Simply by growing some of your own food, you get healthier, more grounded. The village model provides a compromise to the city vs. country debate. But it's a far cry from the guru style collectivity or the ideational homogeny of the sixties' communal experiments. In other words, the tenacity of any community is, up to a point, proportional to its own flexibility. Of course, too multitudinal a community might never find enough glue to stick together, but the force of its dissolution would be nothing compared to the implosion that can happen in the failure of tight-knit group.
Social change can become insular, less able to affect the outside world.
Villages are small ecosystems which belong to larger ones. They're more tied to their own survival, rather than dependent on someone or something else to get them thru. If it can't, you learn how to do or make it yourself. Mother Earth's energy renewal process is tireless. In fact, with proper nurturing, she will give the rural hypermediast so much to work with that an art supply store seems like an overpriced cultural joke.