Twenty years ago, in the wake of a searing presidential defeat, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities and to fortify them into an “Urban Archipelago” of culturally separatist bastions that rejected the reactionary politics of the larger red American landscape. And he got his wish.

Over the last two decades, rural places got redder and urban areas much bluer, and America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture and politics. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.

But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked.

And yet, as these cities evolved together and formed their own, increasingly shared worldview, the public conversation about this brave new pan-urban world-unto-itself stagnated, relegated to localized conversations in narrowly provincial regional newspapers or local NPR programming.

On this pilot episode of Blue City Blues we pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America.