"...there is, usually, more opportunity for employment in the cities, it comes at the cost of not being able to grow your own food."

False. I saw my first aquaponic system some years ago, installed in a 3bd apartment with 3 2000 gallon tilapia tanks entirely within their rented space. They produced commercial quantities of crops and tilapia without any soil, and although they did use the bank of windows in the LR for light, they also used LEDs. Aquaponics can be used to produce more than enough food for the family entirely within the dwelling in which they live.

"...Amish communities..."

These communities, apart from their famous aversion to novelty, tend to have not 'a' company, but to have almost as many companies as there are families. This is much better than a 'company town' IMHO. Gilchrist, Oregon was a logging town built by the landowner logging the surrounding hills. It had a bowling alley, a movie theater, restaurants, all the amenities folks wanted in small town in the 1930s. Then the trees were all logged, and the logging enterprise went bankrupt as the landowner took the proceeds of the sale of the lumber and retired. Last I saw the town of Gilchrist was for sale for ~$1M. Lots of empty houses, businesses, and everything returning to a state of nature, like Chernobyl or smth.

This doesn't happen to Amish communities. If Billy Joe Bob's farm goes belly up, Thurston buys it and puts it back into production. Meanwhile, the dozens of other farms are still in operation and folks that work there or own them are buying that lovely craftsman furniture from the local carpenter, custom tailored pants and dresses in any color you like, as long as it's black, and the variety of other products and services the crafty provide small towns.

Decentralized means of production well enable this same dynamic. Maybe Billy Joe Bob got a hankering for novelty and started manufacturing widgets with his new 3D printer, and was so enamored of that process he let the farm languish. In decentralized communities folks can share their doorbell camera video with their neighbors instead of the NSA, keeping track of any outlanders or local idle youth, like a good village should. People with CNC machines on their kitchen tables can make kitchen tools, like shears and cutlery, while a local concrete former can make carbon doped slabs to serve as supercapacitors that store the electricity from the solar panels printed on recycled PET beverage containers with graphene based inks folk hang on their roofs or off their balconies, and the graphene can be made from methane produced by the manure digesters at the local farm with 40w lasers. Ordinary inkjet printers are all that are needed to print solar panels like that today. Rather than recreating the company town and the necessary hierarchy such an industrial complex requires, like Gilchrist, modeling a community on the Amish society in which folks have small production enterprises that support each other is a far more natural societal structure that is also much more robust and resistant to failure.

Thanks!