I think that the worst place to live would be in a big city. I think that, especially for a family, the only reasonable way to live is to get food locally within a small community that is working together.
There is also such a contrast between cities and smaller towns and villages. One of the reasons we moved from a small city with 150,000 people to a smaller town of 10,000 was that the scale and complexity of the place seems so much more manageable. In our town, it's not that difficult to imagine a decent quality of life even if we were completely severed from the rest of the country. The community is essentially agricultural, with plenty of wood, easy distances between community buildings, a mild climate, an ample water system and lake, and a feeling that people could band together in effective ways if required. In a city, many of these things could be much more challenging and complicated - especially access to food, water and fuel - not to mention the ability of getting people to cooperate on anything, including safety.
I am interested in how we view and value work in smaller communities - it makes you wonder how much of our modern techie and white - collar skills have become useless. If you live in a big city, your work is abstract as are your skills. But in the country, the vale of a good chainsaw quickly outstrips the value of a laptop.
Perhaps my small-town bias has completely negated my ability to see the benefits of the city.

I think your post raises a real and often overlooked distinction, but it also blends a few different ideas that don’t necessarily go together.

First, the comparison between a small town and a big city in terms of “self-sufficiency” is interesting, but a bit misleading if taken literally. Small communities can indeed feel more comprehensible: you know where things come from, you can picture food production, water sources, and who is responsible for what. That creates a strong sense of control and resilience.

However, that sense of independence is often more psychological than practical. A small town that seems self-sufficient is usually still heavily dependent on wider systems—fuel supply chains, medical logistics, infrastructure maintenance, spare parts, internet connectivity, and so on. In a real disruption scenario, many rural areas actually become more vulnerable, not less, because they have fewer local redundancies and less specialized capacity.

On the other hand, cities feel complex because they are complex—but that complexity is also what makes them resilient. Urban areas concentrate resources, expertise, and infrastructure. If one system fails, there are often multiple overlapping alternatives. Food, water, and energy are not locally produced in most cases, but the systems that deliver them are highly optimized and redundantly engineered precisely to handle large populations.

The point about skills is also worth unpacking. It’s true that many urban jobs feel abstract compared to physical or agricultural work. But “abstract” doesn’t mean “useless.” A lot of what keeps modern societies functioning—logistics coordination, engineering, software systems, finance, healthcare administration—is inherently non-physical but still directly tied to real-world outcomes. A laptop in that sense isn’t less valuable than a chainsaw; it’s just operating at a different layer of the system. Without those “abstract” systems, the chainsaw itself might not be manufactured, repaired, or even distributed at scale.

At the same time, your intuition about local competence has merit. Smaller communities often do encourage practical skill sets and tighter social cooperation. It’s easier to see direct cause and effect between effort and outcome. Social cohesion can be stronger because relationships are repeated and visible.

The trade-off, though, is opportunity and specialization. Cities allow people to focus deeply on narrow skills and rely on others for everything else. That specialization is what produces modern medicine, advanced technology, and large-scale infrastructure. In a small town, people may be more generalized, but they also have fewer resources and fewer experts to rely on when something unusual happens.

So it’s not really that one model is “better” in general. It’s more that small communities optimize for simplicity, directness, and local resilience, while cities optimize for scale, specialization, and systemic redundancy. Your preference for manageability is understandable, but it comes with trade-offs in capability and opportunity that are easy to underestimate when things are stable.