Architect, critic, professor of architecture and director of the graduate program in urban design at the City University of New York, founder of Michael Sorkin Studio, president of Terreform and author of many books – most recently All Over the Map (Verso, 2011).

Perhaps a perverse choice for an urbanist, but a few words about Hollin Hills, my childhood home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where, ironically, I learned many city-slicker habits. Because I left at a relatively tender age, I didn’t receive a driver’s license until after I was gone. This meant that I had been without access to the defining, enabling, form of mobility.

For a variety of reasons this worked out, not the least of which was the fact that the rules of circulation and sociability – not to mention the technologies of access – were different for kids than for adults, more urban. Indeed, the movement of kids through this environment was exemplarily advanced, streets ahead of Copenhagen or Amsterdam today. It was, for example, completely contrary to the ethos of the place for yards to be fenced and children were authorised to cut across lots. This meant that we enjoyed a condition of near universal accessibility at the ground plane, that any line could be desire’s. The only rule that obtained was that cross-yard circulation had to be on foot.

This freedom of movement was not simply limited to well-worn paths but also offered its special version of that indispensible urban condition: getting lost. This was available to smaller children within the hilly, wooded, meandering bounds of the community and for the older cohort in the fascinations of forests, dumps, military installations, road-side attractions and contiguous neighbourhoods beyond. We became a wandering crowd of mini-flâneurs.

Hollin Hills – known for its modernist architecture – developed in the late forties and early fifties and attracted a fairly particular kind of resident: educated, liberal, young, first-home owners whose semi-communal and semi-rural fantasies abjured such stereotypical niceties as sidewalks, leaving the streets as all-use spaces, consonant with the most enlightened versions of current urban practice. For us kids, all-use meant walking or bike-riding, our main long-distance movement technology, which offered access to the basic needs of everyday life. Although I walked to school, I biked (with my posse) to the Dairy Queen for soft-serve infusions, to the shopping centre for broader commerce, to the swimming pool and tennis courts for recreation, even into DC to superintend construction sites.

There was also rudimentary public transportation, a bus from the ABW Transit Company (‘all buses wobble…’) that operated on a regular schedule into Alexandria – with its alluring movie theatres, skating rink, White Castle, and other quasi-forbidden pleasures (including an enormous armaments shop) – through the airport (watching take-offs and landings from runway’s end, oh joy!) and on to downtown Washington with its suffusions of culture, its Smithsonian dinosaurs and the always searched for but never found monster penis of John Dillinger at the Medical Museum.

The main supply of my quotidian necessities was provided by my car-driving parents, an efficient delivery system that removed my need for a motor vehicle. They were Fresh-Direct avant la lettre and their periodic organisation of goods movements was abetted by a series of responsive, supplementary systems, the regular pick-up and delivery of milk, laundry, mail, waste, etc. And, my ex-urban parents became avid truck farmers; we enjoyed a self-grown, locavore, cornucopia of fruit and veg, grown in beds fertilised with manure I was dispatched to collect from the dairy farm that survived many years across the street before being displaced by the usual McMansions.

I did have a two-year interregnum of motorised commuting when my parents decided to send me to ‘progressive’ school so that I’d be able to learn in a racially integrated environment. The system was of an advanced nature: I was picked up every morning by a VW bus that aggregated kids according to an efficient travelling-salesman algorithm and returned in the afternoon in reverse order. With a capacity of nine or so, this was an extremely efficient ride-sharing operation, with a high degree of intelligence, just the sort of thing that current advocates of more highly-technologised personal transit urge today.

I am not making a case for suburbs – replete as they are with alienation effects, infrastructural inefficiencies, and environmental vileness. I am suggesting that the good city is defined by the way we access it. When the car was subtracted as mere personal transportation (by law in the case of us kids), the whole system had an uncanny and highly sustainable efficiency. But when cars became the alpha mode for everything, the system flew to pieces. As children, we had a kind of privileged access to the latent urbanity of our neighbourhood, compounded by an elasticity of time, rational movement systems, and the license of our innocent motion. Our parents lived in the suburbs but we lived in the city.

First published in AT222, October 2011