Where's the soul?

Raleigh has friendly folks -- smart ones too -- a good standard of living and a championship hockey team, but ...

It might smell a little funny, but New York City has one, thin and greasy like a mobster's backstory -- or a slice of pepperoni pie. It is extremely loud, somewhat angry and might speak an unfamiliar language. The city's melting pot helps define it, along with the swagger that comes with being a world-class destination, a town that offers incomparable choice and opportunity.

Austin, Texas, has one too. It is big. Like, hugely big, and brags about its live music and smoked brisket, while sipping Lone Star Beer and worshipping Texas Longhorn football.

Raleigh?

Bless its heart.

I'm talking about soul: those bits, pieces and intangibles that help define a city to the outside world and create some cohesiveness within it. For all its domination on lists of best places to live, Raleigh lacks a little something in the Department of Soul.

City soul isn't easily definable. But to me, it's a shared attitude, a community image and a singular style, smooshed together and bound with emotion. Memphis and Boston have soul. Durham, embracing its industrial past while resuscitating downtown, has plenty.

In Raleigh, you have to search a little harder.

One hand is filled with smarty-pants, people with layers of advanced degrees who tinker with our future medicines and technology. The other holds bureaucrats who lack the charisma to throw a decent party for the Stanley Cup-champion Carolina Hurricanes. Juggle in some rappers and artists, some basketball, barbecue and suburbia, and you end up with a pleasant place to raise babies, but not a particularly soulful one.

Raleigh is a growing city, working to refashion itself for 21st-century eyes. Divided geographically between the old, inside-the-Beltline Raleigh, and the newer, more sparkly version on the outside, the city's distinct parts have led to some image-wrestling. What soul it has is in flux, with fights over public art and the future of Dorothea Dix hospital mingling with the promise of a more complete Outer Beltline, new convention center and a reinvigorated main street.

So the soul it nurtures today most likely will not be the soul we're talking about in 10 years.

But we need to start somewhere.

A 'sleepy' city

For some perspective from a town that sops its soul with a biscuit, I called Louis Black, editor of the Austin Chronicle, an alternative newsweekly. Black moved to Austin in 1976. Thirty years ago, the capital of Texas was a "sleepy little city." It ended up on a lot of lists of most inexpensive places to live. It was easy to get around.

Now it's bigger, it has more traffic. City leaders have fought over growth. Home to computer-maker Dell Inc., the Austin area is a techie hub.

Sound familiar?

I've never been to Austin, but I have known people who lived there, and every one of them loved it. It's not too big, not too small, filled with nightlife and good food. The metro area contains about 1.4 million people, and the city bills itself as the "Live Music Capital of the World."

For all that's good about Austin, though, Black says there's a running joke among old-timers: How many Austin residents does it take to screw in a light bulb?

One. Everyone else reminisces about how good it used to be.

It seems like everyone believes the city was at its most soulful the day they arrived, Black says, only to see it dissipate. He disagrees.

More people have moved to town, and the creative class is bigger than ever. More people are making money doing what they love to do.

"I think the soul is in very good shape," he says.

Austin's soul has changed as the city has grown. Because Raleigh is growing so quickly, I ask him for advice as city leaders and residents work on transforming downtown.