There are no smoking gun photographs or sound recordings to prove that Raleigh made a deal with the devil. But as the city has prospered beyond our wildest imagination, some people have wondered if the price for that growth has been the city's soul.

That question was topic one for the artists, entrepreneurs, teachers and other creative residents who gathered last month for the second annual SparkCon festival. By soul, they did not mean one's eternal spiritual essence but the shade-grown, free-range, let-the-good-times-roll energy that puts the hip in your hop.

Raleigh has always needed a bit more mo in its jo; sometimes it seems like its cutting edge couldn't make it through warm butter. As Texans work to "Keep Austin Weird," Raleigh unveiled a statue honoring Andy and Opie.

Me, I like nice; "pleasant" is no put-down in my book. I love the unassuming warmth and charm that define the city.

If Raleigh hasn't found its funk in recent years, it's not for lack of trying. And the SparkCon vision of a jazzier, more eclectic downtown that attracts and nourishes creative risk-takers is appealing.

In full flower, this would mean more than just cool coffee bars and trendy restaurants. The report from the first SparkCon imagines a new type of community -- a "vibosphere" -- with salons, galleries, museums, street art, public speaking venues, graffiti walls and music spaces plus cycling and walking greenways and a fully functioning mass transit system that would help us "lead the way in the development of green technologies."

Problem is, not everyone is aching to crib in the vibosphere. So the challenge for hipsters in Raleigh and across America -- from Providence to Denver to San Diego -- is convincing mainline residents that they will lead happier, richer lives if more of their neighbors sport piercings, paint brushes and Ph.D.'s.

Their pied piper is the economist Richard Florida, who outlined the basic philosophy in his 2002 book, "The Rise of the Creative Class." Fusing Adam Smith and Pablo Picasso, Florida asserted that cities will rise and fall depending on their ability to attract members of the "creative class."

These highly educated, well-paid folks, he wrote, "do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries -- from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts." They do not "consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference and merit."

Claiming to have solved the chicken/egg riddle of economic growth -- do people attract jobs, or do jobs attract people? -- Florida argued that businesses flock to communities with lots of creative people. To ensure growth, cities must satisfy their people's needs.

What do creative people want? Florida's analysis, echoed in many SparkCon discussions, says they favor "active participatory recreation over passive institutionalized forms. They prefer indigenous street-level culture -- a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between performers and spectators." They love active sports and seek public venues for "bicycling, jogging and kayaking ... trail running and snowboarding" (which might be tough for Raleigh).

And they value tolerance and diversity. In one of his most provocative arguments, Florida ties the health of cities to the size of their homosexual population. This "Gay Index," he writes, reflects "an area's openness to different kinds of people and ideas."

The bottom line: If Raleigh wants to keep prospering, it has got to kindle that kooky karma that wafts through hipster havens like Asheville.

The power of Florida's argument is how it braids together two seemingly disparate elements: creativity and economic growth. In fact, they are not so closely entwined, according to Emil Malizia, chairman of the Department of City & Regional Planning at UNC-Chapel Hill.

In a wide-ranging study that will be published next spring, Malizia and four other researchers compared how well two sets of indicators predicted economic performance in 263 metropolitan areas across the United States.

One set was Florida's, which focuses on the percentage of high-tech companies, the number of artistically creative and foreign-born people, and the Gay Index. The other set used more traditional measures, such as education levels, the performance of manufacturing concerns and entrepreneurs, and earnings from business services.

"The general conclusion was that the traditional measures did a better, if still imperfect, job of predicting growth," Malizia said in a phone conversation. "Florida's ideas may sound good, but there's very little science behind them."

In a pivotal finding, Malizia and his collaborators observed that the creative class is more a reflection than an engine of economic health: Their numbers correlated with a growth in income but not in jobs.

There are many good reasons for building vibrant entertainment districts and lush greenways while nurturing the arts. "But if communities do that instead of helping retrain displaced workers or using traditional methods for attracting new businesses," Mailizia said, "they probably won't enjoy the benefits promises."

Malizia noted one other flaw in Florida's argument: His overly broad definition of the creative class. Encompassing about 30 percent of the work force, it includes middle management at, say, Cisco Systems, as well as the programmers who design its breakthrough products.

"Essentially, he uses one aspect of the creative class -- the bohemians, artists and goofy professors like me -- as a stand-in for a much broader population whose aspirations and tastes may be more middle of the road," Malizia said.

Life would be so much easier if cities only had to satisfy the specific demands of a particular group -- especially if that posse included me!

But that's not the world we live in. Instead, city planners and concerned citizens must weigh complex forces and competing demands as they imagine Raleigh's future.

As the search for Raleigh's soul continues, at least we know this much: It's a many splendored thing.