry that Inke Arns was unable to come, I was happy that Marion von Osten took over for her. Listening to Marion, I had the feeling "this is where I came in". When Marion contacted me in 2004 about translations for the project Atelier Europa, it was exactly the right project for me at the right time. It helped me to put myself into a context, to understand what I was finding increasingly frustrating about my work, to see the system I had unwittingly become part of, rather than just feeling incompetent. Following that, I think there was a whole rash of reflections and analyses of working situations, from the Mute Precarious Reader to the "creativity hype" issue of the eipcp web journal. Is it even possible than anyone working in these kinds of contexts doesn't understand the mechanisms and issues now? Nevertheless, I did not find the symposium in Vienna to be simply a repetition of already familiar analyses and critiques, although these seemed to provide a very solid foundation for it. Most of all, the speakers – especially in this constellation – provided an impressive demonstration of how talk of "creativity" is used to mask a very broad spectrum of more or less hidden agendas. Who uses this terminology and what are they actually seeking to achieve with it? In that respect, it was a perfect antidote to the symposium in Linz, and I sincerely hope that all the people in the audience in Linz were listening to the radio last week. In addition to the wealth of information that Armin Medosch has already posted on "Creative Cities", further documentation, including wonderful "umbrella interviews", is being posted now on tagr.tv. The insights are there, now they just need to reach open minds in the right places – at least, I am optimistic enough to hope so.