Unlike, say, New York City, the Twin Cities metropolis has been tied to the areas outside and beyond it ever since the days that the city milled the wheat of the region's farms. Despite perennial outstate-metro rivalries and battles, Minnesota coheres, and an increasing number of thinkers in politics and planning realize that the various regions of the state will only thrive in communion with one another and with the big and dynamic cities on the MIssissippi. Those two cities, too, have come to realize, after years of jealously held separate identities, that they constitute one urban fabric in two colors.