Ilana Preuss on the Past, Present, and Future of Small-Scale Manufacturing.

Recast Your City tells a very different story about making things in our small towns.

As part of my process of understanding cities and how we get around, it’s easy to get lost in the commute, so to speak, of connecting places. It’s essential for us to understand that people’s goals aren’t simply to ride around on a bike or train for fun. This is shocking, I know. Transport is supposed to get us from somewhere and to somewhere else. That’s why you’ll see me writing about housing from time to time; this time I’m talking about the “to” of it all.

Ilana Preuss is a nationally-renowned expert in small-scale manufacturing—building, crafting, cooking, combining, pulling apart—locally.

We used to build things in our towns and places; we used to subsist on the food we grew, and as technology paced, we used to make furniture in the shop down the street and sew clothes in the space above an apartment to sell or trade with our neigh…