Akademik

n.

An extensive system of roads or highways that surrounds a city.

Ashford's controversial ring-road has gone two-way — a move town officials hope will aid the town's regeneration.

The road has been coined a 'concrete collar' by its critics who point to it restricting the growth and development of the town centre.

—"Ashford ring-road goes two-way ," Kent News, July 2, 2007

Then Mark, a software engineer who lives in Bromsgrove, got a job working in Birmingham. After a couple of years he showed the pictures to a colleague.

"I looked at the back of one and it said Suffolk Street. I realised I had been walking down that street for two years and I just thought 'it can't be the same place'. The changes were so dramatic there was nothing to tie the two places together."

One of the main reasons the street was unidentifiable nearly 50 years later was because of the construction of the inner ring road.

The "concrete collar" as Mark describes it, had been pushed forward by city engineer Herbert Manzoni and was designed to prepare Birmingham for a new age — one dominated by the car.

—Alison Jones, "Past meets present in a son's tribute to his father," Birmingham Post, January 27, 2007

At Princeton, Kerr also took a shine to economics and urban development, pondering the fate of cities—why some fail and others prosper. He landed a job as a junior planner in the City Planning Department summers before he graduated and while he put himself through law school at the University of Kansas City. Ironically, his senior thesis, entitled "The Necessary Economic Actions and Tax Incentives to Encourage Urban Redevelopment," is dedicated to Phil Geissal, who designed Kansas City's freeway loop. "I now think it's a failure," Kerr says. "It's a concrete collar that is restricting our growth."

—Susan Lahey and Deborah Bauer, "Whitney Kerr's Rainbow Coalition," The Corporate Report-Kansas City, May 1, 1989