"...it is not enough to run away from trouble, but to run towards a better future..."

If we escape the cities and manage to die alone in the wilderness, we will have doomed ourselves to failure. We are not solitary creatures. Humanity is a herd animal. We can only succeed as society.

Cities are the most potent social communities and infrastructure available. If we can adapt the best infrastructure available for the use of civil society - extant civic centers - to avail civil society of the features of homesteads, then we will optimally succeed at surmounting the challenges humanity faces today. The NWO has broadcast that it intends to inflict a democidal polycrisis on humanity, to destroy civil society and transform humanity into slaves that will best profit overlords.

By adapting cities using the newly adventing decentralized means of production we will build on the most valuable base of infrastructure available to advance civilization. This is a lot harder than fleeing to a cave alone with bags of beans and rice, to hide in the dark forest until the killer drones ferret us out. That latter guarantees failure. We can only save civilization and humanity as civil society, not as loners larping as cavemen innawoods.

The majority of humanity isn't capable to surmount the democidal polycrisis, yet. It would be a mistake to try to rescue every deranged psyop victim and adapt civic infrastructure to defeat overlords at the same time. There are enough people that are competent to create communities that can surmount the challenges we face, and our goal should be to create those communities and adapt civic infrastructure to best enable them to succeed. Only after such examples are available, and the pathological malevolence of centralization has been demonstrated by evil overlords, will normies and NPCs be able to participate. They have to unlearn their indoctrinations first, and they'll have to survive exigent assaults bad enough to break their beliefs for long enough to grasp the truth most do not want to understand and believe. Even the very best possible success will necessarily include many unfortunate deaths and terrible suffering. Waste as little effort possible on saving people from themselves, and work on saving them that want to save themselves already.

Adapting cities to provide the benefits of homesteads seems ridiculous on it's face, looking backwards at where we came from.

Don't look backwards. Look at decentralized means of production that are adventing today because they are more productive than centralization, and look forward to optimizing them for civic infrastructure. Amongst the most important tech that must be developed are things like power, food, and security production using extant civic infrastructure. Commercial buildings that are being rendered useless to extant civil society, as you point out, are able to provide these things with suitable redevelopment/remodeling. Vertical farming, DIY printed solar panels, concrete supercapacitors, laser arrays, microwave moats, manufacturing using 3D printers, desktop CNC, laser cutters and engravers, and etc. are able to maximally advance civil society where the best infrastructure to support these new tools exists, and that is where centralized production, retail outlets, and urban living is being deliberately deprecated by overlords so 15 minute prisons can be forced on us.

If instead of abandoning malls and office building we acquire them for pennies, adapt them to provide organic nutrition, secure housing, decentralized manufacturing of the full breadth of medicines, herbs, defenses, surveillance and attack drones we control, and so on, we will defeat the pathophiles seeking to enslave us, maximize the ecosystemic and environmental health of the world, and eliminate the ability of overlords to parasitize our production, forcing them to themselves produce actual wealth as our peers, if they can manage it and not end up in penury and helpless.

Thanks!